Mother, in that darkness into which you go,
which is not Lear’s or Homer’s-not Charon’s
bowsprit bearing the devious Florentine
on the downward eddy, to allegorical heaven:
nothing dreamt or dissembled, or given the spirit to know
to prove it precarious, like thirst, or the gift of tears,
but blindness itself, a smashing of lenses and lives-
why does my childhood tremble, and my gaze go up
with a child’s assurance, for the large, loved hand
of that providing walker who measures her stride to my own
and steadies the balances? For I guess at a thing
not desolation’s, and walk, as toward birthdays, with
all my surprise made ready.
You come with a gift of light,
mulish and brave, in the shine of sabbatical
candles, wearing my blindness: not
in the barbiturate sleep of the maimed, but held in the salt
of a photograph, parting conventional hedges, a rich braid caught
on the serious smile and the Ukrainian stance
by an apron of porches.
And all is returned, in a dazzle, half
seen, like the eyelash over the eye when the sleeper wakens.
Poppyseed burns on my lips, and we mount up the kiosk
together, my trust in your hand, like a forfeit,
climbing the steps of my nausea,
while the belltower tips toward the dial of the Orphanage
clock, and the iron opens outward. There all my sullen deprival
surrenders its lonely disguises:
there is my father,
clear in the long halation; there, the ascending staves of the bed
harplike in peeling enamels, where I listen to prodigies; there,
grave-plot, headstone, prayer-shawl,
where the son of the blessing arises,
the sevenfold tape on his forearm, and remembers the prayer for
the dead.
A stone in the grave of his mouth moves,
and he cries from the grave-clout: Father!
and forgives him his dying, who knew not what he did.
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