Everyone has advice, lots of suggestions,
Some bring him plastic bowls, tin cans,
Old buckets; someone with half a degree

Roxy lifts her furrowed face and opens
her mouth for another hunk of banana muffin.
Her eyes are matted shut; her white hair wild as Isaiah’s.

The Fence

Once upon a time is what the fence dividing up a mountain 
range announces, in lines at once irregular and even.

Of those who finally win notice,
of these artists it is said their early work 
is either purer, more astounding,

No gentle way of breaking the news: you turn on the TV 
And see the rocket’s red glare: the capsule explodes, 
The astronauts tumble down, and the anchorpeople 

These good New Yorkers bent low over books
deserve a Paradise of softer chairs
and sleep, their heads against that fringed and white

I have dreamt a dream of fulfillment, of freedom:
she was an old woman, with a face like the moon,
first full with reflection, then new and dark, and then

You wake and reach for the phone. No one is harmed 
if you call your wife to claim you have seen the Pacific 
at dawn, running for miles over the quick 

To the living, the words for death are like the dead. 
When they come calling, they’re difficult to make out, 
ragged at the edges, unaccountable ghosts, 

“Feel me to do right,” your father whispered
to you out of the blue of two silences:
his shyness, his dying. How beautifully