I had a little trouble with this poem
because I was supposed to give a final reading.
And I gave a reading with cello, a friend of mine
who plays for New York Symphony Orchestra.
And I didn't want to read this poem because I didn't
want to seem I was ungrateful.
But finally I did.
And one of it was-- one of the reasons was
I don't think poets can be controlled,
and they can't be dictated to.
But another thing is because I thought
it was a pretty good poem and I wanted
to show off, as we all do.
But I'm going to go back to my first book
and read you what I think to be some of the things which still
are with me.
And I wouldn't do this if my wife is here,
but I'm going to do it now because since she's not here,
it won't upset her.
And there are stories to both of these poems
and I'd like to tell you both of them.
My second son was in hospital in San Francisco,
and we knew he was going to die.
And my wife insisted on being taken out of the hospital.
We had to sign release papers.
And we went home and I was sitting in my front room
watching the fog roll in about 3 o'clock in the afternoon,
and I wrote some notes down on an envelope.
The envelope became lost.
And then about six or eight weeks later,
my son, my oldest boy, found the envelope.
I'd forgotten about it and that essentially is this poem.
I wrote the poem very quickly and didn't change but one word.
And about two hours later, we got
a call from the hospital telling us this boy had expired.
And that had I not written these notes,
I know I wouldn't have written a poem for him.
So it's a kind of gift.
This is called "We Assume: On the Death of our son Reuben
Masai Harper."
We assume that in 28 hours lived in a collapsible isolette.
You learned to accept pure oxygen as the natural sky.
The scant shallow breaths that filled those hours cannot,
did not, make you fly.
But dreams were there, like crooked palm prints
on the twin thick windows of the nursery,
in the glands of your mother.
We assume the sterile hands drank
chemicals in and out from lungs opaque
with mucus, pumped your stomach, eeked
the bicarbonate in crooked green-winged veins
out in a plastic mask.
A woman who'd lost her first son consoled us
with an angel gone ahead to pray for our family.
Gone into that sky seeking oxygen, gone to autopsy,
a fine brown powdered sugar, a disposable cremation,
we assume you did not know we loved you."