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>> I had an uncle that I was
always very, very impressed by.

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This uncle died of silicosis of the lungs

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that he contracted while
working in the mines in Arizona.

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By the time he was an older man,
he was suffering quite a bit.

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He had TB by then and when he died, it seemed
as though he drowned because the blood came up

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and he virtually drowned on his own blood.

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It was a man too, or he was a man
that felt that God didn't want him

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and that God felt he wasn't good enough.

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When he was very small, he had been
an altar boy and he always felt

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that his life had never been quite
as good as when he was very small.

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He was a man who had a sense of command,
he was a man who had a great sense

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of courage and this was a poem for him.

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It's simply called Uncle.

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I knew a man with a face of Ahab, but brown.

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He had the face of shorn down
wood, of old wood grained.

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Cheeks like pits.

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The pit he swallowed death from in the mines.

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What he saw past the Billows
was white, but not a whale.

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He said they are here.

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It was the light that claimed
him, not he in search.

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He drowned awake, but there was no water.

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It was in blood he drowned and it was his own.

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I was the huddled ball that
heard him yell he doesn't want me.

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I am too evil and too far.

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He could sit so still on the lawn, hard wood
sculpture, everything left after the fire.

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Tall, gaunt, but not mine, not theirs, his own.

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He did not die, did not die, could not die.

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Thinner, thinner, thinnest.

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The separate plates leatherworking and
death working its leather on his face.

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Mine, mine, but what came up was
blood and he, the long shaft,

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tough as granite, my uncle.

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It was not far.

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They took him across some fields to
lay him down in dust and not in water.

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Though he drowned, he was not lost.

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He had always been found.

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He was our best leader into death.