WEBVTT

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I had a little
trouble with this poem

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because I was supposed
to give a final reading.

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And I gave a reading with
cello, a friend of mine

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who plays for New York
Symphony Orchestra.

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And I didn't want to read
this poem because I didn't

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want to seem I was ungrateful.

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But finally I did.

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And one of it was--
one of the reasons was

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I don't think poets
can be controlled,

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and they can't be dictated to.

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But another thing
is because I thought

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it was a pretty good
poem and I wanted

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to show off, as we all do.

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But I'm going to go
back to my first book

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and read you what I think to be
some of the things which still

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are with me.

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And I wouldn't do this
if my wife is here,

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but I'm going to do it now
because since she's not here,

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it won't upset her.

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And there are stories
to both of these poems

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and I'd like to tell
you both of them.

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My second son was in
hospital in San Francisco,

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and we knew he was going to die.

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And my wife insisted on being
taken out of the hospital.

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We had to sign release papers.

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And we went home and I was
sitting in my front room

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watching the fog roll in about
3 o'clock in the afternoon,

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and I wrote some notes
down on an envelope.

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The envelope became lost.

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And then about six
or eight weeks later,

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my son, my oldest boy,
found the envelope.

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I'd forgotten about it and
that essentially is this poem.

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I wrote the poem very quickly
and didn't change but one word.

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And about two
hours later, we got

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a call from the hospital
telling us this boy had expired.

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And that had I not
written these notes,

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I know I wouldn't have
written a poem for him.

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So it's a kind of gift.

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This is called "We Assume: On
the Death of our son Reuben

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Masai Harper."

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We assume that in 28 hours
lived in a collapsible isolette.

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You learned to accept pure
oxygen as the natural sky.

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The scant shallow breaths that
filled those hours cannot,

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did not, make you fly.

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But dreams were there,
like crooked palm prints

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on the twin thick
windows of the nursery,

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in the glands of your mother.

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We assume the
sterile hands drank

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chemicals in and out
from lungs opaque

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with mucus, pumped
your stomach, eeked

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the bicarbonate in
crooked green-winged veins

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out in a plastic mask.

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A woman who'd lost her
first son consoled us

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with an angel gone ahead
to pray for our family.

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Gone into that sky seeking
oxygen, gone to autopsy,

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a fine brown powdered sugar,
a disposable cremation,

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we assume you did not
know we loved you."

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