ALSO BY EDWARD HIRSCH
Poetry
The Living Fire (2010)
Special Orders (2008)
Lay Back the Darkness (2003)
On Love (1998)
Earthly Measures (1994)
The Night Parade (1989)
Wild Gratitude (1986)
For the Sleepwalkers (1981)
Prose
A Poet’s Glossary (2014)
Poet’s Choice (2006)
The Demon and the Angel:
Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (2002)
Responsive Reading (1999)
How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999)
Editor
The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology (2008) with Eavan Boland
To a Nightingale: Poems from Sappho to Borges (2007)
Theodore Roethke: Selected Poems (2005)
William Maxwell: Memories and Appreciations (2004) with Charles Baxter and Michael Collier
Transforming Vision: Writers on Art (1994)
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2014 by Edward Hirsch
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by
Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.
www.aaknopf.com/poetry
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Strings,” written by Tom DeLonge, Mark Hoppus, and Scott Raynor, copyright © 1993 EMI April Music Inc., Jolly Old Saint Dick and Publisher(s) Unknown. All rights on behalf of EMI April Music Inc. and Jolly Old Saint Dick administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hirsch, Edward.
Gabriel : a poem / by Edward Hirsch.—First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-385-35373-1 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-8041-7287-5 (trade pbk.)—
ISBN 978-0-385-35358-8 (ebook) 1. Children—Death—Poetry.
2. Grief—Poetry. I. Title.
PS3558.I64G33 2014
811′.54—dc23 2013049301
Jacket design by Oliver Munday
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
First Page
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
I would do anything and that’s
What scares me so bad
Don’t want to live my life alone
Don’t want to go back to what I had
Don’t want to spend my life without
All those special things
Don’t want to walk around being tied to
Anyone else’s
Strings, strings, strings, strings
BLINK-182, “Strings”
The funeral director opened the coffin
And there he was alone
From the waist up
I peered down into his face
And for a moment I was taken aback
Because it was not Gabriel
It was just some poor kid
Whose face looked like a room
That had been vacated
But then I looked more intently
At his heavy eyelids
And fine features
He had always been a restive sleeper
Now he was weirdly still
My reckless boy
Dressed up for a special occasion
He liked that navy-blue suit
And preened over himself in the mirror
Hey college boy the guy called out
On the street in Northampton
You look sharp in those new duds
He loved the way he looked
After he stopped taking the meds
That fogged his mind
He admired himself
In store windows and revolving doors
Where his reflection turned
Now he looked rigid and buttoned up
Like he was going to a funeral
On a Friday in early September
Laurie loosened his necktie
And opened his top button
So I could breathe easier
His face was waxen
And slightly shiny
His skin gray and papery
Around his eyes
Already a little sunken
His nose slightly deformed
A scab where his lip had bled
During the seizure
He was still handsome
In his fresh haircut but something
Was off he wasn’t moving
He could never stand still but now
Something that had once been my son
Lay there restless spirit
Who left the house one rainy night
And never returned
Lost boy
Who will never be found again
Anywhere but eternity
Uncontrollable fiery youth
Who whirled into any room
And ranted against whatever
Came into his mind
The world was unjust to him
And so he hurled his tirades
And then disappeared
He has the Japanese word for music
Tattooed on one arm and a Jewish star
Tattooed on the other
It looks colored in with blue crayon
You shall not make gashes in your flesh
For the dead or incise any marks on yourselves
I am the Lord it says in Leviticus
But something tribal had taken root
And he labeled himself a Jew
He downed all four glasses of wine
And sold me the afikomen on Passover
But he did not like the High Holidays
He disliked Sunday school
He was allergic to synagogues
I never saw him crack a prayer book
When he was too young to object
Janet dressed him up for Purim
In a black and white shirt
With a sign on his back that said
Queen Esther’s Little Brother
He roared a noisemaker against Haman
I wonder what he would think
About the short-sleeved shroud
He is wearing under his white shirt
In the casket I hope it’s comfortable
He would have scorned the old Jew
We hired to sit with him overnight
Janet didn’t want him to be by himself
I’m sure he was annoyed by the prayers
I wonder if he believed in God I never asked
He once cut the grass around Emily Dickinson’s grave
In West Cemetery in downtown Amherst
And read me the inscription Called Back
It reminded him of going to the cemetery
In Houston to visit his friend
Who was now in heaven Lettie said
He experienced the rapture
But Gabriel talked to the gravestone
And clutched a reindeer with a yellow bandana
I wonder if he knelt down and prayed
With the family when his friend died of leukemia
Cousins rolled in the aisle speaking in tongues
Jews stand up to the Almighty
I told him but mostly we just s
kipped
Out of services and headed to the playground
He was named after Janet’s mother Gertrude
And the angel Gabriel
Strong man of God
He had three epileptic seizures
Suddenly his brain caught fire
He spasmed to the ground and blanked out
Dostoevsky believed the convulsive fits
Bring you down bring you closer
The idiot the holy fool are nearer to God
He was a pallbearer at two funerals
One of my fathers died in Chicago
One in Phoenix I gave both eulogies
The music of death is solemn
He kept hugging me afterward and talked
Like a madman in the car to the graveyard
Like a spear hurtling through darkness
He was always in such a hurry
To find a target to stop him
Like a young lion trying out its roar
At the far edge of the den
The roar inside him was even louder
Like a bolt of lightning in the fog
Like a bolt of lightning over the sea
Like a bolt of lightning in our backyard
Like the time I opened the furnace
In the factory at night
And the flames came blasting out
I was unprepared for the intensity
