These others are quite different in tone.
I want to begin with a poem called, Living Among the Dead.
It has an epigraph from the French poet, Paul Eluard,
which goes, "There is another world, but it is in this "
The dead, I mean in the poem, are not only the great dead,
gathered and remembered by history,
or those personal dead people we remembered in our own lives,
but a third group, which shares with them,
the fact of being frozen forever in memory they don't change
after they die.
We remember them out of time.
Time stops for them.
I'm thinking of those characters in literature,
fairy tales, stories, and so forth, who are likewise frozen.
Trapped in their texts.
Changeless.
But who were never literally born,
but who for the purposes of this poem, join the dead.
Living Among the Dead.
First, there were those who died before I was born.
It was as if they had just left.
Their shadows would slip out after them.
Under the door, so recently closed, the air and its path
was still swirling to rest.
Some of the furniture came from them, I was told.
And one day, I opened two chests of drawers
to learn what the dead kept.
But it was when I learned to read that I began always
to live among the dead.
I remember Rapunzel.
The improved animals in the just so stories.
And a flock of birds that saved themselves from a hunter
by flying in place in the shape of a tree.
Their wings imitating the whisk of wind in the leaves.
My sons and I are like some wine the dead have already bottled.
They wish us well, but there is nothing they can do for us.
Sebastian cries in his sleep.
I bring him into my bed.
Talk to him.
Rub his back.
To help his sons live easily among the dead
is a father's great work.
Now Sebastian drifts.
Soon he'll sleep.
We can almost hear the dead breathing.
They sound like water under a ship at sea.
To love the dead is easy.
They are final.
Perfect.
But to love a child is sometimes to fail at love,
while the dead look on with their abstract sorrow.
To love a child is to turn away from the patient dead.
It is to sleep carefully.
In case he cries.
Later, when my sons are grown, among their own dead,
I can dive easily into sleep and lull
among the coral of my dreams.
Growing on themselves until, at the end,
I almost never dream of anyone.
Except my sons.
Who is still alive.