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.
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 hatchet metaphor is also a pedagogy—it describes not only what truth is but how it must be handled, wrapped and concealed and carried close to the body, known only to the one who bears it. That discipline of concealment was itself transmitted: the instruction to carry what cannot be displayed, to know the implement without announcing it, to live in proximity to force without becoming its casualty. What the epigraph encodes is a theory of survivorship—not the avoidance of damage but its management, the difference between the man who wields the hatchet and the man who is cut by it lying in the gap between knowledge and restraint. He chose this for Hallucinations because he recognized it as the collection’s governing condition, not its subject matter but its operational logic. 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 a diagnosis, not a decorative memory. 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 as atmosphere rather than catechism: 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 as method rather than abstraction: a way of metabolizing injury, of reading private grief against archetypal recurrence.
If he recurs in nearly every section of Hallucinations, the recurrence tracks an 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, the apparent digression always vertical movement, always 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 arriving as weather: immediate, mystical, unrevised, the academic architecture dissolving into something meteorological. Our temperaments diverged here in ways that proved structural: where he dissolved into the Dionysian, I turned Apollonian, fastening masks and meters tightly enough to bruise the language into discipline, distrusting ecstasy more than I distrusted him, reaching for form as containment rather than ornament.
Our exchange began almost accidentally—I would send him a poem and he would respond with another poem, skipping critique entirely, offering only continuation. No paraphrase, no explanatory apparatus, the conversation accumulating without ever being summarized, each poem a new entry in a running argument neither of us had formally proposed. The proper response to poetry, in his view, was more poetry, interpretation an act of co-creation, the two of us building something whose shape only became visible in retrospect.
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, offering only exposure, witness, and 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 by disciplining aggression rather than abolishing it, and the bond between men is therefore tensile, held in the tension between tenderness and brutality rather than resolved into either. And this is the unsettling part: within his frame, initiation is inheritance. The hammer, the ice, the summoned boy—these are iterations of a pattern older than the household itself, arriving as family history only because the pattern has to land somewhere. The rite proceeds rather than erupts, and the ice is architecture rather than aberration. What drives this is transmission rather than cruelty—the unconscious fidelity of men who were themselves formed this way and know no other grammar of care. The father repeats with the conviction of someone passing on what he received as gift, and that the son experiences it otherwise is a contradiction the frame cannot accommodate, which is where my poem and his commentary part ways without resolving.
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 and 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 ontological as much as professional. Dying from the outside in. The corporate world closes around him, and beauty appears only as passing residue—never durable, never inhabitable. The phrase layer upon layer carries the specific weight of accumulation without progress—a sedimentary process, each obligation depositing itself on the last until the original self is no longer visible at the surface. What passes is described as a refreshing breath of beauty rather than beauty itself—the qualification matters, because what he registers is atmosphere, suggestion, the way a scent can briefly reorganize the air before the room reasserts itself. The nostalgia is for duration: the world in which beauty might have stayed, rather than the moment of it. And the word enduring does double work—what he wishes had been more lasting is also what he wished he had been capable of enduring, the self that could have remained open long enough to receive what passed.
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
The mountains in his imagination were corrective—the aspens and fir outlasting urgency, the timberline falling away, altitude promising an existence stripped of offices, phones, fluorescent light. What he was reaching for was absolution, and the mountains, for a time, seemed to offer it. 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, and 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 when he falters on the talus—a hesitation foreign to him, a man who had always moved through difficult terrain with the deliberateness of someone who had earned his footing. By the summit he cannot join me, and 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, and we huddle beneath an emergency blanket while something accumulates that the glucose packet finally confirms—what the body has already begun to say before any of us have language for it. The mountain does not purify; it exposes.
The grammar reverses Baptism: where the father figure once summoned the boy onto ice, the son now steadies the father above the tree line, and where the boy once consented and the ice proceeded, the father’s body betrays him—initiation shifting from endurance 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—where Baptism staged the containment of violence, The Missouri Basin stages the containment of ruin, the mountain serving as the site where illusion thins and what remains of men is elemental—breath, weather, ash—the son inheriting frailty where he once waited for initiation.
Leadville was never only a town—it was a site of longing. When I was a child, my father worked the graveyard shift, leaving before dusk and returning after dawn, descending each night into the mines while I slept, so that in my imagination he did not go to work so much as go underground. I feared collapse, suffocation, the silence that would follow a headline I could not yet name—the mountain carrying the weight of threat rather than metaphor, his absence a nightly rehearsal for loss rather than poetic distance.
