The Work

for my father

1. Today

Today, this moment, speechlessly in pain,

He fights the terror of being poured out,

The fall into darkness unquenchably long

So that even as he hurtles he keeps holding

Back like a dam the flood overtops—but nothing now

Can stop that surge, already he swirls

To the source of Voices, the many throats inside the one

Throat, each swallowing the unstoppable flood ...

And as if that, all along, were what he'd wanted,

He hears the Voices begin to die down

The way a marsh in spring pulsing and shrilling

Sunup to sundown falls gradually still

—Unappeasable, the silence that will follow

When his every last drop has been poured out.

2. Countdown

In your hospital bed, the plastic mask across

Your face siphoning air into your lungs,

You lie helpless as an astronaut

Blasting into space: Eyes oblivious

To ours, your body's fevered presence

Shimmers like the phantom heat that will trail

Up the pipe of the crematory oven:

How distant we will seem after

Such intensity ... We drift in your stare

Like the dust stirred by the cow your parents

Gave you as a boy to teach responsibility.

Already you are space immeasurable

By your slide rule, your graphs that plotted

Payload, liftoff, escape velocity.

3. Prayer

In the house of the dead I pace the halls:

The walls, collapsing, stretch away in desert

Or flatten into horizonless ocean.

I step outside, the door clicking shut

Comforting in its finality ...

Now I see the house as if I looked down

From far off mountains, and saw you crouching in

The sun-scoured yard, eyes keenly focused,

Pupils narrowing to a cat's green slits:

I can't look you in the face, you see only

The openness of sky rising above mountains.

(Only after the world had emptied

You and filled you with its openness

Will I feel the love I pray to feel?)

4. The God

a dream

A warming pulsing flood like blood surging through

Veins, and now the god stirs in my hands

Dull as stone in this gravity-less Nowhere.

Sensation shivering through me, deliberate and sure,

I cradle you, I sponge you clean

As if you were my son, the emptiness you

Drink like heavy black milk erasing

Your wrinkles and gouged lines of pain.

The god bends me to the work, my fingers driven

By the god, blinded by the god's

Neutrality, until I pull apart the threads

In this place the god commands:

Face wholly unwoven, without heart, mind, you

are nothing in my hands but my hands moving.

5. His Stare

Absently there in a moment of pure being

He sits in his chair, eyes locked, staring:

The air's transparence gains solidity

From his looking; while his emaciated features,

The way his flesh sags from sharpening cheekbones,

Make the summer air weigh like marble on the harsh green

Of the trees he is too weak to prune.

And yet the contemplative distance he is sealed in

Projects with ferocious purpose the will of his body

To withdraw into this eerily removed contemplation

Like one who has heard a tuning fork ringing

And enters and becomes each spectral vibration;

So utterly absorbed that love is a distraction; even

The world, its barest colors, bleeding away before that stare.

6. The Current

The numbing current of the Demorol

Sweeps him out to sea where the secret night

He lives in slowly begins to darken,

His daytime routine of watching his blood cycle

Through the tubes of a machine shadowed by blackness

Blinding as an underwater cave. Already

He filters the dark water through gills aligned

To strain that element he more and more resembles:

Like walls of water held in miraculous

Suspension, the moment of his death looms impartially

Above him, my hands holding his tightening

Its grip even as his hand loosens ...

As if my hand could lead him past that undulating

Weight towering above us out of sight.

7. The Rehearsal

I lead you back, your Orpheus, until you

Stand inhaling, on the topmost stair,

The rank rich air of breathing flesh—

But like fumes rising from earth's molten core

The voices of the dead reach out to you,

Your whispering parents, dead for forty years,

Entreating me to turn—and so I

Turn, as must you: Your footsteps die,

You dwindle, blur into unfillable

Space echoing like the dark of a cathedral ...

But there is no dark, no stair, no Orpheus

—Only this voice rehearsing breath

By breath in words you'll never read these

Lines stolen from your death.

Source: the Chain (The University of Chicago Press, 1996)