Fatherhood-Trick

I’m 42, just before my death. I feel it in the floor and the towers of New York, its railway tracks and neoliberal boutiques

Heraclitus is skipping rocks on the Hudson and he disapproves of my taking the Lincoln Tunnel

Against the skyline, the universe ponders the morals of mortals

         Point to the place it hurts  I said after your thousand individual, little falls

         (I once jumped from the top of an apartment building)

          I hurt all over

Years ago, a consultant sent a patient back to my office with a note: Mrs. X says they have “total body pain.” I can’t help them with total body pain!

Person as wound? Not the right metaphor. Poem as wound? Too familiar.

Zee wants to go shopping on the Lower East Side

Kaz was photographed with Minions and Mickey Mouse in Times Square

Aria plays with a Happy Meal toy—it’s Baseball Snoopy that shoots out a token—

And every second there is a whisper in my ear, the words are unimportant

Some call this suffering, but the strangeness is: I’m already dead

The priest can’t help with total body pain

Why take a photograph of this for you to see? Poem as wounding.

         (I still dream of the water tower, it is a monument to desire)

In the hospital too long ago, I took a picture of my face as proof of death-in-life. The image displays the selfsame sickness we all must wear, the familiar token—

Some songs throw out my mind and I give up

I need a poem that’s total-body-pain, I need the selfsame thing

To show you that I know, I do know—and even in the middle of the mightiest reasons to go on—you—the whisper occurs through the song, water tower, water tower,

I sting you—

And some songs are no help at all, they are cessation

Medicine has its limits

I am delimited

And though I felt blessed with you, I still wanted to die for the pain

There is not enough for the pain. Ask the bodies

         I am not enough for you, but I had to stand in place of, I had to be put
         for—some other metaphor,
                            some other fatherhood

All the brick in this city, fire escapes and billboards, horns and gods

It was never fair, my demands cloaked as wishes for you to be yourselves, to be free

I couldn’t save me, why should you stand in place of, be put for—

And yet you did the trick—how monstrous to say

Be good, it’s all I can say, be good—I put nothing in place of that, I lose track of the whisper, of myself