My original poem carried that fear without stating it—rafters slanting overhead, walls feeling porous, the air thickening as I imagined him descending into tunnels I could not enter, the ground absorbing him, the poem leaning toward elegy long before death arrived and 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 ground is only another town and the blood on the rocks is yours. As a child I had feared he would die underground; as an adult I feared he would disappear into myth, and in both cases I was enlarging absence into cosmology, turning fear into theology, making the mountain an altar. His admonition is protection against exactly that inflation.
Years later, when I rewrote Leadville into sonnet form for Hallucinations, the poem had changed—no longer merely about longing but in part a eulogy, the mountain that once threatened to take him having eventually done so, the imagined collapse becoming dispersal—the rehearsal becoming enactment, his ashes scattered at altitude. 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 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 moving through all of them insisting on scale—the mountain is terrain, the blood is personal, the story worth telling only as long as it stays that size.
Fountain Street began as a meditation on breach—the original poem staging 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 unfolding as if already scripted, childhood absorbed into narrative rather than shattered in chaos, the danger feeling cosmological in its weight and scope.
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
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 and substitutes formation in its place: the boys do not merely wound, they shape the hidden aquifers of my life, the metaphor moving underground where aquifers are unseen, pressurized, formative, determining future growth long before they are visible and making the street geological in its logic rather than sociological.
Most striking is the final line, where I had rendered the scene as eclipse and theatrical stripping and he identifies it as emergence: where you first stepped out of the unseen. The breach becomes threshold, visibility born in violence, the trauma held at proportion—acknowledged without being enthroned, becoming 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. Where Fountain Street marked expansion through generational dialogue, Hallucinations turns toward compression—distillation over proliferation. The story itself is difficult: my visits to my grandfather exposed me to erratic, often violent behavior, and 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. The poem avoids psychology—it will not explain the grandfather, will not trace the Pacific back through his body into the basement—holding the architecture of damage without administering a verdict on the man inside it.
My father’s commentary performs the same discipline from the other side. Where I remain inside the room—the creaking beams, the muffled rage, the bodily strain of the staircase—he ascends to lineage, seeing the same material as continuous fiber rather than recurring episode, a vantage available only to someone who has been both the boy on the stairs and the man who understands what put the drunk there. He had carried the weight literally and then spent decades carrying it intellectually, converting what I experienced as atmosphere into something he could name as structure, and the sonnet holds both positions without resolving them into each other—the room and the lineage the same fact seen from different altitudes. That conversion—from atmosphere to structure—is itself a form of the inheritance he is describing, the mind doing at the level of analysis what the body did on the staircase, carrying what it was given and finding a way to hold it upright.
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 creaking but holding, grandmother steadying what the men cannot, the boys learning early the choreography of lifting a fallen patriarch—inheritance physical before it is legible, weight arriving before language has caught up to it. What his commentary adds is the observer’s altitude, the capacity to see the fiber of pain as continuous and whole, a coherence that dissolves from inside the scene into the strain of the particular body, the particular staircase, the particular night. His formulation—that he loses the view when he is in it—names the essential condition of inherited damage, clarity available only from a distance the living rarely occupy, the poem holding both registers simultaneously, the son inside the weight and the father briefly above it, neither position canceling the other.
What makes his commentary unusual is the insistence that what passes between generations is whole and pure, the fiber retaining its integrity across transmission—a claim that goes beyond the observation that damage travels, which would be unremarkable, into the stronger assertion that it arrives intact. Most accounts of inherited harm emphasize distortion: what arrives in the son is a deformed version of what the father carried, filtered through suppression, misdirection, the particular failures of a particular household, but his formulation refuses that degradation narrative, insisting on structural continuity between origin and arrival. The claim is more demanding than it first appears because it implicates the receiver as fully as the source—the grandson lifting the drunk up the stairs is inheriting the thing itself, undiminished, passed hand to hand down the staircase of the family like the body it is being asked to carry.
But long before I rewrote that scene, my father had written his own reckoning with the same figure in an unpublished poem,
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 weathered rather than lifted, the violence relocated from the room into climate, rage elemental and inheritance atmospheric. The car left on some hill, the bridge gone, the stream uncrossable—these are the coordinates of a man who has lost his bearings inside his own history, the summer storm stripping the trees and sending the water angry to the hills while honesty hardens in winter and the last leaves wither like unkept promises. Where my poem holds the scene inside the house, his dissolves the house into weather, the grandfather’s damage no longer a domestic fact but a seasonal one, something the landscape itself is performing.
