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1 2 9 R M I D W I N T E R L E T T E R G E O F F R E Y B R O C K Dear son of mine, dear daughter, the forecast called for a fine evening, and we did laugh at first, but then we bawled; our wine turned into water. Portentously, even the moon was torn that night by schism, half dark, half bright, but I – blinded by rare optimism and drunk on common scorn – believed a lie, or more than one, and had the two of you believing too. I’m sorry. We didn’t know what not to do. Our country had gone mad in a red flurry. * 1 3 0 Y It fell to my dying father to say something true, (as if your mother and I had been relieved of duty), to steady us both, gather us in his eye, which was calm, and had seen assassinations, wars and genocides, lower- and upper-case depressions, and most things in between – and which abides now, we must hope, in us. ‘‘This is the way America works,’’ he told your tearful mother as she lay her head on his shoulder, his voice cool but not cold. * Detached despite attachment: like the alien who briefs The Counselors in that sci-fi poem he loved by Hayden . . . Let’s say that he was sent to these our shores from some counter-earth, obscured by a wreath of moons, and now has been recalled. And maybe even now he croons ‘‘The Fox’’ or ‘‘Yellow Bird’’ to some space-child, 1 3 1 R telling them tales till late of a world fraught with ‘‘rage and bleeding and frenzy.’’ Let’s say that: it’s a pretty thought and as such counterweight to current trends. * I watched you, near that end, sitting beside his throne-like hospice bed. Mira, you read him poems: a ride, a fish, a western wind. Ravi, you read also, but silently, to yourself, hidden in distant inscapes, afraid of being blown, or caught, or ridden. He stammered Innisfree, the bee-loud glade buzzing in his mind’s ear. Oh paradox on paradox. Oh little boats with your engines and your oarlocks, oh brilliant bilge: much here is beautiful. * 1 3 2 Y Even the moon, that night, was fifty-fifty. The talking heads droned on, their facts and faces all as shifty as sand or water, or light when the good light’s gone. I’m trying to glimpse a future where fathers are better, and countries, but all I see tonight are spacemen. If this letter should find you there, then picture a joyous me, not this large child, grieving at four a.m. for his earthbound father, his failing country. No, not him; he is a ghost. You’re living – and must live further. ...

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