Poems, 1957–1967

FATHERS AND SONS

FATHERS AND SONS 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 of the house And started his evergreen car. Terrific impact, none his, Killed him three blocks to the north. In his second sleep the boy heard The reared-up tearing of metal Where a glassed-in face leapt and broke, But to him it was something else, An animal clash, a shock of resolving 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. 214 Brow lowered in strife, he stamped In the laurel thicket, a herd of does 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. THEAURA He used to wake to him With a sense of music coming Along with a body in movement. It swayed with the motion of a hip Rolling into the bathroom, And, lying in bed in the winter dark Of fathers, he heard rock-and-roll Closed off while 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 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 Buckdancer's Choice 215 Of his teens, his last year Of bicycles, 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 of tunes, those stations Never off the air. He sits still Wherever he is, as though caught With music on him, or as if he were About to be given it somewhere In the region of the stomach: That sound is the same, and yet not— There is too much steadiness in it: none Is carried rightly, none wavers With the motion of adolescent walking, none Lumbers as it should. Still, it is there In trios of girls, in fake folk singers 216 From Brooklyn, and he enters, anywhere, His son's life without the wakingto -it, the irreplaceable motion Of a body. Bongóes. Steel Guitars. A precious cheapness He would have grown out of. Something. Music. Buckdancer's Choice 217 ...