UIN DEATH I KNOW WELL ENOUGH ALL THINGS END IN EMPTINESS"
to Dave I,natow
I feel wonderful today after a long night
being naked with my wife.
For weeks we hated each other, refusing to speak or touch,
staring at each other across the table,
but last night when I got home from work
there was nothing,
nothing except the face of my dead father,
his blue eyes half open not seeing in or out.
I read the letters you wrote me when he was dying
and wept. You said that what we talked about
when I'd phone you before he died made you remember
how you're afraid sometimes of not fmding anybody to help you
when you need it, of how we live trapped between the "clayey walls
of life," reaching up for a hand. Nobody else is
so kind. I hear the ocean hissing
under his window the morning he died
and my mother screaming down the halls after she found him,
couldn't wake him, then called me.
All those long weeks he was failing I'd call you
and you listened, so delicately aware of my pain that
it was your pain. Dave, I love you.
At night I drink if I feel death's leaning
just outside ready to smash in the door and begin on me.
But life cuts me open, I do what I want to, mostly.
Last night I came home angry and tired and told my wife to love me.
We stared at each other. Soon we touched.
Then we talked about anything
until we knew each other so deeply we took off our clothes and felt
everywhere and clung to each other and fucked
then lay touching until we slept.
Death does this with people.
Her face, his, yours, rise out of the darkness
that terrifies us. We can live.
Dave, I'm as old as you are.
Three pale blue lights burn in the building
across the street, a few lumps of snow
melt on the sill. My head floats on the pane the way it'll look
