from the death notes / No. 3

                   the catalyst for this poem is from "Masquerade",

                  masks by Saul Steinberg, photographed by Inge Morath

                

In short order my father’s skin color

(I can't come around to calling it a "complexion"

and even "color" seems a poor evaluation)

descended from a sub-value of grey, to the value of raw granite.

there’s a yellowing to the whites of his eyes, his brow,

a linear map running to somewhere in the distance, his mouth

constantly seeking water, his expression clueless, absent and fatal.

––my visits to his hospital bedside got to where I could distinguish

the differences between his groans of grief and his moans of pleasure.

––It was all in the tonal ranges;

the lower timbre pleasure, the higher timbre grief, the rare middle timbre

laying in the final performance of his lungs.

––I wondered during the last exhaling if the middle timbre was an indication

of him dreaming about the hilarious house party at the Gleason’s place

on East Sedalia Street in the summer of 1952, at which I was often told

by surviving participants, he was the life of.