“There is too much truth in this; any hand should hesitate to dilute it. The question is what do you do with such a well-crafted hatchet? … Secrets create unexpected worlds. Wrap it in a T-shirt, tie it to your leg and cover it with your trouser; pretend it isn’t there. Only you know the use of the holy paraphernalia.”
— Robert Lee Francoeur
Before he died, my father chose the book’s epigraph. The selection was characteristic in that it was not consolatory, nor was it ornamental. He did not understand truth as disclosure; he understood it as force. In Francoeur’s formulation, truth is not revelation but implement—weighted, edged, capable of incision. To wield it is to accept collateral damage. My father lived inside that paradox: one hand extended in tenderness, the other steady on the hilt. The tension was not episodic. It was structural. It organized the house; it organized us. The epigraph above was not chosen in abstraction. It was, I suspect, his response to an earlier poem of mine:
Leonard Cohen’s voice / hung in the air like smoke, / strangers came in / and out of the living room / over the years there was a low red table / by the window / with a gold eagle / in the center / clutching a shield / and arrows one hand to protect / one hand to destroy
That image—protection and destruction held in the same emblem—was not decorative memory. It was diagnosis. The house contained tenderness and threat in equal measure: the eagle gripped both shield and arrows. The paradox I later named in prose had already been staged in the room. His epigraph, with its hatchet wrapped beneath the shirt, answers that earlier vision. Truth, like the eagle, carries two hands.
Mysticism entered our home not as catechism but as atmosphere: Leonard Cohen murmuring through the living room like incense smoke, suggesting that theology could be erotic, that doubt could be devotional. Freud sat beside Dewey on the shelf, as if psychoanalysis and pragmatism were two instruments tuned to different registers of the same inquiry. Joseph Campbell’s monomyth threaded itself through dinner conversations, not as abstraction but as method: a way of metabolizing injury, of reading private grief against archetypal recurrence.
If he recurs in nearly every section of Hallucinations, this is not an act of filial piety but an acknowledgment of intellectual inheritance. The blueprint of my thinking was drafted under his supervision long before I knew I was building anything.
By training, Francoeur was an academic—psychology, law, ABD for a doctorate left unfinished. His mind was erudite to the point of intimidation. He could orbit a subject through history, etymology, jurisprudence, only to return—apparently by sleight of hand—to the thesis he had been assembling all along. What felt like digression was in fact vertical movement. He was not wandering; he was working at altitude.
Yet when he wrote poetry, the scaffolding disappeared. The man who could casually utter “puerile torpidity” abandoned punctuation, capitalization, ornament. His poems arrived as weather—immediate, mystical, unrevised. If his academic prose was architectural, his verse was meteorological. Here our temperaments diverged.
Where he dissolved, I constructed. Where he leaned Dionysian, I turned Apollonian, fastening masks and meters tightly enough to bruise the language into discipline. I did not distrust him; I distrusted ecstasy. Form, for me, became not decoration but containment.
Our exchange began almost accidentally. I would send him a poem; he would respond not with critique but with another poem. No paraphrase, no explanatory apparatus—only continuation. The proper response to poetry, in his view, was more poetry. Interpretation was an act of co-creation rather than adjudication.
It was only after he passed that I responded to his prologue with this epilogue:
There was always something hidden at the thigh: metal cooled beneath the ordinary cloth, a weight that warmed my skin without reply. My mouth learned silence first, then oath, how breath can whet a blade without a sound, how light falls clean and leaves the darker growth. A hand remembers what it hasn't found— the seam in wood, the cracks in ice, a pulse that keeps returning underground. At night it hums—not loudly, like a wire strung across two unseen posts; a spark returns your voice, then makes a muted choir, words I'll never sing to you. A mark can still be left without a hidden blade as skin remembers pressure in the dark. The cloth is thin. The edge remains at play.
In Fountain Street, I left his commentary intact. It had never been intended for publication. It belonged to the privacy of our shared intellectual life—elliptical meditations on masculinity, ritual, sport, war—initially written in response to Cathexis, which later matured into Baptism. In those lines he distilled a lesson that would haunt both of us.
affection between men / has always been / circumscribed by pain here, in the balance / between love and brutality / lies the origin of sport, / the first act / of civilization
The claim is anthropological as much as personal. Masculine affection, in his formulation, is ritualized through sanctioned violence; sport becomes sublimated war, civilization a choreography of managed aggression. Pain does not interrupt affection; it circumscribes it.
In Baptism, I write of winter, ice, the uncle’s authority, the hammer poised above the frozen surface, and the boy summoned alone—“A boy consents. The ice proceeds.” The poem does not frame the moment as trauma, nor does it soften it into nostalgia. It presents initiation without commentary. Exposure, witness, endurance. The cold is not metaphor; it is condition.
