I
My pity followed your plaid back
into the sun
to the car
in a holocaust that would rattle you home
from the furniture oil and detergents and the splintering
telephone bell in the vacuum’s hoses,
to your porch in South Shaftesbury.
There, by the cutouts of poodle
and duck in the flowering
pig-dirt,
the cast-iron cat on the maple
flashing its egg-yolk enamels,
the denims and doilies,
Puss-in-Boots in a pinafore tinted in tripes and molasses on
tinfoil,
Pat and his bottle-
the Unthinkable struck:
the hairs of your head stood on end, and at last,
in the sweat of your glasses
you wept.
II
A seventh son,
or a last, however you reckoned it:
the boy in the bulldozer
never needing you less, and untender,
the wayward
and quarrelsome father and unwitting
offender, out of love with the Law, straddling
a cloud with an aerial to pleasure
your Sundays,
easy with tears, like yourself…
On your way to the hospital, with the face in the oxygen
bag coming closer, some things fell together:
Myrtie and Rosemary, runaways;
the smashup
near White River;
the “maphrodite” Dido run over,
her with a litter;
sticks and a star
in a soldier’s necropolis;
arthritical weather,
with the welldrillers gouging the gardens, and the water
at two hundred feet showing gritty-
no use to harden
the heart or take on.
If the answer was bitters-
omething you’d done, something you’d found and forgotten,
well,
that was for later, the more was the pity:
for it all added up into Cancer.
III
In the wallpaper jungle, with the stove
snuffling lamp-oil and the living-room crammed with a death,
the question resumed:
the death of a son is momentous.
It gathers the glaze in linoleum
parlors,
blues the laces with starches, hardens
the nooses of neckties and buttons up collars
and waits for our love like a service.
The Thing that was meant-
the face in the oval that looked toward the face in the casket
where the range of the Thinkable crashed on a deathdate
hostile alike to consent and forgiveness,
wanting only
denial-
a Vermonter would know how to choose between sugar
and granite;
and the death of a son needed granite.
IV
That quarry in Danby:
the blocks came out smoking
with spray and acetylene:
the heft of a mountain, the electric
and diamond of drillers, the marks of its anger were on it.
One could picnic on granite;
cobble pathways;
and in June
in the melted abysses, where the terrible adamant mounted
or fell
out of birch into fire
one could dive toward the time of a planet.
It was marble—the negations of marble—that counted!
So you strove with that sleepy destroyer in the maw
of the quarry where a season lay locked in its guilty
mutations.
The spiderplant greened in the window.
The ground-thaw
worked on the slate
in the pit of the well
a pillar
of drouth in the garden, the cats, and the crosses.
Denial and pain were made perfect:
and two summers later,
after the lawyers and losses,
the water came up.
It rose three hundred feet
in the main, breaking strong in the pipe-elbows.
For the first time
the tap in your kitchen ran
hot and cold
your weariness bathed
to its length in a porcelain tub:
and the taste of the water was sweet.
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