His earlier commentary to Grandfather shifts the focus from episode to lineage: where I remain inside the scene—creaking beams, muffled rage, the bodily strain of carrying a diminished patriarch upstairs, violence domestic and cyclical and endured—he widens the lens, naming the continuity without denying the pain. Each fiber having the color of pain suggests something woven across generations, tensile and structural, and 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. In folding his commentary into the later sonnet, I held both views at once—the storm and the staircase, the flood and the room—the inheritance persisting whether it appears as winter wind or as a body hauled up the stairs.
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 as terminal architecture, burial becoming habitation, pine replacing timber, the hearth becoming earth. The structure remains while its purpose shifts, and the question—who builds these houses?—settles into astonishment rather than indictment. In a universal city, anonymity and intimacy converge: unnamed faces gathered so that someone might still stand close, architecture persisting at the edge of erasure as necessity, the poem recording 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 fragment has the quality of something written before the framework arrived—before the commentary developed its characteristic altitude, before the syncretic vocabulary had fully formed. What it shows is a young man already circling the same problem, the rebellion of God within himself a question he had felt in his own body a thousand times, the theology arriving through the visceral and the comic rather than through doctrine. The parenthetical—save one or two / some say—holds the sacred and the biological in the same breath without resolving them into each other, intimating immanence through intervention, divine births and god made flesh, while the arrival itself remains prosaically earthbound: 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 diagnostic rather than nostalgic, hope appearing only as glimpse—a flash along the naked shingles of the world. Beneath consolation lies the homunculus of desire, unnamed and operative, Dionysus granting ecstasy before dismembering, unity giving way to fracture in a cycle that is mythic and psychological at once. 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. What held these traditions together in his thinking was less a philosophy than a recurring shape—the pattern of fullness interrupted, order broken and renamed, the divine showing itself only in the moment of its withdrawal. He was drawn to the edges of each system, the places where doctrine ran out and something older and less manageable pressed through.
This 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 a quasi-cultic organization styling 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, eventually rising into a position of authority within it. 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.
What struck me about those drawn to it was that they were often people stalled in career or intimacy—earnest, intelligent, but searching for narrative elevation. The system was self-sealing, sustained not through coercion but through satisfaction, mirroring its adherents back to themselves so precisely that each heard confirmation of what he already believed or feared. I framed my poem through Plato’s allegory of the cave; my father remained within the Greek canon 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 she stands at the center of the chamber tending the fire—not the enlightened prisoner who escapes illusion but its source, the shadows persuasive precisely because they were tailored to each viewer. My father’s response moves from illusion to cost: by invoking Prometheus he reframes charisma as expenditure. Bringing fire up from the abyss becomes less heroic gift than compulsive act, the fire retrieved continuously because the abyss does not surrender it permanently. The liver that grows too quickly ensures the wound never closes—the capacity for suffering replenished at exactly the rate it is depleted. What looks from outside like authority is from inside a labor that cannot stop without the whole apparatus collapsing. Where I saw managed projection, he saw tragic self-immolation, and the two readings are not contradictory: the cave requires the fire, and the fire requires the one who will not stop carrying it up from the dark. In some respects he understood her from the inside—the Dionysian affinity, the duende, the particular momentum of a life that has not yet learned to govern its own force. His own young adulthood had carried those same charges, and the Prometheus figure he chose is not without self-recognition. That shared register is perhaps why his response carries a measure of resigned empathy alongside the indictment—he is not diagnosing a stranger but acknowledging a trajectory he had once been close enough to his own to name without contempt.
The exchange is one of the few in the collection where his commentary outpaces mine in severity—where I named the system he named the cost, where I saw the cave from outside he saw the rock from inside, and what he gave the poem was depth-sounding rather than interpretation, the specific knowledge of someone who had stood close enough to that particular fire to understand what it takes from the one who tends it. That knowledge is biographical before it is analytical: he had lived inside the Dionysian momentum long enough to know how it consumes its host, and the Prometheus figure he reached for was drawn from memory as much as from myth. What his commentary adds to my poem is the interior of the image—the sensation of the chain, the specific arithmetic of the wound that will not close, the bird as something felt rather than observed. A reader who has only seen fire from the outside can describe its light; he was describing its heat, and the difference is audible in every line of his response.