His response did not reinterpret the scene psychologically. He widened it. What appears in my poem as singular ordeal becomes, in his formulation, structured repetition—violence contained, rule-bound, reenacted without annihilation. Civilization begins not by abolishing aggression but by disciplining it. The bond between men is therefore neither purely tender nor purely brutal; it is tensile.
And this is the unsettling part: within his frame, initiation is not deviation but inheritance. The hammer, the ice, the summoned boy—these are not accidents of family history but iterations of a pattern older than the household itself. The rite does not erupt; it proceeds. The ice is not aberration. It is architecture.
This is the adult counterpoint to Baptism. If that poem stages initiation from the boy’s vantage, The Missouri Basin belongs to the chapter High Ground —a structural inversion of Low Country . The plane has shifted. We are no longer at ice level under a hammer; we are above the tree line, where altitude strips away myth.
My father’s love affair with the mountains began as escape. In his twenties they were the antithesis of Wichita’s corporate grid—the flat prairie of obligation, the scrutiny of parents, the weight of supporting a young family. From his personal work, written on Lear Jet stationery:
Business, busyness / gets so heavy sometimes / everything urgent and serious / surrounding me with / layer upon layer of / dying from the outside in / until I’m sure / that I’m suffocating / and out of nowhere / a refreshing breath / of beauty walks past / my life leaving / a nostalgic residue / of wishing / that it should have been / more enduring
The suffocation is not merely professional; it is ontological. “Dying from the outside in.” The corporate world closes around him, and beauty appears only as passing residue—never durable, never inhabitable.
The counter-image follows:
How I’ve learned to love / the aspen and fir wearing away / grand mountains when / their growing / goes with the winter snow Remember floating up those mountain streams / straggling through pulsating / alpine flowers flowing / around us and the fir / until the timberline fell below / and we stood on barren rock / with the winds of another / world sweeping our eyes
Here the mountains are not recreation; they are correction. Aspens and fir outlast urgency. Timberline falls away. Another world opens. Altitude promises purification—an existence stripped of offices, phones, fluorescent light. The fantasy is not conquest but absolution.
Then came the experiment. He dragged us through what can only be called a Mosquito Coast rehearsal—caravans along the Colorado interstate, Creede, a log cabin, survival drills in alpine wind. The mountains were imagined as antidote: to decadence, to domestic strain, to the “rat race.” They promised renewal. We followed that promise for decades—from the Rockies to the Appalachians—training in snowfields and talus as if endurance itself were inheritance. The Missouri Basin records the fracture.
We are ascending Mt. Harvard. He falters on the talus. The hesitation is foreign to him. By the summit he cannot join me. My brother reaches me not to admire the Divide but to announce the storm—minutes away. When it strikes, it is blinding. Snow erases distance; wind strips orientation. We huddle beneath an emergency blanket. Something is wrong. The glucose packet confirms what the body has already begun to say: diabetes. The mountain does not purify. It exposes.
The grammar reverses Baptism. There, the father figure summons the boy onto ice. Here, the son steadies the father above the tree line. There, the boy consents and the ice proceeds. Here, the father’s body betrays him. The initiation is no longer into endurance but into limitation.
My earlier draft leaned toward elegiac ascent:
the sun is straining through your breath, / I am pushing toward the beginning with you, I see the ground spreading out below, / the deep veins in the great basin / leading us to the night, the quietudes / of forgiveness and maturity, your son fixing the fire / in preparation for tomorrow / before the ascent, before you become helpless
The language searches for reconciliation—“forgiveness and maturity”—as though altitude could resolve inheritance. His commentary refused that comfort:
we came to this place / to reveal our infirmities passing above the tree line / the wounds of my childhood / dissipated in the talus leaving the essence of your manhood / to brace us against the wind and ice
The mountain is not cure; it is exposure. Wounds do not dissolve into transcendence; they scatter into stone. What remains is not mythic fatherhood but residue—“the essence of your manhood,” stripped of projection.
In the later sonnet form, the exchange compresses into final clarity:
Son, we came here to name our ruin, not mend it. Past the tree line’s ragged mark, the wounds you carried into me lie strewn in talus. All that’s left of men grows stark and simple—ash and weather, breath and dune. Take what remains. The mountain keeps the dark.
This is the adult answer to the ice. Civilization’s first act in Baptism was containment of violence; here the act is containment of ruin. The mountain does not save. It names. Above the tree line, illusion thins. What remains of men is elemental—breath, weather, ash. The son no longer waits for initiation. He inherits frailty.
Leadville was never only a town, it was a site of longing. When I was a child, my father worked the graveyard shift. I rarely saw him. He left before dusk and returned after dawn, descending each night into the mines while I slept. In my imagination, he did not go to work; he went underground. I feared collapse, suffocation. I feared the silence that would follow a headline I could not yet name. The mountain was not metaphor—it was threat. Absence was not poetic distance; it was nightly rehearsal for loss.
