POEM
For H., Dead in a Car at Thirty-eight
Today I blessed every little thing in the world
for its grace and its horror, and its sadness
and its reluctant love. I blessed the grass and the rain.
I blessed my sick and demented stepmother. I blessed the stars
that did not appear in the heavens last night, and I blessed
the stars that will appear in some heaven I will never live
to discover. I blessed my wife and my eight-week-old son,
who have come into my life against all the miserable odds,
and in whom, should I die in my bed tonight, I will have known
a sufficient happiness to make all sadness the good price
of its own redeeming. I blessed everything that is living
and whole, because you are dead, and, last time I saw you,
you were nearly a happy man, a man off in a car who had
published a book, wanting to be free of his own encumbrance.
Let me say it now: I hardly knew you, and have no claim
to write this. I even turned you down once for a job,
felt a twinge of envy when you told me your sail had become
a sale. There’s nothing fair about it, let me tell you,
and now I am sitting here, feeling blessed because you’re dead
and I’m still alive, sniffing the battered flowers, praising
the dark, fickle gods, hearing the same voice
calling not me that must have called it to you.
Reprinted from The Wages of Goodness by Michael Blumenthal by permission of the University of Missouri Press. Copyright © 1992 by the Curators of the University of Missouri.
Source: The Wages of Goodness (University of Missouri Press, 1992)
Michael C. Blumenthal is a poet and educator who has also ventured into essays, memoirs, and . . . MORE »
