It started with Kevin Tristan and Danny
Who nicknamed himself Big Bird
They introduced him to D.
Meaty and large slow-moving slow-talking
Who once stayed with us for a month
J.M. came by sometimes a con man
Who looked like a model he said
He was born in Israel or the Dominican Republic
Then he met Joe the center
The straw-haired chosen one
Update Freddie Mercury from Queen
Tune up the rage
For the speed-metal band
Swaggering down the street
Take the lamp the drum
The torch lofted up and carried
Through the middle of town
Mr. Impulsive walked out of class
When he did not like what the teacher said
It was boring
Mr. Impulsive scurried out in a storm
Wearing shorts and a wife beater
Soon he was shivering
The neighbors complained to the landlord
Complained to me but Mr. Impulsive
Could not be bothered to close the gate
Mr. Impulsive left the house without his keys
I don’t know how many times
He camped out on the front stoop
One night he convinced a neighbor
To shimmy the lock with a credit card
He was never locked out again
Mr. Impulsive will not be sleeping at home
He’d rather stay out and crash
Wherever he finds himself at five a.m.
He could be oddly well-mannered
To the parents of his friends
He was usually welcome
From the notebook of Mr. Impulsive
It is better to sneak through a side door
Than to wait in line like a sucker
It is not necessary to get directions
It’s much better to head out right now
Time doesn’t matter
These were the antics of Mr. Impulsive
Who never knew where he was going
Until he got there
From the Book of Teenage Rage
It’s just a transitional stage they said
He was depressed defiant lethargic rude
Restless and defensive he shuttled back and forth
Between the Upper West Side and Brooklyn
His parents were getting divorced
He told people that he was sick of school
That’s why he had gotten thrown out on purpose
He wanted to come home instead
When he dyed his hair red blond and green
It was as if he’d been running through
The spectrum of the rainbow
When he colored his hair blue
The sink was covered with blue dye
As if the sky was turned upside down in a bowl
Lights turned on all over the house
Air conditioners blasting two TVs blaring
Cabinet doors should not be closed
Upstairs in his room half-eaten plates of food
Open take-out containers uncapped drinks
Stained sheets clothes strewn on the floor
One toilet clogged the other plunged
Wet towels piled on the floor
He forgot to walk the dog
He was too exhausted
He could not be expected to answer
When the tutor rang the bell
When he read Cliffs Notes
For Catcher in the Rye he thought
Holden Caulfield was boring
A teenage boy finds himself
Lying facedown on top of a bus
Racing through a tunnel out of the city
He is plastered to the slippery roof
And breathing in the terrible fumes
Which go on for miles and miles
A boy clinging to the surface
His mouth full of dust
His arms and legs spread-eagled
A winged angel in the grime
Remembers the ocean wind
The spray in his face the fog lifting
The bus slows in heavy traffic
And the boy peers down to see
Himself in the front seat
Of a passing car a stick figure
Crayoned between his parents
And then the bus picks up speed
And flies into the faceless darkness
And the boy and his parents
Become a vanishing scrawl
Lying facedown on top of a bus
Racing through a tunnel out of the city
Plastered to the slippery roof
And breathing in the exhaust
The darkness visible at last
And then suddenly a blackbird
Floating like charred paper
The bruised blue sky
Maybe I shouldn’t go on talking
About the self-involved young social worker
Who convinced everyone
She could handle Gabriel on her own
In Amherst where she inherited a house
From her estranged parents
It takes a village I said
She could not manage him
But he settled into her basement anyway
It took two months for her
To decide to sell her house and move
Into a smaller place without him
She sent me an e-mail explaining
That it was just too taxing to live with him
But he was ready to stay by himself
And she could check on him weekly
For one hundred dollars per hour
They could shop together
Maybe I shouldn’t go on talking
About an undertrained overwhelmed
Unprofessional twenty-eight-year-old
But on his third night in a new place
He felt a terrible stabbing pain in his chest