My original poem carried that fear without stating it. Rafters slanted overhead. Walls felt porous. I imagined him descending into tunnels I could not enter. The air thickened. The ground absorbed him. The poem leaned toward elegy long before death arrived. It was already practicing mourning. His response refused that inflation.
don’t stay too long in Leadville, / move on to the campfire / where we huddled together / like some ancient tribe / learning the power of stories / to stave away the night tell the story again / but this time remember / that it is only another town / where the blood drying / on the rocks / is your own
The correction is bracing. Return to the fire. Return to proportion. This is not sacred ground. It is “only another town.” The blood on the rocks is not archetypal. It is yours.
As a child, I feared he would die underground. As an adult, I feared he would disappear into myth. In both cases, I was enlarging absence into cosmology. His admonition is not dismissal—it is protection. Do not turn fear into theology. Do not make the mountain your altar.
Years later, when I rewrote Leadville into sonnet form for Hallucinations, the poem had changed. It was no longer merely about longing; it had become, in part, a eulogy. The mountain that once threatened to take him eventually did. I had scattered his ashes at altitude. The imagined collapse became dispersal. The rehearsal became enactment. In my sonnet’s closing turn, his earlier warning is compressed and formalized:
You said: The fire’s near—move from the tribe; strike flint to keep our worlds apart. Don’t stay too long in Leadville’s starless night. Repeat the tale: this town is not your home; the blood that stains its rocks is yours alone.
What began as free-verse correction becomes structural containment. The campfire becomes flint. The tribe becomes separation. The elegy is disciplined before it can become monument. Leadville now holds three temporal layers at once: the child fearing collapse, the adult writing longing into myth, the son scattering ash into wind. His voice moves through all of them, insisting on scale. Tell the story. But remember: the mountain is not cosmology. It is terrain. The blood is not universal. It is personal.
Fountain Street began as a meditation on breach. The original poem stages childhood violence through eclipse and theater: a looming hand, boys lurking in a garden, a stripping rendered with the calm inevitability of “rising action, apex, and dénouement.” Even in its earliest form, the violation is structured. The drama unfolds as if already scripted. Childhood is not shattered in chaos; it is absorbed into narrative. The danger feels cosmological rather than anecdotal.
The later sonnet tightens that atmosphere and withdraws explicit detail. The emphasis shifts from event to emergence—less on what was done than on what it made visible. It is at this point that my father’s commentary enters and reframes the entire episode:
no one can explain why they came / to shape the hidden aquifers of your life, but it is here, on Fountain Street, / where you first stepped out of the unseen
From my vantage, his response does not deny harm, nor does it sentimentalize it. What he refuses is causality as explanation. “No one can explain why they came” suspends the search for motive or justice. Instead, he substitutes formation. The boys do not merely wound; they “shape the hidden aquifers” of my life. The metaphor moves underground. Aquifers are unseen, pressurized, formative. They determine future growth long before they are visible. The street becomes geological rather than sociological.
Most striking is the final line. Where I had rendered the scene as eclipse and theatrical stripping, he identifies it as emergence: “where you first stepped out of the unseen.” The breach becomes threshold. Visibility is born in violence. This is not absolution; it is proportion. The trauma is not denied, but it is not enthroned either. It becomes the point at which self-consciousness begins—the moment one moves from being acted upon to becoming a witness of one’s own life.
Once again, I rewrote Grandfather into sonnet form, collapsing Francoeur’s commentary into the poem itself. If Fountain Street marked expansion through generational dialogue, Hallucinations turns toward compression — distillation rather than proliferation. The story itself is difficult. My visits to my grandfather exposed me to erratic, often violent behavior; yet what I witnessed was only a diminished echo of what my father had endured. The scene becomes generational microcosm: grandmother steadying the house while men fracture within it, boys inheriting weight before they understand its origin.
My original poem renders the house as burdened:
the crossbeam creaks / when grandmother cries, / the floorboards muffle / the drunken rage / of her husband / she rocks steadily above him / in the master bedroom / with two generations of boys / in her lap / they are all men now / and each has taken his turn / hauling the sad figure / up the stairs
His commentary reframes the image from episode to lineage:
I have also seen / this inner structure / of ancestral bonds, / each fiber having the color of pain / passing between father and son / and on through to grandsons / I understand that it is whole / that it is pure / that I lose this view when I am in it, pulling against the weight / of this old man’s body / that I am carrying
The house absorbs violence. The beams creak but hold. Grandmother steadies what the men cannot. The boys learn early the choreography of lifting a fallen patriarch. In the room, inheritance is physical. Weight precedes language. But long before I rewrote that scene, my father had written his own reckoning with the same figure in an unpublished poem, “Fuge: Watching the Old Man’s DT’s.” There the interior has already dissolved into landscape:
I must have left the car / on some hill / for there is no bridge / to cross this stream / The trees have been / stripped and torn / in a summer storm / that sent the water / angry to the hills It still rages / the closer to its bed, / curls of gray and white / rush and rant Honesty is hardest / in winter / when old men / grow worried and the last leaves wither / like unkept promises / in the wind
In his poem, there is no staircase, no crossbeam — only flood and season. The father is not lifted but weathered. Where my poem stays inside the room, his relocates the violence into climate. The rage is elemental. The inheritance is atmospheric.
His earlier commentary to Grandfather shifts the focus from episode to lineage: I remain inside the scene — creaking beams, muffled rage, the bodily strain of carrying a diminished patriarch upstairs. The emphasis is repetition — grandmother absorbing shock, boys absorbing expectation. Violence is domestic, cyclical, endured more than resolved. He widens the lens. He does not deny the pain; he names the continuity. “Each fiber having the color of pain” suggests something woven across generations, something tensile rather than accidental. What feels to me like burden, he sees as wholeness — even purity — though he admits that clarity disappears when one is “in it,” straining beneath the weight. From a distance, lineage looks coherent. Inside it, it feels heavy.
In folding his commentary into the later sonnet, I did not absolve the past, nor did I indict it. I held both views at once: the storm and the staircase, the flood and the room. Men carry what they did not choose. Whether it appears as winter wind or as a body hauled up the stairs, the inheritance remains.
In other poems, untethered to any book, his empathy could arrive with almost unbearable directness:
in Chicago / I saw them buried / in plain pine caskets unnamed faces / inexplicably appearing in this universal city / they came here to lie down / to be gathered and wrapped / in wood who builds these houses / to gather them / to the hearth just for a mother / father sister brother / to be near?
Here the house reappears—not as refuge but as terminal architecture. Burial becomes habitation; pine replaces timber; the hearth becomes earth. The structure remains, but its purpose shifts. The question—“who builds these houses?”—does not settle into indictment so much as astonishment. In a universal city, anonymity and intimacy converge: unnamed faces gathered so that someone might still stand close. Even at the edge of erasure, architecture persists—not as sentiment, but as necessity. The poem does not console; it records the strange fact that enclosure follows us to the end.
At other times he bared his teeth, as in his response to O Felix Culpa (which would later become She Will Arrive in sonnet form in Hallucinations):
Something waits to take control / of buildings, bodies: Trishna no longer disguised, / nature red in tooth and claw. Now we know the reason for metaphysics: / the holy trophy wrapped between the sheets / was a virgin.
The force of his commentary lies in its refusal to sentimentalize either eros or theology. “Trishna”—the Buddhist term for craving—appears without mitigation. Desire is not spiritualized; it is named as appetite. The phrase “nature red in tooth and claw” collapses evolutionary violence into intimate encounter, erasing any stable boundary between biological impulse and metaphysical aspiration. Buildings and bodies fall under the same law. What appears sacred is shown to be governed by the same pressures that govern flesh.
“Now we know the reason for metaphysics” does not elevate the act so much as expose its aftermath. Metaphysics becomes explanation applied retroactively to appetite. The “holy trophy” wrapped between the sheets fuses conquest, sanctity, sacrifice, and possession into a single emblem. Theology does not restrain desire; it narrates it. What is later called holy is first experienced as force.
Birth and regrowth, rupture and reconstitution—this was the pattern he traced across traditions. Whether invoking the Maenads, Christ overturning the moneylenders’ tables, or Osiris dismembered and reassembled, he returned to the same sequence: order is broken, then named; fracture precedes form. In this exchange, as in so many others, he withheld consolation and offered proportion instead.
The seeds of this stance appear in an earlier, unpublished fragment:
It’s hard to imagine God / having a rebellion / within himself / Though I must have / felt it a thousand times / and know it well, / as every human creature / (save one or two / so some say) / comes from a momentary / grunt and perhaps / a moan.
The moment is less elegiac and high-minded and more prosaically earth-bound. Parenthetically, “save one or two / some say” does masterful work in intimating immanence through intervention: divine births, god made flesh. But the arrival here is markedly different: “a momentary / grunt and perhaps / a moan.”
In additional commentary that later informed Manners , he writes:
Having found the way / back to Dover Beach, there is still hope / for the comfort of true love. But it is just this momentary glimpse / from the naked shingles of the world / or even from the edge of sleep that reveals the unnamed homunculus / hidden in desire. The god of wine and sex / gives ecstasy, then tears men’s bodies / limb from limb.