In response to Penelope in Flux, an extended exercise in prosopopoeia in which M. Wickam from Sense and Sensibility has his first truly existential moment, 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 sacrament rather than problem—broken into bloody bread collapsing Eucharist and biology, difference dissolving into shared substance, time tied in a knot and folded inward rather than stretched across history, the father–son relation appearing as indivisible continuity, unity assumed and immanent and unthreatened. The later commentary revises this optimism: what once seemed naturally fused now requires removal, the God implicit in shared flesh becoming One only through purification, the urge toward unity persisting but passing through dismemberment and learning the cost of coherence—youthful immanence hardening into disciplined monotheism rather than softening into it. The early poem belongs to a man who had not yet needed to choose between wholeness and purity, for whom the two still felt like the same condition. What the later commentary records is the moment that equivalence broke—the discovery that coherence demands excision, that the unity he had once felt as given must now be achieved at a cost he had not anticipated when he wrote these lines.
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 ontological before it is experiential. What he was handing me in those four lines was the governing premise of an entire architectural imagination: that the house is already bifurcated before anyone moves into it, attic and basement not decorative opposites but cosmological ones, the vertical axis of the dwelling encoding the vertical axis of consciousness itself. Heaven above, Hell below, and the living caught in the purgatory of the middle floor—this is the spatial logic that runs beneath Infidelity, Grandfather, The Empty House, and Possibilities, where ceilings bruise like skin, timber measures masculine strain, rooms are assigned to grief, and enclosure is the condition that generates consequence rather than merely containing it. His response identified the seed from which that architecture grew: the house is not a neutral container that family dynamics have charged with meaning, but a structure that arrived already divided, already hierarchical, already encoding the fracture between the parents who came first. From that seed the house became container and jurisdiction—determining what enters, what is barred, what collapses under load—and inheritance became weight, love became occupancy, betrayal became breach, the building absorbing the full grammar of human damage because it was designed for exactly that, the split installed before the first room was furnished or the first argument conducted within its walls.
What strikes me now is that his response arrived without hesitation, as though the question my poem was asking had been waiting for him—as though he had been carrying the answer long before I formulated the question. The split he names is not a theory he had developed; it is something he had lived inside, the son of a man who built his own below-deck darkness and a woman who sealed her interior life under oath, the product of a household where division was not dysfunction but architecture, the condition of existence rather than a failure of it. When he wrote that by the time we know we are already cursed, he was not offering consolation or diagnosis—he was reporting from inside the structure, confirming what the body already knew before the mind had language for it, and handing that confirmation forward as the only honest inheritance he had.
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.
What the aerial move costs is legibility at the level of the particular. Patterns dissolve, perspectives fade, dramas disappear—but so does the specific face, the specific hour, the weight of what was actually said in the room. His ghost-above-the-house is a figure of genuine philosophical poise, but it is also a figure of withdrawal, and the green table he mentions at the opening—physical, present, pressed against—suggests he knew this. He writes from beside the table before he rises above the house, and the sequence matters: the body locates itself before the mind abstracts it. The commentary begins in contact and ends in altitude, and that trajectory is not evasion so much as his characteristic method—grounding the observation in the immediate before releasing it into the structural, the particular earning the general rather than being bypassed by it.
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.
The poem is also, beneath its indictment, a study in the specific grammar of excess—the way pleasure generates its own diminishment not through punishment but through saturation. The horses that dance to music are not wicked; they are foolish, which is the more damning charge, because foolishness implies a capacity for better judgment that was simply not exercised. The rose-petal beds do not corrupt so much as soften, and what they soften is the capacity to bear darkness—afraid of / darkness absorbing names the core failure not as vice but as avoidance, the refusal of the condition that gives pleasure its edge and meaning its weight. The flesh that hangs loose before iron has not been defeated by an external force; it has been rendered unfit for encounter by the very indulgences that were supposed to sustain it. And the slaves licking, the treasure already loot before the river arrives—these are not consequences imposed from outside but the logical terminus of a system that consumed its own foundations. What the river carries away is not the city but its name, which is the final irony: the only thing that survives excess is the word for it, the cautionary label on an emptied vessel.
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 reverses expectation: ecstasy precedes thirst rather than answering it, desire welling up from a darkness prior to narrative rather than arising in response to lack. Having seen the source, the end arises—revelation recursive rather than illuminating, the flaw in the midst of perfection echoing forward into Manners, where appetite, incision, and power are expressions of order’s design rather than deviations from it, generative tension running through the whole rather than interrupting it.
