I carried my sleepy son to his bed
and left his sleepy self to the digest of the night.
I went to my room, thinking I would read and reflect
on the night's strange and wonderful events.
And then at early morning, I would
start my mother's procession.
My wife's same route, from house to funeral parlor,
and from there to the grave.
I always kept a stack of books on the night table, books
I chose randomly, and whose pages I read in no order
and in small bites.
For this reason, I read very little fiction,
enjoying poetry and aphoristic writings by artists,
especially.
It was to the French painter Ingres I turned to that night,
thinking to find a sweet passage to ease me from images
of death and pirated souls.
"A true line," it read, "is closer to God than any church."
It was a noble thought designed to assure artists
of their value or to make them feel inadequate and forever
striving.
I repeated the sentence a few times,
and then shut my eyes for the next few hours before daylight.
Somehow, the artist's words made me
more melancholy than the fantastic
events on the pirate ship, more sad than my mother's death,
which already seems so long ago, before there were mothers.
Those words made me wonder why I ever wanted to be an artist.
Why I ever wanted to live, though I never thought
I wanted to die.
I tried very hard to quiet myself,
to keep my thoughts calm, but I could not.
I wondered how my son was faring after such a powerful night.
So I went down to his room, but he was not
in his bed, which was perfectly made as if the housekeeper had
come and trimmed the sheets and flattened out the blankets.
I went from room to room, went up to the attic,
and down to the basement, searching and searching
for my boy.
I went to my mother's room, but he was not there either.
Or, oddly enough, was she.
I would think about her later.
For the moment however, I was not concerned about the mother,
knowing that wherever her body was, mattered little, now
that her soul was on its adventures.
I had not yet started to grieve her death.
So busy was I in the events of the night.
But I knew that I had an eternity before me to grieve.
I went out to my studio, sure that my son had gone there,
where he had often come with his mother
to visit me at my work, where he felt safe
among the stacks of drawings and tubes of paint.
Safe in the place where for all my regrets
of not being the artist I had dreamed of being,
I had been most happy.
He liked my happiness, my boy, as had his mother.
It made them feel safe, when nothing else was safe.
"Imagine," I started to say, "imagine
that my mother had so little control over her life,
as to have her husband die on the phone in mid-sentence.
And imagine how little she had to say over things
that she herself had died in mid-read, so to speak.
So little control over our life, and none
in death and its aftermath.
No voice to say where your soul went,
as if it went anywhere at all.
Granted it had not been plucked from your last breath,
and stowed aboard a pirate ship for trading.
"Don't give it a thought."
My mother answered once, when as a boy
I asked where we went when we died.
I did not give it a thought for a long time,
having erased the question from my view
until after my wife died.
But soon after, I wondered whether the dead ever
missed the living, or whether they entered a new world
where nothing of the past lived, and when
no one who had lived in it mattered any longer.
My mother dreamed of an eternity spent
in a library, where she could read all the books of all
the world in all the languages.
"How many millions of books there would be,
mom," I said, awed by such a project.
"Yes," she said.
But one day, in just another day of eternity,
she would have read every book ever written.
And then, where would she be?
The studio except for the feeling of stale dust
and emptiness was as much as I had left it,
except that the paintings looked tired,
sagging on their stretchers.
Paintings need to be seen or they languish, wither
and die on the vine.
My unfinished Poussin was leaning, languishing
against a windowless wall, though I
was sure I had left it on the easel
when I went out to visit the ship at Angkor.
I would have loved to have finished that canvas.
And this time, I hoped I would have the courage
to paint my wife's face where the shepherdesses were supposed
to be.
The courage to leave for however long it
lasted, a trace of my heart.
My son was not in the studio, even
though the morning sunlight now flooded the large sad room.
What I mean is that although it was light,
he had still not appeared.
Whatever that meant, I was worried now
because I missed him so much, and I
was frightened of a life where I would always miss him.
"I'll miss you too, of course," I said guiltily to my wife,
in case she had read my thoughts from somewhere in the universe.
"And I'll miss you too as well," I said to my mother,
not wanting her to feel left unloved.
But, of course, missing a son is different from missing
all others, who return to you in various guises.
But unlike sparrows, sons do not return in the spring.
In the middle of my musings, the door opened,
and my son came in with a beautiful young woman.
He was tall now with a faint red mustache,
and he walked with a seaman's gait,
as if to study himself against the rolling deck of the world.
He had his arms about the beautiful woman's waist.
He was full of smiles for him-- she was full of smiles for him.
And she held-- and he held her like a man,
confident that he is loved.
I was happy for him, and wished my mother could see him,
a young man in love.
"Dad," he said in a sigh, as a low sigh of evocation, memory,
and longing.
Then he slowly looked about the studio,
even above at the beams under the high open ceiling, looked
about as if searching for me on our old life there.
But I was nowhere to be found.
Thank you.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDS]