A LIGHT SWITCHED ON

Kierkegaard, you say?  I queried
a poet I loved, his face already gone
dark inside, like a burnt-out bulb,
the ghost of a face you'd say
if you wanted it to haunt you.

                         No reply.

            It's getting that way
in all my dreams lately, words
sailing into the dark, unanswered . . . 
 
Night before last, my wife and I
gathered with the surviving sons
of a poet lonely from Ohio.

I'd steered my wheelchair past
waist-high tables with their display
of manuscript poetry, letters
running on under the clear glass, into obscurity,
leaving me to ask each son
the meaning his words kept for them.

                             No reply --
as if each whispered question
could supply the meaning we looked for,
a light switched on in the bedroom
waking us into memory, its approximations.

Once, a bloodshot moon
hung itself in my bedroom window --
and that was no dream.

I wondered then
what linked us, dead and living,
to each other.
Was it the glass like winter ice
walling us from this rank autumn decay?

To be given glimpses, hints,
words often obscure, that fly apart
whenever you try using them:
the fish dark already, moving in place
under shining ice.