for Walter Anderson - Grandfather
1.
Grandfather,
It is the seventh day,--
Perhaps, tonight, we should rest.
I have made much of you,
Or nothing.
You have been dead
A long time.
That rib,
The name of the rage
You daughtered,
In turn, is mother to me,
And that place
Where you are buried
Awake most nights,
And will not close its eyes.
Whose knock?
Still knocks at the entrance
To the godhouse, at the threshold
Of the Janus door, enjambed
Between the firmament
And the stars: I, in the daylight
Of my living. You, still weeping,
Locked within the pantry
Of your dark?
Who wrought the gnomon,
Raised the shadow,
Mortared the clockworks
Into the heart's entablature,
Set the frieze to our endless remaking,
As if for the first time:
You, with your dancing-bear shuffle,
I, no taller than five.
In my right hand
The flower of my consolations.
In my left,
A fountain of petals
Out of a cane of thorns.
You've kept your old hieratic pose.
Around your pharaonic head,
The nimbus of cigar smoke:
Image of the splayed angel
Caught in its window of light.
So the beam. So the mote. So the eye.
And over the caming's liminal frame
The shadow-play:
Leviathan sounding,
His mortal spew
Guilt as after birth,--
And through this darkening glass,
The spreading stain
Of remorse.
The unwritten
Everywhere,
Language of our wounded love:
Logos of the knuckle rub.
The oracular voice
At the bottom
Of the deadly Chinese finger trap,
Your thumbnail half-moon
Pressed into my flesh.
The words, say uncle, and
I give.
Your beard
That reddened my arms,
Rawed my cheeks,
Brought down my easy tears:
Watered the lonely body of my fields.
Overflowed the dry well
Where I wrestled you,
and lost.
Earned my gimp leg.
Took the name,
First Born.
2.
That was the day after
you slapped my face
for buying candy
instead of gloves.
No blame.
The weather was bitter,
no time for plenty,
and I, still living
off the fat of an innocent wealth,
ate sweets
with the money you gave me
as payment for my warmth.
After forty years
the print of your hand
still burns.
And I may go a week
without waking to the smell
of a house on fire,--
without stumbling to the edge
of my son's bed to sniff at the air:
a blind man's reaching backward
into a more palpable dark.
I lean to feel
if that same clay
is patted upon his face
that grows hard upon my own.
Sight without seeing,
whether there is a mark
where that same heat rises,--
completing the night's circle
of an almost invisible char.
