Children to me is a word in a song,
Think, by James Brown. I don’t know
Children, I’m out of touch with their hopscotch
And video games, no father with a daughter, a son
And interruptions they’d bring and pleasures.
But I was once a son, a child. So much
Of us formed in those early years. People
Who might say, You’re regressing, stuck
In childhood, that’s a shortsighted view.
Everything the child sees is big. For the child,
No matter his or her physical make up, is small.
To the child people are big, big as trees,
And the field is vast, so there’s the small
Child in his or her big world; the river
Is wide and deep, wider, deeper to the child.
I’m telling you this because you too were once a son,
A child, also, when you were living, a husband
Who lost one wife (in death) and married
Another, whom I’d never met, though I knew
The first, her voice, her angular face.
Why you left, why you stopped being you,
My friend, is a mystery. For a poet,
I think you were better than most,
At least those I knew, and also as a friend
You were generous, genuine, unsentimental.
You were handsome, witty, bright; in college
You played baseball, second base as I see you
On the diamond. When I met you, you said
The word recovering; well, that quilt of recovery
Somehow unraveled, though I didn’t see that,
Didn’t see you fall off the wagon into an abyss
That perhaps others, near you at the time,
Could see: He’s in an abyss—I wonder
If anyone, or two, at the time said that,
Silently or to you, or to others. Why?
Why am I talking as if you could hear?
You are now part of the silence, the nothing
That’s not ours, the living. So I call to you
From the other side of the river, or rather
From my side of the wall that separates us.
You’d understand, about how for the child
All is magnified, a twig on the ground in the woods,
The damp earth, the mint freshness of leaves
Or crisp winter leaves under his or her feet.
In the woods of childhood, the blue jay squawks
And the child hears keener than I. Why
Did you leave? A mystery. The child’s world
Mysterious, so different from the mystery
Of you that perhaps there’s a sameness.
You argued, wanted milk not artificial creamer,
For too long a time one restaurant morning:
A memory so ordinary, like your rumpled
Chinos, blue eyes, cleft in your chin.
And then the poems, which all had an edge
And spoke to what it means to be human.