>> I had an uncle that I was always very, very impressed by.
This uncle died of silicosis of the lungs
that he contracted while working in the mines in Arizona.
By the time he was an older man, he was suffering quite a bit.
He had TB by then and when he died, it seemed as though he drowned because the blood came up
and he virtually drowned on his own blood.
It was a man too, or he was a man that felt that God didn't want him
and that God felt he wasn't good enough.
When he was very small, he had been an altar boy and he always felt
that his life had never been quite as good as when he was very small.
He was a man who had a sense of command, he was a man who had a great sense
of courage and this was a poem for him.
It's simply called Uncle.
I knew a man with a face of Ahab, but brown.
He had the face of shorn down wood, of old wood grained.
Cheeks like pits.
The pit he swallowed death from in the mines.
What he saw past the Billows was white, but not a whale.
He said they are here.
It was the light that claimed him, not he in search.
He drowned awake, but there was no water.
It was in blood he drowned and it was his own.
I was the huddled ball that heard him yell he doesn't want me.
I am too evil and too far.
He could sit so still on the lawn, hard wood sculpture, everything left after the fire.
Tall, gaunt, but not mine, not theirs, his own.
He did not die, did not die, could not die.
Thinner, thinner, thinnest.
The separate plates leatherworking and death working its leather on his face.
Mine, mine, but what came up was blood and he, the long shaft,
tough as granite, my uncle.
It was not far.
They took him across some fields to lay him down in dust and not in water.
Though he drowned, he was not lost.
He had always been found.
He was our best leader into death.