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Young'un

Now I am wondering if we get everyone back

and if all orphanings can be undone like mine

with the right word if one keeps listening for it.

Now more of us know fatherlessness than fathers

and if links may be restored at long last

with our snapped and dangling chains we need preparation.

Now pushing off from nothing is a valued trick

and I too admire a bird accelerating

without toehold in mid-air like an orphan, but

now in middle age addressed as "'young'un" --

and after he'd paid his old man's tears (clever

with words he made his claim with the old phrase) --

now, his deft mix of humor, possession

and lost habit pluck me back into his lineage

with the power of fathers to make a child a niche.

Now that words have slung me again in his mind

and mine from his chain of descent I can deal

without remorse in the jostles and jerks of linkage.

Spells

I promised that long romance, mothering,

twenty years at most, but it took

twentyone.

When you wake the dream furniture's

gone, but the wear-and-tear's present

where you slept, as a trip to a vanished

dreamt bathroom leaves your mattress

one stain older. Meanwhile dayfulls

happened elsewhere, and won't be taken

back.

Deaths are paid while we dream,

their sounds audible in that extended

parenthesis. It is not only those

inside the long possession that alter,

age, turn remote or away.

After all, this was not the longest

of my romances, only the latest.

Awake now I see I've gained

the object of the oldest. Not that I don't

adore, but where are the rose windows

in sunlight I remember? It came

naked and simple, a plain door

to a plain presence.

Magic visages

have drawn me. Gravity's not more

relentless than their dissembled glamour.

Why do they turn now, far

too long after my passionate invitations?

And something dawned early this morning.

I woke, I turned smiling, but the lighted

clock said it was still night.

How can we tell the truth? Still,

trying enough lies we'll surround it.

filling every mort of space

in its vicinity we'll trap it, and feeling

in every crevice we'll trace its outline.

If we don't see its eyes we'll feel its teeth.

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