Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2008

New Year’s Day Nap

181 f r o m g o u r d s e e d n e w y e a r ’ s d a y n a p Fiesta Bowl on low. My son lying here on the couch on the “Dad” pillow he made for me in the seventh grade. Now a sophomore at Georgia Southern, driving back later today, he sleeps with a white top hat over his face. I’m a dancin’ fool. Twenty years ago, half the form he sleeps within came out of nowhere with a million micro-lemmings who all died but one piercer of membrane, specially picked to start a brainmaking, egg-drop soup, that stirred two sun and moon centers for a new-painted sky in the tiniest ballroom imaginable. Now he’s rousing, six feet long, turning on his side. Now he’s gone. I sound low-key, but this is the way I howl an old hymn in the plaintive bass-drone, a charm for accepting what happens, and a stubborn question, • • • 182 f r o m g o u r d s e e d in the why valSay ley of death should weep Or I lone the derness in wilrove ? There’s no one to worry about waking with my singing. I have loved them, those two boys, so well that they’ve left. We’re after the fact now, out in nowhere again. We’re I, and I am a line of music wriggling along like water wanting to be ocean. dars of Lece - ba- bow The non at feet, his with his The is fumed air perbreath . Singing and talking, one vibrates with the other. Vapor-mist-going-up-this-way, cloud-come-back-around-down. • • • 183 f r o m g o u r d s e e d The old FaSoLa singers would not commit to words, until they ran through the notes, in broken lines of rain. The reverse of me rocking my babies to all verses of Samanthra, or David’s Lamentation, who now in a shower somewhere murmur tunes they have no lyrics for. La la la sol sol mi mi mi mi do I never took them to church, or told them stories about David, or Samuel, or Jesus, but they move like fish, or tadpole-radios in the mud, flat on their backs on a roof, or breezing by. Maybe any motion is holy music, not only theirs. Remember how it went, then forget. Sliding, forget more. Sliding air in the throat, this song it seems so soon to quit, any shred of unfinished existence, • • • 184 f r o m g o u r d s e e d La la la sol sol mi that somehow is unbelievably over. The growing of the corn over and over. Our watery bodies keep moving. Hands give. Eyes weep. Feet walk. Shoulders swim. The throat sings. The chest hopes. The genitals wait. and the thighs, their small-stroke dancing work of balancing and lifting, the thighs, slow-move a big riverlike forgiveness we can jump in, I and my strong boys, now men. Some songs don’t ever get completely sung. They’re sung by the blood, inside creeks and rocks and air, 185 f r o m g o u r d s e e d in some cellular Beulah land, the harmonizing water sings them. do ti fa fa sol mi mi mi re do do ti ti la la la ...