THE READING ROOM


1.

You'd come on lunch hour, writing letters to 
a son gone off to college, the first in the family,
all angst and airy rebellion. Now there are guards 
and sensors at the doors. No hush except 
the whir of computer fans - 

though the books remain, ruminant over meaning, 
here or hereafter. Nothing I wanted 
in your letters, then, telling who was here -
schoolchildren, businessmen with their ties loosened,

daydreaming, as you had dreamed a life of Letters, 
though you got no closer than the book
reports you ghostwrote for your first-grade boy.

And your soul, like a sparrow flown in the door
of the banquet hall, as Bede's Northumbiran priest
would say, where there is food, a blazing fire,
has flown out the other-for all we know,

tossed by storms in some eternal dark.

2.

Waiting out the rain here as more than once
We did on our way downtown from some museum,
I write now to imagine you walking the city,
your clients scattered through it like the beads
from a broken rosary. You counted them,
made the city your mind. And on Saturdays
you'd open it for your boy.

I imagine you as I imagined God,
knowing what it is to be a father-
the sounds our children keep, a heart beating in
one ear, a familiar voice storying in the other

how hard it is to raise a separate person,
to lose the hoped-for rematch with the world.

3.

In the end, you gave up reading, scorned the loss
of everything you'd lost, and more. Your legs
wayward, you gave up walking. Then a finicky
digestion, you hated food. Forced to retire,
you hated life, and gave up all the pleasures
that might have tempted reconsideration.
All your thoughts were reasons you should die.

4.

Today I walked your route uptown,
El Greco still at the Met, galleries thick 
with people looking up, some explaining 
in hushed voices - not library quiet 
but almost - the rows of saintly heads 
mounted on pyramids of pastel cloth 
over too-solid flesh. Already begun 
their final sublimation. Even the hands 
of the Inquisitor are white-
knuckled on his chair. 

And somewhere in a painting or the crowd 
I caught an eye as blue as yours, even
at the last. After the small paralyses,
only it remained to argue for a soul.
I see it now turned skyward, or merely upward
against itself and all the clotted world.