Distortion

But I don't believe in ghosts or anything
 I know that you are gone and that
 I'm carrying some version of you around
 Some untrustworthy old description in my memories
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 That must be your ghost taking form
 Created every moment by me dreaming you so
 Is it my job now to hold whatever's left of you for all time?
 And to reenact you for our daughter's life?
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 I do remember
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 When I was a kid and realized that life ends and is just over
 That a point comes where we no longer get to say or do anything
 And then what? I guess just forgotten
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 I said to my mom that I hoped to do something important with my life
 Not be famous, but just remembered a little more
 To echo beyond my actual end
 My mom laughed at this kid trying to wriggle his way out of mortality
 Of the inescapable final feral scream
 
 But I held that hope and grew up wondering what dying means
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 Unsatisfied, ambitious and squirming
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 The first dead body I ever saw in real life was my great-grandfather's
 Embalmed in a casket in Everett in a room by the freeway
 Where they talked me into reading a thing from the bible
 About walking through a valley in the shadow of death
 But I didn't understand the words
 I thought of actually walking through a valley and a shadow
 With a backpack and a tent
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 But that dead body next to me spoke clear and metaphor-free
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 In December 2001
 After having spent the summer and fall traveling mostly alone around
 The country that was spiraling into war
 and mania, little flags were everywhere
 I was living on the periphery as a twenty three year old
 Wrapped up in doing what I wanted and
 it was music and painting on newsprint
 Sleeping in yards without asking permission and eating all the fruit
 From the tree like Tarzan or Walt Whitman,
 voracious, devouring life, singing my song
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 But that December I was shaken by a pregnancy scare
 From someone who I'd been with for only one night
 Many states away, who I hadn't planned to keep knowing
 
 A young and embarrassing over-confident animal night
 
 The terror of the idea of fatherhood
 at twenty three destroyed my foundation
 And left me freaked out and wandering around
 Mourning the independence and solitude that defined me then
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 Though my life is a galaxy of subtleties
 My complex intentions and aspirations do not matter at all
 In the face of the crushing flow of actual time
 I saw my ancestors as sad and misunderstood
 In the same way that my descendants will squint back through a fog
 Trying to see some polluted version of all I meant to be in life
 Their recollections pruned by the accidents of time
 What got thrown away and what gets talked about at night
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 But she had her period eventually
 and I went back to being twenty three
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 Eleven years later I was traveling alone again
 On an airplane from New Zealand to Perth, Western Australia
 Very alone, so far away from you and the home that we had made
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 I watched a movie on the plane about Jack Kerouac
 A documentary going deeper than the usual congratulations
 They interviewed his daughter,
 Jan Kerouac, and she tore through the history
 She told about this deadbeat drinking, watching Three Stooges on TV
 Not acknowledging his paternity, abandoning the child
 Taking cowardly refuge in his self-mythology
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 When she spoke I heard your voice telling me about the adults who had
 Abandoned you as a sweet kid and left you to grow precariously
 And when she spoke I looked in her face and saw you looking back at me
 
 On a tiny airplane seat screen at the bottom of the world
 I saw a French-Canadian resemblance
 And I heard suffering echoing
 A lineage of bad parents and strong daughters withstanding
 
 She had black hair and freckles and pale skin just like you
 And she told the hard truth and slayed the gods just like you
 I saw the cracks in the facade of posterity
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 I missed you so I went home
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 The second dead body I ever saw was you, Geneviève
 When I watched you turn from alive to dead right here in our house
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 I looked around the room and asked "Are you here?"
 And you weren't, and you are not here. I sing to you though
 I keep you breathing through my lungs
 In a constant uncomfortable stream of memories trailing out
 Until I am dead too
 And then eventually all the people who remember me will also die
 Containing what it was like to stand in the same air with me
 And breathe and wonder why
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 And then distortion
 And then the silence of space
 
 The Night Palace
 The ocean blurring
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 But in my tears right now
 Light gleams