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 absurd)

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 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 middle timbre laying in the final exhaling of his lungs.

––I wondered during that 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’m often told

by surviving participants, he was the life of.