It is when I’m writing my old good friend RR
about my current state, about how I still see
my father sitting with his chin in his hands
at the dining room table the morning he turned
sixty as I have just done…and remember asking
him what he was doing and his answer, “I’m
staring at the prison bars” ( the melancholy
he refused to allow into the music of his voice
present then for the very first time so he was
in that instant transfigured as another person
for me)… it’s when I’m writing this to RR
that it occurs to me that my poor head is
a nature preserve, a wildlife refuge, for so many
who are extinct in the outside world, my parents,
uncles, aunts, grandparents, friends, lovers,
teachers, antagonists, great-aunts, great-uncles,
first cousins now, patients, those I’ve known in France,
Tanzania, Brazil, darkest Ohio, California…
I take pleasure in this new way of thinking about
my own head, my mind that works so hard, making
preposterously little headway, if any, because
I’m always lost even finding first names for now
2006