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 divine appearing as totality rather than comfort, radiant, devouring, beyond proportion.
He believed he had glimpsed something structurally akin to that moment—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 being limit rather than spectacle: to look directly would mean death. The experience diminished him before immensity rather than enlarging him, and like Arjuna watching time consume its warriors in advance of battle, what he encountered was scale rather than reassurance. What he carried back was a permanent alteration in his sense of proportion, the kind that makes ordinary ambition feel frivolous and ordinary consolation feel thin, and a specific patience with suffering that was perspective rather than stoicism—personal history becoming easier to hold without demanding that it resolve. That recalibration runs through everything he wrote afterward, the insistence on stripping away inflation, on naming what is actually present rather than what we wish were there.
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: where I look outward toward distance—light, duration, constellation—he turns inward toward permeability, the window becoming the living membrane between interior and exterior rather than a frame through which one contemplates the cosmos. The Source is felt in the tension between darkness and openness rather than imagined across centuries of turning, the room staging revelation rather than obscuring it.
The shift is from astronomy to aperture—the Source encountered through exposure rather than located beyond the self, the window a threshold carrying the full weight of that word, darkness the condition through which what stretches from the senses to the source passes rather than leaps. The rupture he described—the blinding nearness he could not fully behold—returns here in miniature, the divine pressing against the pane rather than waiting elsewhere, the vast emptiness of the other side present and immediate rather than cosmological and remote. What his response locates in the window is a genuine devotional posture: the self made permeable by darkness, the senses extended toward something they cannot name but can feel as pressure.
That posture is the inheritance. What De Facto Stranger records is what happens when the same grammar—immanence, aperture, the Source breaking through the membrane of the ordinary—is turned inward by a man sitting across a table from a woman he cannot bring himself to address. The cosmology of the window poem, in which the divine presses against the pane and the room stages revelation, becomes in the later sonnet the self-exonerating architecture of someone who has converted a failure of nerve into the physics of cosmic origin, spontaneous symmetry breaking, the moment the vacuum slumped into asymmetry and produced everything that is not everything else. The father’s window opens onto something genuinely larger than the self. The son’s window is where he looks when he has decided, without deciding, not to act.
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 assuming impermanence as equilibrium while his asks whether erasure is ethical—a different and more demanding question. The phrase swallowed up by the order of things reframes transience as structure: a system that absorbs disturbance without memorializing it, indifferent to the specific weight of what it takes in. His question introduces agency into what I had treated as inevitability, and the agency is double—it implicates both the woman and the medium. Should her act engrave a story on the water: the word engrave is doing serious work here, suggesting permanence, intention, the deliberate marking of a surface that resists marking. He is asking whether passage ought to leave consequence, whether the ethical life requires inscription, whether a self that moves through the world without leaving a trace has honored or abandoned its obligation to the world it moved through. The alternative—to pass through the wind like a bird, leaving no trace—is offered with genuine ambivalence, neither endorsed nor rejected.
In his framework, shaped by Zen and by a lifelong suspicion of monuments, tracelessness was not necessarily failure; it could be the highest form of fidelity to impermanence, the refusal to impose meaning on a surface that will not hold it. But the question remains open because he understood that the woman in the poem is not a bird, that her body carries weight the wind does not, that what she displaces has a different order of consequence than feathers crossing sky. The commentary sits at the exact hinge between the Buddhist acceptance of impermanence and the humanist insistence that lives leave marks—and it refuses to come down on either side, which is the most honest position available to a man who had spent decades moving between those two poles without finding rest in either.
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—a word that refuses prior inscription rather than erasing it. The closing couplet resolves his question in favor of equilibrium, the surface holding and the disturbance spent, the Heraclitean-Zen posture translated into something juridical: the form itself performs the restoration it describes, containment becoming evidence.