The gesture toward Dover Beach is not nostalgic but diagnostic. Hope appears, but only as glimpse—a flash along the “naked shingles of the world.” Beneath consolation lies the homunculus of desire, unnamed but operative. Dionysus grants ecstasy and then dismembers. Unity is followed by fracture. The cycle is mythic, but it is also psychological.
This doubleness—consolation immediately shadowed by appetite and rupture—typifies the syncretic pressure that runs through his commentary. Though he resisted overt historical allusion in his own verse, his lifelong project of synthesis surfaced most clearly in these exchanges. Zen and Christianity, Osiris and Christ, myth and doctrine were not, in his view, competing systems but converging attempts to articulate the same fracture in consciousness. If Campbell provided the grammar of recurrence and Suzuki the discipline of emptiness, Blake supplied the warning: revelation hardens into institution; vision calcifies into law.
The following exchange was atypical because it centered not on one of my poems but on a mutual acquaintance—someone both my father and I knew—who had drifted into what I can only describe as a quasi-cultic organization. It styled itself as philosophical and transformational, somewhere between Heidegger, Scientology, and a Dale Carnegie sales seminar. She was intelligent, charismatic, and artistically gifted, yet increasingly absorbed by this system. Over time she rose into a position of authority within it and, to my mounting discomfort, tried to draw me into its orbit. I attended two sessions. They triggered an old reflex: the atmosphere of managed revelation and controlled language felt uncomfortably close to my early indoctrination in the Pentecostal church.
My father knew her only indirectly, but he sensed my unease. She cultivated an inner circle of devoted followers, and from time to time I would spar with them over matters of doctrine, though I eventually recognized the futility. The system was self-sealing. What struck me was that those most drawn to it were often people stalled in career or intimacy—earnest, intelligent, but searching for narrative elevation. In that sense it functioned less as philosophy than as self-help cosmology. I framed my poem through Plato’s allegory of the cave; my father remained within the Greek canon as well, but cast her not as philosopher but as Prometheus.
her teachings join / with the darkness, / shadows flicker on the cave wall men ring about her / to hear her slightest / whisper each hears a different voice, / the fire illuminates / only the secrets they imagine commentary: she consumed herself / bringing fire up / from the abyss chained to the rock / her liver grows / too quickly she watches the bird / hovering, waiting to feed again / on her unfulfillment
In my poem, I placed her within Plato’s cave, but not as the enlightened prisoner who escapes illusion. She stands at the center of the chamber, tending the fire. The darkness and flickering light are not instruments of liberation but of projection. When I write that “each hears a different voice,” I am naming what I witnessed: a system that mirrored its adherents back to themselves. The fire did not reveal truth so much as illuminate private longing. Each listener heard confirmation of what he already believed or feared. The cosmology sustained itself through personalization. The shadows were persuasive precisely because they were tailored. The cave endured not through coercion, but through satisfaction.
My father’s response moves from illusion to cost. By invoking Prometheus, he reframes charisma as expenditure. She is not merely casting shadows; she is consuming herself to keep the flame alive. “Bringing fire up / from the abyss” becomes less heroic gift than compulsive act. The punishment is not externally imposed but cyclical and internal: the liver that “grows too quickly” ensures the wound never closes. Devotion replenishes what must be devoured again. Where I saw managed projection, he saw tragic self-immolation. Together, the exchange shifts the question away from doctrine toward appetite—what hunger in her, and in those who gathered around her, required the fire to keep burning.
In response to Penelope in Flux, Francoeur wrote:
Your songs of dismemberment flow like leaves / entrained by the wind, into my dreams. You’ve forgotten how your mind / became a public meeting place. There is a path that leads back in time, / where Anti-Osiris safeguards your myth, / where Blake’s black-robed priests / still chant oppressive hymns. The beginning and end of history / is this primordial urge / toward unity. Instead of being sewn back together in one skin, / love sprouts separate parts / that must be removed / if God is to be One again.
The phrase “public meeting place” is diagnostic: for him, consciousness was never solitary but a chamber in which competing mythologies converged, contended, and accumulated. Anti-Osiris—negation guarding origin—implies that preservation itself requires inversion, while Blake’s “black-robed priests” signal his long suspicion that institutions fossilize revelation into coercion, mistaking enclosure for transcendence. The poem’s decisive turn rejects gentle reconciliation in favor of excision: “love sprouts separate parts / that must be removed.” Syncretism here is surgical, not sentimental; to make God One again requires sacrifice, purification rather than pluralism. History, in this vision, moves not as drift but as compulsion—dismemberment, reassembly, apotheosis—always shadowed by the danger that unity hardens into tyranny and chant becomes law.
