too tedious for him to notice when it ended.
He works so slowly he moves back in time
carrying our dead letters to their lost addresses.
It’s silly to get sentimental.
The dead have moved on. So should we.
But isn’t it equally simple-minded to miss
the special expertise of the departed
in clarifying our long-term plans?
They never let us forget that the line
between them and us is only temporary.
Get out there and dance! the letters shout
adding, Love always. Can’t wait to get home!
And soon we will be. See you there.
SPECIAL TREATMENTS WARD
I.
So this is where the children come to die,
hidden on the hospital’s highest floor.
They wear their bandages like uniforms
and pull their IV rigs along the hall
with slow and careful steps. Or bald and pale,
they lie in bright pajamas on their beds,
watching another world on a screen.
The mothers spend their nights inside the ward,
sleeping on chairs that fold out into beds,
too small to lie in comfort. Soon they slip
beside their children, as if they might mesh
those small bruised bodies back into their flesh.
Instinctively they feel that love so strong
protects a child. Each morning proves them wrong.
No one chooses to be here. We play the parts
that we are given — horrible as they are.
We try to play them well, whatever that means.
We need to talk, though talking breaks our hearts.
The doctors come and go like oracles,
their manner cool, omniscient, and oblique.
There is a word that no one ever speaks.
II.
I put this poem aside twelve years ago
because I could not bear remembering
the faces it evoked, and every line
seemed — still seems — so inadequate and grim.
What right had I whose son had walked away
to speak for those who died? And I’ll admit
I wanted to forget. I’d lost one child
and couldn’t bear to watch another die.
Not just the silent boy who shared our room,
but even the bird-thin figures dimly glimpsed
shuffling deliberately, disjointedly
like ancient soldiers after a parade.
Whatever strength the task required I lacked.
No well-stitched words could suture shut these wounds.
And so I stopped…
But there are poems we do not choose to write.
III.
The children visit me, not just in dream,
appearing suddenly, silently—
insistent, unprovoked, unwelcome.
They’ve taken off their milky bandages
to show the raw, red lesions they still bear.
Risen they are healed but not made whole.
A few I recognize, untouched by years.
I cannot name them — their faces pale and gray
like ashes fallen from a distant fire.
What use am I to them, almost a stranger?
I cannot wake them from their satin beds.
Why do they seek me? They never speak.
And vagrant sorrow cannot bless the dead.
MAJORITY
Now you’d be three,
I said to myself,
seeing a child born
the same summer as you.
Now you’d be six,
or seven, or ten.
I watched you grow
in foreign bodies.
Leaping into a pool, all laughter,
or frowning over a keyboard,
but mostly just standing,
taller each time.
How splendid your most
mundane action seemed
in these joyful proxies.
I often held back tears.
Now you are twenty-one.
Finally, it makes sense
that you have moved away
into your own afterlife.
MY HANDSOME COUSIN
I saw you in a dream last night—
Quiet and pale, but still my handsome cousin.
Your hair was thick and glossy black.
Your breath was earthy whispering in my ear.
“I’m not dead,” you told me. “I’ve been away.
I’ve come to show you the house I’ve bought.”
We walked together through the empty rooms.
Each one was smaller than the room before.
“And this,” you smiled, “will be the nursery.”
I thought of your children, now full-grown,
Who know you from old photographs,
And of your widow, beautiful but gray.
I wanted to ask where you had gone,
But you spoke first, “It’s time to go next door.
Let’s see the house that will be yours.”
IV. IMAGINATION
ELEGY FOR VLADIMIR DE PACHMANN
(Odessa, 1848–Rome, 1933)
“How absurd,” cried the pianist de Pachmann
to reporters from the Minneapolis Dispatch,
“that my talents or the talents of a Liszt
were confined to so small a planet
as the earth. How much more could we have done
given the dimensions of a fixed star?”
He began a prelude quietly, then stopped.
“Once Chopin could play this well. Now only me.”
When he brought his socks into the concert hall
and dedicated that night’s music to them,
or relearned his repertoire at sixty-nine
using only the fourth and fifth fingers
of one hand, the critics thought his madness
was theatrical, but the less learned
members of his audience, to whom he talked
while playing, knew the truth.
Porters and impresarios told of coming on him,
alone in a hotel suite, his back
curved like a monkey’s, dancing and screeching
in front of a dressing mirror,
or giving concerts for the velvet furniture
in his room, knocking it together afterwards
for applause. “Dear friends,” he whispered to it,
“such love deserves an encore.”
Now relegated to three short paragraphs
in Grove’s Dictionary of Music
and one out-of-stock recording of Chopin,
he reappears only by schedule
in a few selections broadcast on his birthday,
music produced by rolls on a mechanical piano
where no fingers touch the keys as each piece
goes to its predictable finale.
LIVES OF THE GREAT COMPOSERS
Herr Bruckner often wandered into church
to join the mourners at a funeral.
The relatives of Berlioz were horrified.
“Such harmony,” quoth Shakespeare, “is in
immortal souls…. We cannot hear it.” But
the radio is playing, and outside
rain splashes to the pavement. Now and then
the broadcast fails. On nights like these Schumann
would watch the lightning streak his windowpanes.
Outside the rain is falling on the pavement.
A scrap of paper tumbles down the street.
On rainy evenings Schumann jotted down
his melodies on windowpanes. “Such harmony!
We cannot hear it.” The radio goes off and on.
At the rehearsal Gustav Holst exclaimed,