When we drove a spike too weak into wood too hard
we got, not
the satisfied grunt of everything organized to go downward,
but a sudden yodel,
like a funny bone singing.
I don’t want to go back to that workbench
with its smell of spruce sawdust, where the voice
inside things cracks, and changes, ever again.
The sound doesn’t come from the wheel-rims of the milk wagon rattling the milk and the cream down the hard earth of Oswald Street,
nor from the ice cream wagon of Peter Pellagi, whose horse, we all knew, dropped a horse bun under the wagon whenever Peter scooped ice cream inside it,
nor from the cart of the scissors-grinder, who frictioned black steel into Faustian sparkles,
nor from the wagon of the iceman, who stabbed out a block of that silenced water and lugged it in tongs into the house,
nor from the horse and team of the ragman, who from the next street began bellowing his indecipherable cry, possibly “Old rags!” or was it just the noise inside things that have turned into old rags, “AWWWWRAGHHH!”
of these now no ones, but from the no one himself,
the father, who neither brings up the rear nor goes on ahead,
and never rides alongside;
and it approaches closer and closer
and just before arriving goes farther and farther away.
In another generation
the father and son come skidding down
the embankment together. They wade
through the shallows, where the bright water
tumbles upon itself making self-licking noises,
then swim to the rock which, like a leak, lets bits of the river fly out.
Everywhere else the water lies flat
and yet seems to slide past faster than other water,
as if there is that force in it
that intimidates matter and can twist
the laws of physics, like the libido inside the lawn bowler’s bowling ball, which dawdles it along well after it has used up its impetus.
The father and son laugh—unrhythmic, lovely noise—and, as if
entropy just then curled its tongue inside it, the river cowlicks.
From a town somewhere a consecrated bell knocks
its mild accurate notes all the way to the river.
The boy picks up a pebble, puts it
in the pointed place at the bottom of his pocket,
first checking with a finger for a hole,
then they climb back up
to the path, which, in the schemelessness of things, soon works its way back down
to the banks of that secretly frantic water
still shedding its impressions of their bodies,
in which a few, small, horned fishes quietly drift.
Can a father give his son
what he himself never possessed,
or lacks the courage to wish up from his own deprivation?
Unlike the boy, who will turn into the father,
and unlike the father, who will turn into no one,
the pebble on the windowsill does not wrinkle, does not die,
though one day it will get lost,
or be thrown out,
maybe by the father the boy who stuck it in his pocket in the first place becomes,
when he forgets what it was he wanted the pebble to remember.
The motes inside the rays
of sun crossing the room of the childhood house
do not settle but keep turning
through themselves, like the Z° bosons inside matter,
which know the moment they stop they get plucked up,
with a short sucking noise, like a camera shutter capturing a soul,
and belong to the past even before they exist;
in something of the way that childhood happened already;
or like the wedding kiss.
When I come back to my father’s house,
it will be in any month, though I have loved
fall, and August, and the august moon,
and the moonstruck flagstones going to the door.
When I come back someone will be singing
in an upstairs room, and I will stop
just inside the door to hear who it is,
or is it someone I don’t know, singing,
in my father’s house, when I come back?
Those we love from the first
can’t be put aside or forgotten,
after they die they still must be cried
out of existence, tears must make
their erratic runs down the face,
over the fullnesses, into
the craters, confirming,
the absent will not be present,
ever again. Then the lost one
can fling itself outward, its million
moments of presence can scatter
through consciousness freely, like snow
collected overnight on a spruce bough
that in midmorning bursts
into glittering dust in the sunshine.