Living Will – Ecclesiastes 12
Ian’s Birthday Poem: 12-5-78

I have opened many seeds in my life, and I have
captured flight, gray sails pitched over Atlantic bare sky.

Inside the hull, skin blazes. Twilight opens its door;
rain falls simply on my curved fingers as the green velvet
sinuous hill depicts the lines of family, its convergent genes--
sweet frolic plays the historical waltz and chance
roams over Irish Tara and English Plymouth to spin
the edges of maps into tales, history and human flaw.

I am grown there under perpetual blue waves,
floods from old tides that are not heard but read --
intuitive glyphs strung out on the dreaming walls
in Algonquin caves where we search even in this
millennium for language to become hospitable.

We mostly fail. I walk to the river tender, search
for righteousness, speak with an orthodox Jew on
taxi ride from Newark Airport. He said, as the Rabbi
did when I was 20, to be righteous, -- that is our end.
I connect the sky, interpret the signs find the history
of my son, Ian, know him to be righteous and write
in his gift book that fact; no matter what his life, goodness
is the perfect sum that adds the edges of gravel to rivers
and clouds to mountains, perfects cycles, synclines,
and every geothermal vault, even the last ones
that will boil the sea and we can hear in that last cry
how I may dream the flood again as North River,
now called Hudson, sweeps under the rim of graveyards,
garbage scows and the septic coins of terror.

No, it is not that dark tonight. My son lives another year,
and will live many past my own. I give him one seed.
His mother gave him peace. The city will be daylight
and the rivers and caves of Algonquin dreamers
will capture the faith of the righteous
for at least one day a year.


###