Letters from the Dead

I. From My Mother

You who have read as I read when I was eight
that the sea will disgorge at the end of time
its centuries of dead, walk with me now,
listen with me as a blue rain ticks down
from your roof. This is not Armageddon, just another day
I am out of life, a spirit, today age eight
and this same sun freckling the autumn grass
drew me out, another morning, summer ending,
1915 and after, seventy-five years
into a world I never learned to love enough.

Today, hand in hand, we will walk back
until I am that little girl, flowers in hand
she presses into a book, A Child’s Garden of Verses,
cowslip, Queen Anne’s lace, Wild Clover,
a piece of that day breaking off in my son’s hand
today, June 9, 2007. Now I look down,
he is so small from here, my son at late middle-age.
I watch him press it to his nose, scentless,
his lips, to see him taste it, tasteless, kissing it.
And I would come back, not even when he cries
and the memory of me flickers while he tries, failing at this.

II. From My Father

Morning begins: the world outside my window
waited for me while I slept: the blue so struck
with gold, as dawn arrives, it lifts me up.
I throw the covers back, already I am in the hour,
a boy come to Detroit from Flint to make his way
as my father never did or could. There never came a way.
Just work and work and then my wife, daughter, son,
a mother-in-law, sister-in-law, the cousins,
a house of others I had to feed and clothe.
But this morning I am seventeen, throwing off the dark
and no one in my father’s house is up to shake off my dream.
I’ll go out to the streetcar, then climb the office steps,
where I am youngest clerk, arriving early, leaving late,
a habit I will take on to become my life.
And the habit like the role of a priest at his last rite
will be the one I live by seventy years until the end.
And now in this place without night or morning,
light or dark, I am alone with it
in the absence of mourning, unemployed
or idle, all eternity a long hour I can’t think how to fill.