Questioner

 

What does it all mean? he asked.  I didn’t know then.

It was spring.  We sat outside. A soft wind crossed

 

Over a hill and down into our shack of a house.

I supposed that “it” was the wind, so I lost the sadness

 

Inside his question.  (I was barely sixteen; he near fifty,

alcoholic, homeless except for a room we let to him,

 

For free.)  I supposed that meaning was in being itself.

Beyond breathing, there was nothing to know:

 

You got up and lived--that was enough. Impatient,

I looked at the cool, strifeless hill.  I can’t tell, I said.

 

A year later, on a last tear, he was dragged by a car

for fifty yards, victim of a person or persons unknown.

 

Once loose, hurt, he crawled beneath a house, trying to

get warm--it was a wet, cold winter.  Froze there,

 

Under a stranger’s floorboards, never calling

out.  (Maybe the question had taken the booze’s place,

 

And he was tasting, finally, the balm of a reply.

He should have tried to get someone’s attention.)

 

I’m near his age now, and feel his question--even own

part of the answer. Sometimes, going to sleep,

 

I call out to him.  I see him as he was then, and say

to him with my mind: I found it, uncle, I found it.

 

I don’t know whether he hears me--or cares anymore

for my notions.  He knows more than I do, now--

 

If anything at all.  I wish I could say to him, though,

about that day: Uncle, forgive me, I was young,

 

And unprepared.  I missed your anguish.

You grasped at nothingness. I heard the wind.

White Pelican Review (Fall 2000)