The Whole Motion: Collected Poems, 1945–1992

Fathers and Sons

And disappears into air. That is the bush my hand Went deeply through as I followed. Like a wild hammer blazed my right thumb In the flashlight and moonlight And dried to one drop Offox blood I nail-polished in, That lopsided animal sun Over the nearly buried Or rising human half-moon, My glassed skin halfmooning wrongly. Between them, the logging road, the stopped Stream, the disappearance into The one bush's common, foreseen Superhuman door: All this where I nailed it, With my wife's nailbrush, on my finger, To keep, not under, but over My thumb, a hammering day-and-night sign Ofthat country. Fathers andSons I. THE SECOND SLEEP Curled, too much curled, he was sleeping In a chair too small for him, a restless chair That held no place for his arms. In his sleep he grew legs to replace them As his father liftingly strained And carried him to the next room. All the time he settled away A gentle man looked upon him And then walked out ofthe house And started his evergreen car. Fathers and Sons / 2I9 Terrific impact, none his, Killed him three blocks to the north. In his second sleep the boy heard The reared-up tearing ofmetal Where a glassed-in face leapt and broke, But to him it was something else, An animal clash, a shock ofresolving antlers, And slept on, deeper and deeper Into the mating season. The next room filled with women; his nostrils Flared, his eyes grew wide And shot with blood under eyelids. Brow lowered in strife, he stamped In the laurel thicket, a herd ofdoes Trembling around him. Into the rhododendron His rival faded like rain. He stared around wildly, head down. In the undying green, they woke him. II. THE AURA He used to wake to him With a sense ofmusic coming Along with a body in movement. It swayed with the motion ofa hip Rolling into the bathroom, And, lying in bed in the winter dark Offathers, he heard rock-and-roll Closed offwhile water ran through it, Then the door opening, music Opening, strolling down the hall, Bad music moving all over The house, electric guitars that followed Some body around. It was his son, With his portable radio always Buckdancer's Choice I 220 At his belt, leaning over, adjusting the dial For disc jockeys. That would be The Skimmers, and that the Last Survivors, moaning afar in the kitchen, Who moved when the living moved. He could hear him coming From far away, every dawn, And now the sound still coming From everywhere is grief: Unstoppable. At the beginning Ofhis teens, his last year Ofbicycles, the wild Music, traveling through the suburbs From junior high, was broken on the road. But it leapt everywhere Into odd places: from every angle It does not cease to be heard, the aura Surrounding his son. He cannot hear it early In the morning, unless he turns on his radio By the bed, or leaves it on all night, But in supermarkets it comes Forth from the walls; it glances From plate glass in department stores, And he moves within his boy's Chosen sounds: in cars, theatres, In filling stations, in beer joints Where he sits as though in the next phase His son would have lived, hearing voices Giving prizes for naming oftunes, those stations Never offthe air. He sits still Wherever he is, as though caught With music on him, or as ifhe were About to be given it somewhere In the region ofthe stomach: That sound is the same, and yet notThere is too much steadiness in it: none Is carried rightly, none wavers Fathers and Sons / 22I With the motion ofadolescent walking, none Lumbers as it should. Still, it is there In trios ofgirls, in fake folk singers From Brooklyn, and he enters, anywhere, His son's life without the wakingto -it, the irreplaceable motion Ofa body. Bongoes. Steel Guitars. A precious cheapness He would have grown out of. Something. Music. SledBurial) Dream Cerenwny While the south rains, the north Is snowing, and the dead southerner Is taken there. He lies with the top ofhis casket Open, his hair combed, the particles in the air Changing to other things. The train stops In a small furry village, and men in flap-eared caps And others with women's scarves tied around their heads And business hats over those, unload him, And one ofthem reaches inside the coffin...