Except when he enters my son,
The same age as he at his death,
I cannot bring my brother to myself.
I do not have his memory in my life,
Yet he is in my mind and on my hands.
I weave the trivial string upon a light
Dead before I was born.
Mark how the brother must live,
Who comes through the words of my mother.
I have been told he lay
In his death-bed singing with fever,
Performing with string on his fingers
Incredible feats of construction
There before he was born.
His Jacob’s Coffin now
Floats deeply between my fingers.
The strings with my thin bones shake
My eyes go from me, and down
Through my bound, spread hands
To the dead, from the kin of the dead,
Dead before I was born.
The gaze of genius comes back.
The rose-window of Chartres is in it,
And Diogenes’ lines upon sand,
And the sun through the Brooklyn Bridge,
And, caught in a web, the regard
Of a skeletal, blood-sharing child
Dead before I was born.
I believe in my father and mother
Finding no hope in these lines.
Out of grief, I was myself
Conceived, and brought to life
To replace the incredible child
Who built on this string in a fever
Dead before I was born.
A man, I make the same forms
For my son, that my brother made,
Who learnt them going to Heaven:
The coffin of light, the bridge,
The cup and saucer of pure air,
Cradle of Cat, the Foot of a Crow
Dead before I was born.
I raise up the bridge and the tower.
I burn the knit coffin in sunlight
For the child who has woven this city:
Who loved, doing this, to die:
Who thought like a spider, and sang,
And completed the maze of my fingers,
Dead before I was born.
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