This is the silence around the poem of the death of my father. This is the silence before the poem.
While my father was dying, the Challenger was exploding on TV Again and again. I watched it happen. In his hospital room, I followed his breath. Then it stopped.
This is the silence in a poem about the dying of the father.
We’re burning the earth. We’re burning the sky.
Here is another silence in the middle of the poem about the immolation of the Fathers.
I have just come down from my father. Higher and higher he lies Above me in a blue light Shed by a tinted window. I drop through six white floors And then step out onto pavement.
Still feeling my father ascend, I start to cross the firm street,
At five I wake, rise, rub on the smoking pane A port to see—water breathing in the air, Boughs broken. The sun comes up in a golden stain, Floats like a glassy sea-fruit. There is mist everywhere, White and humid, and the Harbour is like plated stone, Dull flakes of ice. One light drips out alone, One bead of winter-red, smouldering in the steam, Quietly over the roof-tops—another window
To turn a stone with its white squirming underneath, to pry the disc from the sun’s eclipse—white heat coiling in the blinded eye: to these malign necessities we come from the dim time of dinosaurs who crawled like breathing lava
1Once in Mexico an old man was leading on a string—was it a cat? And we saw it was a tarantula sidling along in the dust, writing a message from God for people who thought they knew where creature-life ended.
2We came upon scenes like that, the world back of a lurid pane of glass.
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