Yet the longing toward unity was not always so severe. In his youth, he imagined unity not as something achieved through removal but as an ontological condition already present beneath division:
Burn up the barriers Not he or she / or you and me / but everybody’s body is / broken into bloody bread / and time is tied in a not / and they grow one out of another / and I and my father are one so close / that for every two / there is one in between / moments melting / into unfreezing / sparks of life
Here, fracture is not problem but sacrament. “Broken into bloody bread” collapses Eucharist and biology; difference dissolves into shared substance. Time is “tied in a knot,” not stretched across history but folded inward. Even the father–son relation appears as indivisible continuity rather than burden. Unity is assumed, immanent, unthreatened.
The later commentary revises this optimism. What once seemed naturally fused now requires removal. The God who was once implicit in shared flesh becomes One only through purification. The trajectory is not contradiction but hardening: youthful immanence yields to disciplined monotheism. The urge toward unity remains, but it has passed through dismemberment and learned the cost of coherence.
In an unpublished exchange, Nursery Rhyme, I wrote:
A strange, indeterminate beat / pulsed in my house. / When I was a child, / the attic was Heaven, the basement Hell, / and into the purgatory / of my family / directly in between / I fell.
He responded:
This world / is already split / when everyone / enters into it: father and mother / come first— / by the time we know / we are already / cursed.
The split, he insisted, did not originate in architecture; it preceded it. We enter a world already divided—father and mother first—and by the time we become conscious of it, the fracture is internalized. The house reflects an inheritance it did not create. Division is ontological before it is experiential. From that seed grew an architecture that runs through Infidelity, Grandfather, The Empty House, and Possibilities : ceilings that bruise like skin, timber that measures masculine strain, rooms assigned to grief, poems that require enclosure to generate consequence. The house became container and jurisdiction—determining what enters, what is barred, what collapses under load. Inheritance became weight; love became occupancy; betrayal became breach.
In his response to The Romantic , he did not address the confession so much as the metaphysical architecture beneath it:
You asked me to write / on the backside of the poem / pressed against this green table. Whether the poem can be redeemed / is the question, but I think / what you really want to know / is how women pull us / into a promise of unity. It is the contradiction of the plural / that paralyzes me: / the thought of so many ways to become one / is as unsatisfying as the poem / on the other side. From within whose vision is it / that empty houses appear? / Things seem clearer / hanging above the house / like a ghost watching: / patterns dissolve, / perspectives fade, / dramas disappear.
The “promise of unity” reframes eros not as romance but as metaphysical lure. Where The Romantic wrestles with confession and moral reckoning, his response relocates the struggle to ontology. The paralysis is not guilt but plurality—the contradiction of the plural. To become “one” is both erotic fantasy and theological aspiration, yet multiplicity refuses collapse. The poem’s inability to close mirrors that refusal; redemption becomes shorthand for a unity that cannot be secured because nothing was ever singular to begin with.
His decisive move is aerial: “hanging above the house / like a ghost watching.” From that altitude, intimacy becomes pattern and drama thins into abstraction. Where I remain inside the wound, he abstracts it into structure. Years later, in The Arrangement , I answered that vantage by descending again—back into the room, into time, into breath and objects and aftermath. If he sought coherence from above, I insisted on consequence within.
That aerial move did not originate in our exchange. It had been forming in him long before my poems entered the conversation. As a young man he was already wary of pleasure mistaken for permanence. In an early poem addressed to “Sybar,” he invokes the ruined Greek city synonymous with excess, Sybaris:
Sybar, / your foolish horses / dance to music, / answering the sorrow / of your pleasure / shriveled in rose-petal beds / afraid of / darkness / absorbing… Sybar / your flesh hangs / loose before iron / cursing your moment / of careless imagining, / your slaves licking / and your treasure / were loot before / the river left / only your name.
The indictment is direct. Pleasure curdles into erosion; indulgence dissolves into sediment. The river leaves only a name. Decadence does not collapse from outside pressure but from internal excess. Long before he reframed eros as the “contradiction of the plural,” he was already diagnosing the instability of appetite untethered from proportion. Even here, the pattern is visible: elevation followed by stripping, drama reduced to residue. What later becomes metaphysical abstraction in The Romantic begins as moral warning in Sybar.
Another youthful fragment makes the principle explicit:
Once removed from reality / knowledge is something / other than me / for others to see / what they are lacking / for wanting to be / art / is / reality
The fragment reads now as a quiet counterweight to his own aerial instinct. If The Romantic rises toward metaphysical vantage, this early poem resists removal. Knowledge, once detached, becomes spectacle—“something / other than me.” Art, by contrast, refuses that separation; it is not commentary upon reality but participation in it. What he would later practice—hovering above the house, converting drama into pattern—was tempered even in youth by an intuition that truth cannot live at a distance for long. In placing this fragment here, the arc clarifies: the father who abstracted was also the young poet who distrusted abstraction. Between those poles—altitude and immediacy—our dialogue found its charge.
