still alive, swaddled to the neck in this

black bunting, the ropes lovely as

spider-lines against wet stone.

Things That Are Worse Than Death

(for Margaret Randall)

You are speaking of Chile,

of the woman who was arrested

with her husband and their five-year-old son.

You tell how the guards tortured the woman, the man, the child,

in front of each other,

“as they like to do.”

Things that are worse than death.

I can see myself taking my son’s ash-blond hair in my fingers,

tilting back his head before he knows what is happening,

slitting his throat, slitting my own throat

to save us that. Things that are worse than death:

this new idea enters my life.

The guard enters my life, the sewage of his body,

“as they like to do.” The eyes of the five-year-old boy, Dago,

watching them with his mother. The eyes of his mother

watching them with Dago. And in my living room as a child,

the word, Dago. And nothing I experienced was worse than death,

life was beautiful as our blood on the stone floor

to save us that—my son’s eyes on me,

my eyes on my son—the ram-boar on our bodies

making us look at our old enemy and bow in welcome,

gracious and eternal death

who permits departure.

II. Private

The Guild

Every night, as my grandfather sat

in the darkened room in front of the fire,

the liquor like fire in his hand, his eye

glittering meaninglessly in the light

from the flames, his glass eye baleful and stony,

a young man sat with him

in silence and darkness, a college boy with

white skin, unlined, a narrow

beautiful face, a broad domed

forehead, and eyes amber as the resin from

trees too young to be cut yet.

This was his son, who sat, an apprentice,

night after night, his glass of coals

next to the old man’s glass of coals,

and he drank when the old man drank, and he learned

the craft of oblivion—that young man

not yet cruel, his hair dark as the

soil that feeds the tree’s roots,

that son who would come to be in his turn

better at this than the teacher, the apprentice

who would pass his master in cruelty and oblivion,

drinking steadily by the flames in the blackness,

that young man my father.

Grandmother Love Poem

Late in her life, when we fell in love,

I’d take her out from the nursing home

for a chaser and two bourbons. She’d crack

a joke sharp as a tin lid

hot from the teeth of the can-opener,

and cackle her crack-corn laugh. Next to her

wit, she prided herself on her hair,

snowy and abundant. She would lift it up

at the nape of the neck, there in the bar,

and under the white, under the salt-and-pepper,

she’d show me her true color,

the color it was when she was a bride: