My little girl, I suppose like any other young child,
has been obsessed off and on with the idea of death.
The wonder of death.
And in some ways more important to her
than sex, which she understands all right,
and I wonder what the virtues would make of death education.
In some ways, a lot more important since it's something
we've never faced really in this country.
And I think it's the source of a good deal of our agony.
A denial of death.
A refusal to accept death.
When she sees dead squirrels and dead animals,
dead things, and she went in when
her grandfather died and touched his cold brow and wondered.
And in the car driving somewhere a few months ago,
she said, papa, what am I going to do if I have
to go poo poo after I'm dead?
And I said, well, I don't think you'll have to,
and she said, but yeah, but what if I do?
I said, well, after you die, you stop going poo poo,
so you don't have to worry about it.
But she couldn't get out of her head, and she said, well, yeah,
but what if I have to go poo poo after I'm dead?
What am I going to do?
So I said, well, you have to look for a toilet.
And she said, I think you better have a toilet in my coffin.
Will you see to that, and she said,
don't forget the toilet paper.
And I tried to talk to her about death,
and her mother did in a very different way.
Sometimes, I got very confused, and I didn't
know what to say exactly.
I wrote a poem to say it called, "I Am Here," for Naomi later.
I want to speak to you while I can in your fourth year
before you can well understand, before this river
white and remorseless carries me away.
You asked me to tell you about death.
I said nothing.
I said, this is your father.
This is your father like water, like fate,
like a feather circling down, and I am
my own daughter swimming out.
A phosphorescence on the dark face of the surf.
A boat circling on the darkness.
She opens her eyes underwater.
The sun climbs.
She runs.
She decapitates flowers.
The grass sparkles.
Her little brother laughs.
She serves meals to friends no one has seen.
She races her tricycle in circles.
I come home.
The sun falls.
You eat all day.
You want to be big.
Look how big, you cry, stretching your arms to heaven.
Your eyes stretched by all the half-terrified joy
of being in motion.
The big move clumsily, little love, as far as I can see.
They break everything, and then they break,
and a pool of decayed light sinks back into the Earth.
Writing these words tonight, I am coming
to the end of my 35th year.
It means nothing to you, but I rejoice, and I am terrified,
and I feel something I can never describe.
They are so much the same.
So much the sun blazing on the edge of a knife.
We are little children, and my face
has already entered the mist.
I hear you cry out in the black in the theater of night.
I go in and hold you in my arms, and rock
you watching your lips working.
Your closed eyelids bulge with a nightly vision.
I get lost too, Naomi, in a forest that
suddenly rises from behind my breastbone
on a night of no moon.
Stars hang in the black branches.
Great, small, glittering like insoluble crimes
ceaselessly calling me toward that thick darkness
under the trees.
I turn sobbing to run, but it is everywhere.
I wanted to give you something, but always
give you something else.
What do you call it when it is underground like a cold spring
in the blood, when it is a poem written out of naked fear
and love which is never enough, when it is my face,
Naomi, my face from which the darkness streams forth.
The petal falls.
The skin crumbles into dirt.
Consciousness likewise crumbles, and this
is one road the squirrel will not cross again.
I was here, Naomi.
I will never be back, but I was here.
I was here with you and your brother.