Once again, the poem-response-poem cycle is on display, though here the movement is overtly circular. His commentary to A Billet Doux—later partially absorbed into Manners —was carried almost verbatim into The Threshold , but disciplined into sonnet form and set within a larger architecture. What began as spontaneous meditation became metered theology. The sonnet did not overwrite his language; it gave it containment. The title names the exchange precisely: a threshold is not resolution but crossing—an aperture between utterance and reply.
Ecstasy is a water / invisible to the thirst / that brings things to be– thirst that wells up / in empty darkness / to shape the stories of the living. Having seen the source, / the prophet also sees / the end arising, the thirst that came before us, a flaw / in the midst of perfection– / it precedes all that waits to be born.
The claim itself reverses expectation. Ecstasy is not the answer to thirst; it precedes it. Desire does not arise in response to lack; it wells up from a darkness prior to narrative. “Having seen the source, the end arises.” Revelation is not illumination but recursion. The flaw “in the midst of perfection” echoes forward into Manners , where appetite, incision, and power are not deviations from order but expressions of its design. Desire is not accident. It is generative tension. The thirst precedes us.
From here the argument presses further back toward what he called simply The Source. The archetype is familiar across traditions: Siddhartha beneath the Bodhi Tree, Bodhidharma facing the wall in austere vigilance, Christ in the desert, Muhammad borne through the seven heavens, Aquinas silenced after declaring his life’s work straw. Yet the analogy that gripped him most forcefully was from the Bhagavad Gita: Arjuna asking Krishna to reveal his true form, and receiving a vision so terrible in its splendor that he begs for it to cease. The revelation is not consoling. It is unbearable. The divine appears not as comfort but as totality—radiant, devouring, beyond proportion.
He believed he had glimpsed something structurally akin to that moment. He described a waking vision marked by a blaring trumpet, repeated phrases, and a blinding light he knew instinctively he could not fully behold without annihilation. The crucial detail was not spectacle but limit: to look directly would mean death. The experience did not enlarge him; it diminished him before immensity. Like Arjuna watching time consume its warriors in advance of battle, he encountered not reassurance but scale.
This theological pressure clarifies the exchange in The Window. My poem gestures outward:
you are a pinprick of light / another man observes a century of turning / from his window he imagines your existence / the constellations of being
His response relocates the axis:
the window lives / as much as any thought / in a dark room laying in darkness / I sense its openness / and the vast / emptiness / of the other side like a whole in time / what lives within / stretches from the senses / to the source
The movement is subtle but decisive. I look outward toward distance—light, duration, constellation. He turns inward toward permeability. The window is no longer a frame through which one contemplates the cosmos; it becomes the living membrane between interior and exterior. The Source is not something imagined across centuries of turning; it is felt in the tension between darkness and openness. The room does not obscure revelation; it stages it.
The shift is from astronomy to aperture. The Source is not an object to be located beyond the self but continuity encountered through exposure. The window is not decorative metaphor but threshold. Darkness is not absence but condition. What stretches “from the senses to the source” does not leap over perception; it passes through it. The rupture he described—the blinding nearness he could not fully behold—returns here in miniature. The divine is not elsewhere. It presses against the pane.
Palimpsest began as a restrained meditation on Heraclitus—the familiar maxim that one cannot step into the same river twice because the waters are always moving on. My impulse was almost Zen in its detachment: the body enters, disturbs, disappears; the surface reforms; the cosmos reasserts equilibrium. Transience is not tragedy but law. What vanishes leaves no scar. The water forgets. Here is my first poem, from Fountain Street:
a woman slips through the long cattails / then pushes off from the bank / toward the center of the pond she sinks into the water / her pale suggestion echoing outward / along the edge of the ripples the stars realign quickly / on the surface of the pond / as if the evening had not been disturbed / by her body, even for a moment
And his commentary:
an image on the surface, / a woman’s body piercing through it / only to be swallowed up / by the order of things— should her act engrave a story on the water / or is it better to pass through the wind like a bird / leaving no trace / of ever having been here
The philosophical tension shifts here from flux to inscription. My poem assumes impermanence as equilibrium; his asks whether erasure is ethical. If the surface reforms, does that absolve the act of consequence? The phrase “swallowed up by the order of things” reframes transience not as neutral flow but as structure—a system that absorbs disturbance without memorializing it. His question introduces agency into what I had treated as inevitability. Should experience leave trace, or is coherence found in disappearance?
