Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2008

The End of the Sentence

195 f r o m g o u r d s e e d t h e e n d o f t h e s e n t e n c e Home is where the art is, without the he. Home is where it’s at, without the her. Alison is a painter and a carpenter, and my love-in-the-making, and those are our unmarried marriage-songs. We live and love thirty miles and minutes apart. Separate homes, same his-and-her heart. Last night I stayed with her in Lexington. We tried to think of the sentence Mike put on the wall at one of his showings. “It’s difficult to write a Paradiso, when . . .” But we couldn’t get the end. “It’s difficult to write a Paradiso, when all the world wants is an epilogue.” Not bad, but not it. I drove back to Athens this morning and went to look in on Mike. He snoring away. Margo Rosenbaum is there. “You writing much lately?” “Well, yeah.” Mike opens his eyes. “He’s got a little telephone by his bed that he listens to everybody’s secrets on.” • • • 196 f r o m g o u r d s e e d “I wish. Hey buddy, Alison and I were trying to think of the end of your sentence, ‘It’s difficult to write a Paradiso . . .’” When you’re facing a conflagration. “Right. We couldn’t get it.” He snores back, days and nights reversed. The others leave, and I sit there with the shades pulled. The physical therapist slips in.“Do you think he’ll feel like some exercise later?” “Gosh, I don’t know. Can he get up?” “We lift him. He went over to the window this morning.” I woke at Alison’s, staring into the drowningly open day. A band of birds shot across the pane, and I felt how Mike won’t see that much detail again. On his walker all concentration goes to the exhaustion of one foot. He tries to attack. “I don’t know what any of this means.” “I don’t either.” “Where’s the fairness factor?” “I don’t know.” “Why do you keep coming up here?” 197 f r o m g o u r d s e e d “I just like to hang out. I don’t know.” Outside in the air, I see a glory, his searing, soaring honesty lifting above my seed-picking. I need to attack myself. He is the hawk of human-ness riding bright-cold winter. I will never write anything else about anybody’s death, and that’s not what this is. We don’t die. We just can’t be located quite. The talk continues on the secret phones. Alison and I are so alone that we can love. We have to have privacy, and we have to have the phone. It’s hard to claim to be living in Paradiso, when you’re watching a friend burn down to an intricate ember. Mike winked at me out of near-coma, and sang a faint, madeup song, • • • ...