As if I’d unsheathed the sun
Like a crazed fly the daredevil monarch
Like a bee exploding from its hive
Like a bird ricocheting off the window
Like a small car zooming too fast
On a two-lane highway at night
His friends thought they would die
Like the war cry of an injured crane
Falling into the sea
I did not see it hit the waves
Like the stray fury of a bullet
Splintering against a skull
The soldier looked surprised
He did not move when they touched him
Like a bolt of lightning flooded with darkness
After it strikes the sea
Ben Jonson was off in the country
Visiting a friend’s estate
When he had a vision
Of his eldest son Benjamin
Who appeared to him with the mark
Of a bloody cross on his forehead
As if it had been cut with a sword
Jonson was so amazed
By the apparition that he prayed
Unto God it was but a fantasy
His friends assured him
It was a fevered dream
It was no dream
The letter came from his wife
Announcing their seven-year-old son
Had died of the Pest
Ravaging London in 1603
Why had the father escaped
That night Jonson’s son appeared
To him again in a dream
This time the child of his right hand
Had grown into the shape of a man
The one he would become
On the Day of Resurrection
Jonson wrote a poem and called his son
His best piece of poetrie
A lovely line a little loathsome
I loved that poem once
He said we are lent our sons never take
Too much pleasure in what you love
Why go over seven years of fertility
Doctors medicine men in clinics
Peddling surgeries and drugs
Why go over seven years of treatments
That never engendered a child
Janet and I adopted him
It took another twelve months
Of social workers and lawyers
Home studies and courtrooms
Passports and interlocutory orders
Injunctions jurisdictions handshakes
Everyone standing around in suits
Saying yes we think so yes
What was for others nature
Was for us culture
We traveled from Rome to New Orleans
It took twenty-three hours
Of anguish and airplanes
Instructions in two languages
Music from cream-colored headsets
Jet lag instead of labor
On the other end a rainbow
Of streamers in the French Quarter
A celebration in Jackson Square
We stayed in an empty bungalow
And waited all night
By the bay-shaped window
For the moment when our lawyer
Collected him from the hospital
And brought him to us
It was inscribed
In the Book of Life
And the court of law
It was signed in a neighboring parish
And written in black ink
It was sealed in blood
After five days and nights
On this earth our lawyer
Took him from the arms of a nurse
Strapped him into an infant seat
And delivered him
Into our keeping
A wrinkled traveler
From faraway who had journeyed
A great distance to find us
A sweet aboriginal angel
With his own life a throbbing bundle
Of instincts and nerves
Perfect fingers perfect toes
Shiny skin blue soulful eyes
Deeply set in a perfectly shaped head
He was a trumpet of laughter
And tears who did not sleep
Through the night even once
O little swimmer in the deeps
Raise up your arms
Ring out your lungs
O wailing messenger
O baleful full-bodied crier
Of the abandoned and the chosen
He dropped out of the sky
Into the infirmary in the Garden District
At nine pounds two ounces
When he was eight days old
We carried him into family court
In a plastic molded seat with a handle
After he settled our case with a special order
The judge an amateur photographer
Snapped pictures of us in the witness stand
We propped him up in the middle
Of the table in a Chinese restaurant
And rotated him this way and that
The mohel arrived at my parents’ apartment
With a little black suitcase of instruments
It was barbaric but it was our barbarism
At the American Academy in Rome
Our friends threw a black-and-white party
Like Truman Capote he wore black and white booties
There were Welcome Gabriel signs in the rafters
The classicists drank gallons of red wine
And hoisted him up like a trophy
Gelsa the Italian nanny overdressed him
And took him all over Trastevere he was known
At the butcher shops the dry cleaners the coffee bars
He had become the unofficial mayor
Of the neighborhood waving from his stroller
At shopkeepers who waved and shouted Ciao Gabriele
When he learned to crawl he pulled himself
Forward on his arms a little at a time
As if he were climbing Arizona Beach on D-day
We strapped him into the car seat
And drove around for hours
Trying to get him to sleep
There were other parents nodding
To each other on the road I remember steering
Clear of the trucks veering down Highway 59
Give him a wing and a propeller
And he’ll launch I joked
When he hurled himself out of his crib
It was no joke when h
e twitched
And twisted in his sleep we marveled
That he never stopped moving
I can make out a man pushing a stroller
Through Rice Village on Sunday morning
Dew on the grass mist on the windows
The moon a crescent in a children’s book
The streets vacant the parking lots empty
Everyone in the city slept but us
Why all the tears
Oh blow Gabriel blow
Go on and blow Gabriel blow
At the diner we set him up in a high chair
Where the little pasha shrieked
And littered the floor below
While Little Richard mimicked a drum intro
From the speakers above
A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bop-bop
In the end it becomes a blur
Oh blow Gabriel blow
Go on and blow Gabriel blow
Issa recalled how a young priest
Slipped crossing a bridge
And fell into the torrents of a river
People searched with lighted torches
Until they found him wedged between rocks
And carried him home on a litter
His parents wept they wept bitterly
In front of everyone and even the old priests
Cried until their sleeves were soaked in tears
When the boy was cremated two days later
Issa tossed flowers into the flames
And watched them seeping into the sky
He lost three baby boys in infancy
He named his daughter Sato
Hoping she would grow in wisdom
She was pure moonlight beaming
From head to foot a butterfly
Resting her wings on a sprig of grass
He believed his two-year-old flitted
In a special state of grace
With divine protection from Buddha
But he was wrong he could not bear
To see her body swollen with blisters
In the clutches of the vile god of smallpox
His wife cried at her death he did not
He tried to escape he could not