The exchange did not remain discursive. It was compressed into sonnet form in The Surface Holds , where the tension between flux and inscription is formally adjudicated. The sonnet preserves the original cosmology almost intact: the body enters, the surface splits, circles widen and thin, alignment restores itself, and what departs returns “unwrit.” The closing couplet does not reopen his question; it resolves it. If meaning demands argument, the argument settles in favor of equilibrium. The surface holds, and the disturbance is spent. In that sense, the sonnet translates the Heraclitean-Zen posture faithfully, but with greater finality. What had been observational becomes juridical. The form itself performs the restoration it describes; containment becomes evidence.
As his life narrowed—first through grief, then through cognitive decline—our exchanges thinned. My stepmother’s death unmoored him. Some griefs do not move forward; they settle and deepen. His mind, once so precise and wide-ranging, began to flicker. The voice that could braid Freud and Blake and Campbell into one seamless line of thought grew intermittent. I tried, in poems like The Empty House, to write him back into the world. But language could not hold him in place.
At his request, there would be no grave. He did not want a stone or a marker. He wanted to be reduced to ash and returned quietly. When the time came, I released half of him from the summit of Mount Elbert, while my brother scattered the other half from Mount of the Holy Cross. The mountains that had once been his refuge now received him. And I could not help but hear his own words, written years earlier, from the preceding poem explication:
is it better / to pass through the wind like a bird / leaving no trace / of ever having been there
The act was less memorial than enactment: no inscription, no stone, dispersal rather than permanence. The wind carried what the surface would not hold, and in that movement the cosmology he had articulated—flux without monument, structure without sentiment—was not described but fulfilled.
And yet, even before he died, he had already been preparing me for this. He knew my fear of death—my fixation on endings, on finality—and he did not comfort me in the way I wanted. He steadied me instead, in the old instructive mode that could be severe only because it was meant to keep me from turning terror into theology:
So you have discovered yourself wandering / in this steel tube, until you question / where you entered and where is the end. / From womb to death, it is sadness / that bores through it is sadness / that you were born into. / It has always been this way, / memories lying beyond memory, / the future remaining unseen. / Seeing this is the first step / toward becoming / unrestrained by metal
He was not dismissing my fear. He was telling me that sadness is not an interruption but a condition of being alive, and that seeing it clearly loosens its grip. The “steel tube” was the sense of being trapped inside time, inside the body, inside an ending you cannot control. To recognize that structure, he believed, was the beginning of freedom from it.
What follows is one of the few poems that addresses him directly, without the mediation of landscape, ritual, or inherited myth. There is no mountain, no ice, no architecture — only the face across the table. By this point, the pauses had grown longer. What had once been intellectual calibration began to resemble searching. The squint I had always associated with precision began to carry another charge: delay, interiority, perhaps even defense.
father you are still hiding / your darkening youth / it’s visible when you pause / briefly before the next thought / your eyes squint / to keep the story a secret
commentary: I don’t know anyone / to whom I could explain: / the mystery of who I am unfolds / in an imagined gaze / I fear I will figure out how it ends too soon
The poem is spare because the gesture is spare. It isolates a tic — the narrowed eyes before speech — and reads it as concealment. I was not accusing him; I was registering the sense that something remained withheld. His history was not simple. There were fractures, violences, excesses, military operations that were never fully narrated. Even in our closest years — during those daily chess sessions in Tennessee, when we would talk politics, theology, and taunt each other like sparring partners — there were territories he would not cross. The squint felt like a gate.
His reply complicates that interpretation. He does not deny secrecy; he reframes it as existential opacity. The “imagined gaze” suggests that identity is never fully self-possessed but always refracted through how one believes one is seen. The fear is not exposure but premature closure — “I fear I will figure out how it ends too soon.” In that line, the squint becomes less defensive than protective. To understand the arc of one’s life too clearly is to feel its finitude too sharply.
As dementia advanced, the pauses lengthened and lost their former authority. The man who could once hold court for hours, dynamically extemporizing with iron control, became more emotional, more volatile, less anchored to chronology. Near the end, he imagined himself aboard the USS Indianapolis, under the command of McCain. When he realized that McCain was dead and that it had in fact been his own father who served as chief electrician on the Indianapolis, he understood, briefly and lucidly, that his mind was loosening its grip. Months later, he was gone.
Read in retrospect, the poem and its commentary feel like an early negotiation with that inevitability. I thought he was hiding some dark chapter from his youth; he was grappling with ending. I suspected guardedness; he articulated mystery. Between us lies not accusation but asymmetry of perception — the son reading gesture as secrecy, the father naming identity as something that unfolds only partially, always under the shadow of conclusion.
This was the last poem he sent me:
generation there are words that never pass through the mind but arrive unannounced in the passage of time there is a place between clouds and rain a space where the unseen condenses into song flowing like a river from the source to the sea to meet you here past the familiar past anything to grasp past the rushing cascades and the long, slow pools of silence to gaze across this opaque wall separating father from son
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