Classic Poem

Pardon my injuries
now that you are old —
Forgive me my awkwardnesses
my impatience
and short replies —
I sometimes detect in your face
a puzzled pity for me
your son —
I have never been close to you
— mostly your own fault;
in that I am like you.
It is as though
you looked down from above
at me — not
with what they would describe
as pride but the same
that is in me: a sort
of shame that the world
should see you as I see you,
a somewhat infantile creature —
without subtlety —
defenseless.

And because you are defenseless
I too, horribly,
take advantage of you,
(as you of me)
my mother, keep you
imprisoned — in
the name of protection
when you want so wildly to escape
as I wish also
to escape and leap into chaos
(where Time has
not yet begun)

When Adam died
it came out clearly —
Not what commonly
might have been supposed but
a demon, fighting for the fire
it needed to breathe
to live again.
A last chance. You
kicked blindly before you
and nearly broke your leg
against the metal — then sank
exhausted.
And that is the horror
of my guilt — and the sweetness
even at this late date
in some kind of acknowledgment

I realize why you wish
to communicate with the dead —
And it is again I
who try to hush you
that you shall not
make a fool of yourself
and have them stare at you
with natural faces —
Trembling, sobbing
and grabbing at the futile hands
till a mind goes sour
watching you — and flies off
sick at the mumbling
from which nothing clearly
is ever spoken —

It not so much frightens
as shames me. I want to protect
you, to spare you the disgrace —
seeing you reach out that way
to self-inflicted emptiness —

As if you were not able
to protect yourself —
and me too — if we did not
have to be so guarded —

Therefore I make this last plea:

Forgive me
I have been a fool —
(and remain a fool)
If you are not already too blind
too deaf, too lost in the past
to know or to care —
I will write a book about you —
making you live (in a book!)
as you still desperately
want to live —
to live always — unforgiving

I'll give you brandy
or wine
whenever I think you need it
(need it!)
because it whips up
your mind and your senses
and brings color to your face
— to enkindle that life
too coarse for the usual,
that sly obscenity
that fertile darkness
in which passion mates —
reflecting
the lightnings of creation —
and the moon —
" C'est la vieillesse
inexorable qu'arrive! "

One would think
you would be reconciled with Time
instead of clawing at Him
that way, terrified
in the night — screaming out
unwilling, unappeased
and without shame —

Might He not take
that wasted carcass, crippled
and deformed, that ruined face
sightless, deafened —
the color gone — that seems
always listening, watching, waiting
ashamed only
of that single and last
degradation —
No. Never. Defenseless
still you would keep
every accoutrement
which He has loaned
till it shall be torn from
your grasp, a final grip
from those fingers
which cannot hold a knife
to cut the meat but which
in a hypnotic ecstasy
can so wrench a hand held out
to you that our bones
crack under the unwonted pressure —