And walked to the police station in his pajamas
The ambulance took him to the hospital
But the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong
With his heart it was a panic attack
Laurie and I came up with a plan
For a system of mentor/companions
And he never suffered another one again
I’d like to raise a glass to Cliff
Bearded social worker mud-man potter
Who shambled up for an interview
And worked with Gabriel for two years
In Amherst no one made more progress
Gabe condescended to him at first
Because he was really a hick poor guy
Only New Yorkers had everything figured out
And the rest of the world was playing catch-up
I’d like to raise a glass to Moises and Christa
The Brazilian psychologist the substitute teacher
And New Age mother who companioned him
I’d like to raise a glass to Tim
Founder of YES
Who called him a bright spark of a person
And taught him the rights of the disabled
Let’s also save a glass for Melissa
Who found him three jobs through WEYA
Summer of Amherst Department of Public Works
Summer of Meals on Wheels
And Forbes Public Library in Northampton
He learned to drive and got his license
I thought he was too out of control to own
A car Janet bought him one anyway
He earned three college credits for a class
In marketing at Holyoke Community College
He believed he could sell anything at all
I’d like to raise a toast to anyone
Who can convince me there is a world out there
Where he is selling something to someone
From the sto
rybook of bluster
And bad judgment
From the annals of loneliness
From the history of kids he met
On the street in special programs
It was dangerous to stay in Amherst
Lord of Misadventure
I’m scared of rounding him up
And turning him into a story
God of Scribbles and Erasures
I hope he shines through
Like a Giacometti portrait
I keep scraping the canvas
And painting him over again
But he keeps slipping away
He was like a spider
Preyed on by other spiders
And older insects
Sweet venom
His arrivals were swift
And his departures sudden
I couldn’t understand how
He lifted the shower door
Right off its hinges
When Gabriel cooked
The flames rose too high
And the fire alarm sounded
When the fire alarm sounded
He tore it off the wall
And left the wires dangling
From the Book of Regrets
Maybe we should have gone to Tokyo
We almost visited once
At the time of the Pokémon craze
A bunch of kids in Japan suffered
Epileptic seizures like his
Maybe we should have tried Edinburgh
Or Dublin to see if we felt at home
He decided he was Scots-Irish
We never heard a nightingale
Or played cricket on the beach
Or sang karaoke together
Maybe we should have kept him home
From boarding school Janet and I
Never quit arguing about it
I should have been calmer
I should have been more patient
At least I never whacked him
Though I wanted to a couple of times
The only punishment that ever worked
Was leaving the room
Maybe we were too hard on him
Maybe we were too soft
The therapist recommended
I kick him out on the street
I never had the stomach for it
Maybe I should have forced him
Into a wilderness program but how
He would have hated it hated me
Though maybe he’d be alive
It was a mistake
To put her daughter in an orphanage
During the Moscow famine
Tsvetaeva realized too late
It was an error
That could never be rectified
And cost her a daughter
Who starved to death she said
God punished me
It was a mistake
To marry off his darling second
Daughter at ten-and-a-half
Tagore wrote The Child for Rani
On her deathbed at thirteen
It could not assuage his guilt
He returned to the Grief House
For his youngest son his eldest daughter
Tears could not assuage his guilt
When Ungaretti lost his nine-year-old boy
He understood that death is death
In an extremely brutal way
It was the most terrible event of my life
I know what death means
I knew it even before
But when the best part of me was ripped away
I experienced death in myself
From that moment on
It would strike me as shameless
To talk about it
That pain will never stop tormenting me
Adolescents in the city
Of noise young men
In the land of confusion
Gabriel called him Broseph
Joe called him Hebro
Laurie called it a bromance
Broseph liked rock and roll old-style
Hebro liked emo-punk
Stomp to the music
They smoked weed and watched ballgames
Got into everything with everyone
Hustled girls everywhere
They got the call for the rave
Subwayed it out to Williamsburg
Banged around clubs
Gabriel came home with a skinny Russian
Model who sat there mutely
And refused to eat
She skipped out on him once
When he was down with a cold
No no man you’ve got it all wrong
Joe explained in the restaurant
We don’t need relationships
What we need are relations
Often they argued about one thing or another
It was all very Shakespearean Joe said
Gabe was my dude my equal
Me and Gabe were young men together
Whenever I did my endeavors
Gabe was with me
We took him to Arlington Park racetrack
But they wouldn’t let him in the clubhouse
Because he was wearing a t-shirt and jeans
He disappeared
And in ten minutes he came back wearing
A button-down a tie and a blue blazer
He stopped by with a dozen incense candles
You don’t even like incense Laurie said
It didn’t matter he had gotten them for free
He bought ten cheeseburgers for ten bucks
On the dollar menu at McDonald’s
And threw six of them away
He brought a six-pack of beer
Into the common room of the nursing home
To watch a football game with my mother
Because everyone needs a good beer
Especially the guy on the ventilator
And the nurses who work too hard
He said the countryside
Made him feel nervous he wanted
A twenty-four-hour kind of city
He woke me up at two a.m.
To take a walk he needed to talk
Laurie pulled me back into bed
He had flat feet and an awkward gait
He didn’t like to dance he liked
To go to raves and chill with friends
He couldn’t pay attention
But his meds made him feel sleepy
And he sold them to college kids
He liked to kick back and remember
The time we were riding home
In a taxicab on the West Side Highway
And my mother offered to take him
To a strip club for his twenty-first birthday
What’s wrong with that she wanted to know
Why they couldn’t celebrate together
That’s just what you want he bellowed
Going for a lap dance with Grandma
He liked to kick back and declare
He wanted to track down his birth mother
To see if he really had Celtic blood
He liked to kick back and tell my family
About the time he saw an American Hasidic
Jewish reggae musician at Hampshire College
He saw Nicholas Cage going up an escalator
In a movie theater and turned to his friends
I hate Nicholas Cage he has such a big head
He liked to kick back and tell us
How much he liked weed and ’shrooms
How bad could it be for you he said
It comes out of the ground
He liked to kick back and roll a spliff
With his friends at night
He always liked to go higher and higher
We’re here he’d say lifting his hand
To the middle of his chest
But we need to go here
He continued on
And raised his hand up to his neck
Friedrich Rückert w
rote 425 poems
After his two youngest children
Died from scarlet fever
Within sixteen days of each other
In 1833 and 1834 he could not cope
And often thought they had gone out
For a while they’ll be home soon
He told himself to tell his wife
They’re only taking a long walk
Mahler scored five of those poems
In 1901 and 1904 for a vocalist
And an orchestra to break your heart
As soon as I heard the plaintive oboe
And the descending movement of the horn
And the lyric baritone entering
I felt I should not be listening
To Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing
Kindertotenlieder with the Berlin Philharmonic
Mahler’s wife was superstitious
And thought he was chancing disaster
With Songs on the Death of Children
Now the sun wants to rise so brightly
As if nothing terrible had happened overnight
The tragedy happened to me alone
Mahler knew he could never have written them
After his four-year-old daughter died
From scarlet fever three years later
He said he felt sorry for himself
That he needed to write these songs
And for the world that would listen to them
Mallarmé was left in fragments
And could not right it
After his adored Anatole
His exquisite second born
His future prospects
A celestial soul
Succumbed to rheumatic fever
Treacherous blow of death
Ridiculous enemy
Ailing in springtime
Mourned in winter
His eight-year-old was lodged
In a little cemetery
Overlooking the Seine
Where skaters glided by at Christmas
And barges froze in the canals
And the moon eclipsed
His future projects
Hugo could speak of his daughter’s death
Hugo was happy to be able to speak
Of his daughter’s death