This is for a man indifferent to all I do, whose knees at ninety-six
still knock about my face, as he sits in a reclining posture-pedic
on a patio in the thrall of mockingbird and gecko-heaven,
somewhere in Riviera Beach. All fathers have his arrogance,
his stammering lack of urge to speak: ministers, slave traders,
rum-runners hiding in their mother's skirts all mute in the face
of a child of blindworms. On a stuccoed wall, a moss-eaten
picture of a youth away at war, cast into the campagna glare
of a hero standing on crutches on a terrazzo at Basso Piane,
a home for influenzaed Red Cross drivers at the front.
Here's Hemingway--fabulist, lady-killer, Cuban pummeller
of nurse sharks. Behind him Ed--my granddaddy--hazy post
to the symmetry of the shot (a dark-haired Neopolitan
on the right, the triptych's macho Goya to my relation's
effeminate El Greco behind this eager amputee of Christ)
is reading from Evangeline in the sunset dark, the very
trocheed lines he coddled into me when I was half his age,
the only other poet-soldier in the family, the only one
to cast a lovesick tired eye at strangers in the night
and disallow the certainty of God and loneliness
and help stray silent black sheep from the fold.