Poem Begun on the Day of My Father’s Death and Completed on the Day I Dreamed of My Own

Into the now-hushed —

+

this overture of emptiness,

skin’s stake in the gravity of opening —

everything —

fire in the air,
we go light-lit and sheen —

sky having once more made

this world of blue:

o self:

even the ocean ends

  +

how long have I waited to think a thought

  that was not

its shadow?

In the next          

will I know?

  Will

  +

the stars

                                when they whisper to the dark to undo its dress

recall how to shine?

          What otherness besides

  / beside —

this

can we know?

  +

What I have not done?

    there must be a door to what to

do — as though time is an apology for time.

        Curtains part like clouds

— all entrances are exits:

what do we find

when we find
 

that which we sought without looking?

 
+

Lord of the hypothetical —

   [what if you are the only one

who feels what we do not?]

hear my prayer —

  +

every mystery is the greatest,

not just what fails to prolong —

— in the inextinguishable: 

there we live the way the undying

fire within burns us to live,

  strikes us like a match

to be the metaphor of our own igniting —

what darkness lit by that light?

+

bones kerned

and bones kilned:

bones on the back of bones —

each breath is a bone and within each breath a body:

tell us again —

  what do the living do 

inside the landscape
in which nothing is visible       except the vanishing

the existence of one state
does not mean

necessarily

the existence of another —

departure does not mean

arrival

+

Let us look at the air

as though it were some kind of idea —

let us conceive this life

as a corridor —

let us rise

into continuity as a mode of suspension:

 let us be the medium, the decussation —

               let us recall:

                everything is transfusion —

let us

learn to adapt

ξ

Dean Rader has authored or co-authored twelve books, including Works & Days, winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, a Barnes & Noble Review Best Book, and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, was published in April from Copper Canyon Press. His writing has been supported by fellowships from Princeton University, Harvard University, Headlands Center for the Arts, Art Omi, and the MacDowell Foundation. A finalist for the 2021 Balakian Award from the National Book Critics Circle, Rader is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.