The same Heraclitean substrate generated a second poem, The Song of Heraclitus, though here the river has become a landscape under continuous force and the figure moving through it is the philosopher himself rather than a woman entering a pond. Where The Surface Holds is a sonnet that adjudicates—arriving at a verdict, delivering it, closing—The Song of Heraclitus is a curtal sonnet that enacts truncation as argument, operating at three-quarter scale because the full structure is not available to a mind moving through a world that absorbs disturbance without remainder. The mountain is tamped in fog rather than revealed by it; the lake is a blade laid flat and cold, violence already accomplished; the ridge-line carries ash and ferns simultaneously, residue and growth occupying the same edge without hierarchy. The birds that his commentary invoked as figures for tracelessness—to pass through the wind like a bird, leaving no trace—arrive here in reversed form: their bodies score the water clean, the inscription becoming the erasure, the trace a cleaning of the prior state. The ornithological vocabulary his commentary introduced is inherited and inverted, arriving at the same destination by opposite motion. The tail-line—he moves; the morning burns—does not close the argument; it re-enters the conditions that generated it, the circle turning rather than closing, the system still running when the poem stops watching it.
As his life narrowed—first through grief, then through cognitive decline—our exchanges thinned. My stepmother’s death unmoored him, and some griefs do not move forward; they settle and deepen, reorganizing the self around an absence that will not resolve. 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 growing intermittent, the connections that had always arrived effortlessly now requiring effort, then requiring more effort, then not arriving at all. I tried, in poems like The Empty House, to write him back into the world, to create occasions for the exchange that had shaped both of us, but language could not hold him in place.
At his request, there would be no grave—no stone, no marker, no fixed location to which grief would be required to return. He wanted to be reduced to ash and returned quietly to the mountains that had been his refuge, his correction, his answer to the corporate grid and the domestic strain and the life he had spent decades trying to outrun. 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. Standing there, I could not help but hear his own words returning—not from a poem addressed to me, but from the commentary on the Palimpsest exchange, written years before either of us knew it would become a description of his own ending:
or is it better to pass through the wind like a bird leaving no trace of ever having been here
The repetition here is not decorative. Earlier in this essay those lines appeared as a philosophical question—his genuine ambivalence about whether tracelessness was failure or fidelity, whether the ethical life required inscription or honored impermanence by refusing it. Now the same lines arrive as biography, the question answered by the circumstances of his death rather than by argument. He had written the question about the woman in the pond, about the abstract ethics of erasure, without knowing he was also writing his own instructions. The wind that carries ash is the same wind the bird passes through. The trace he declined to leave is the same trace he had spent a lifetime interrogating. The cosmology he had articulated—flux without monument, structure without sentiment—was not described in those lines but fulfilled by them, the commentary becoming the script for an ending he could not have planned and did not need to, having already articulated its logic decades before.
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 his response was not comfort in the ordinary sense but the old instructive severity, the mode that could be hard 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 telling me that sadness is the condition of being alive rather than an interruption of it, and that seeing it clearly loosens its grip—the steel tube the sense of being trapped inside time, inside the body, inside an ending you cannot control, the recognition of that structure being, in his view, the beginning of freedom from it. What he was offering was the same posture he had maintained across decades of commentary: not consolation but proportion, the self made smaller before the scale of what it actually inhabits, the tube recognized as tube so that the tube can stop being the whole of the world.
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.
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
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. The poem isolates this 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. Even in our closest years, during the daily chess sessions in Tennessee where we talked politics and theology and taunted each other like sparring partners, there were territories he would not cross. The squint felt like a gate. His reply complicates that reading: he does not deny secrecy but reframes it as existential opacity. The imagined gaze suggests identity is never fully self-possessed but always refracted through how one believes one is seen, and the fear is not exposure but premature closure—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. Near the end he imagined himself aboard the USS Indianapolis under the command of Senator McCain, and when he realized it had in fact been his own father who served as chief electrician on that ship, 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—the son reading gesture as secrecy, the father naming identity as something that unfolds only partially, always under the shadow of conclusion.
By the time this arrived, the exchanges had thinned to almost nothing. The mind that had once answered my poems with counter-poems and my arguments with deeper arguments, had grown intermittent—its signal fading in and out like a transmission losing its source. I had watched him lose the thread mid-sentence, watched him reach for a word that had been native to him for decades and find the shelf empty. The man who could once extemporize for hours on the Bhagavad Gita or the jurisprudence of natural law or the precise theological error of institutional Christianity had become someone who needed to be reminded of what year it was. I had stopped expecting replies to anything I sent him. And then this came—not a response to a poem, not commentary, not the old correction or instruction or the Swiftian thrust designed to keep me honest.
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 sonWhen I wrote back to tell him how much it meant, he asked what I was referring to. I sent it back to him in an email; he did not remember writing it. Whatever channel had carried it was already closed on his end—the poem had passed through him and arrived in me, and he had no memory of its passage.
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