Big Man
When my dad died nearly two years ago the earth shook and it’s been shaking ever since. I don’t suppose it’ll ever stop. People stay gone.
The fact that he took his own life at 84 has complicated that shaking for me and for everyone who loved him. It’s given it a twisted, shuddering kind of rhythm.
He was complicated and stunted and frustrating and hypnotizing and blindingly brilliant and probably mad.
But we loved him. I loved him.
Big Man, Part One
i
And what would I have
done in any case?
Would I have
spurred my horse
onto the battlefield
to beat back your shadow
with a cry?
Would I have
reasoned with your phantom,
cajoled it to believe again
like some roaring
big tent revivalist?
Could I
have whispered you back
from the edge like a shaman,
or marched you free,
free at last
into Canaan?
You had decided to go.
And why not?
The hand withered,
the keys fallen mute,
and even the trees lining your street
all turned away
from your strange and broken feet.
ii
Did you bid us farewell,
if only in your winking farmer’s heart?
Did you smile that we
would understand
before you dissolved like Liotta
between the cornstalks?
Were you a kind fisherman when you went?
Did you take your long days like
marlins in your hands and
thrust them into the sea
to be free?
Or were you burning so
that you merely whirled into
the death room and seized
the instrument in a spasm?
iii
I nearly erased myself
so that you could exist.
You wanted so badly
to explode
among the cathedrals
of men,
but instead you hid
between the white keys
and the black,
a dust mote singing to the dark.
What am I saying?
I did erase myself,
wiped any trace of me
from the mighty Book
a thousand times,
so that you,
you
could be.
Why I can still draw breath
I do not know.
iv
But then you burst
from the sea,
black hair
smoothed back
by seaweed and salt,
and laid waste my enemies
without mercy,
my leviathan, my saint.
Laugh of golden thunder,
eyes heat lightning over
Needles, Jerusalem, Rome.
I’m sorry I couldn’t
walk you into the dark.
It’s a cut that will never
stop bleeding.
I was weak
from centuries
of your sunless gaze.
Was I only the ghost of some
invisible clown,
destitute and pointless
in your gorgeous court?
Did I not have muscles, bones, magic?
And as for her,
as for the rack,
the iron,
oh, you were so hard.
“Get over it,” you said.
But I didn’t know how.