he and you

He smiles all the way to sleep,

Pockmarked skin shining amongst

A family he created. 48 dark eyes looking to him for laughter.

What does he read these nights as he wrestles with it?

What light does he turn on?

I want to know because he is doing what must be done,

The same way he would yell scat

Out into the dark before walking out.

He begins every story with “this is the last

Story, I promise” as if we all waited for this to end,

But everybody in the room is holding their breath

In awe that we are inside some magic bubble,

Shadow faces of despair only showing on the rainbowed perimeter.

He is telling us “the fuckers don't want to see us rise,”

He is filling us with air.

It is as if he wants to convince us

He is no role model. Mistakes here

And there, the house flooding,

Cops pissed off or shady clients defended.

The details grow fuzzy as they change with each telling

First it was a field of cinders, then a movie theatre,

A general’s plane or maybe the chaplain’s.

Always he is no hero, he told me he took

A deer’s life and immediately asked god’s forgiveness--

What shines through is his life.

His brutally sharp and strong life,

Muscling its way into the light

Like a seal to the top of the ocean.

Grandpa, is it lapis lazuli? When you read that did you think of me,

Or was that for you, the beauty and tragedy together defying despair?

You know how to look at it, hold it, find it again and again.

When you say, NO let us speak of life—

Do you grow frustrated you cannot give it all to me at once?

I am listening now. I will not wander off

To the cabin in the mountains. Let us turn this ageless stone between us.

You have been married 59 years and alive 85 and awake to all of it,

Alive to all of it as it even as it beats upon you like a storm against cedar panes,

Or bends you low like wind in the cattails.

Unafraid you are laughing

as we speed over the spray, as we break out into the sea.

Are you thinking of your youth now and do you see it in us?

I see mine in you, your intelligent eyes fixed on me

holding some conversation then another

up to the light and putting it down again,

Content and still searching.

Your laughter now is mine at 5,

Innocent and ancient as the struggle we both continue

To just... hold it within us completely for a moment.

I laughed as I tried to catch you between my hands,

But you were always escaping.

After you leave, your son and i

Wash the dishes together.

He turns stairway to heaven way up

and we both know this is something

essentially human,

not knowing and being afraid to know,

the sadness, the hope, the desire to reach across

and touch another human being

down somewhere that is deeper than where death can find.

If your cancer was a boss I would organize the shit out of his workplace and pretty soon he would have no power.

If your cancer was a book I would read it quickly to learn its lesson and then throw it away in a place where it would never come back again.

If your cancer were deep and I could only see the edge, a truth whose depths I could barely comprehend with my 25 years of life, whose life was tied to your life and whose meaning only you could see, I would long desperately to be with you, to talk about Shakespeare and agree about revolution, to read poetry and sing old songs, to hear you tell your life so slowly that I’d miss my plane

And stay for dinner and a Mel Brooks movie and I’d watch you lean into your chin and begin to snore and know that you are something that only comes once and every particle of this earth is blessed to have its shadow cast by your fire.