The Inheritance

In Canada, on a dark afternoon,

from a cabin beside Lake Purgatory

I saw your two clenched fists in a tree—

your most recent rage—until I came to my senses,

and saw two small lighted glass lamps reflected

through a window onto the maple leaves.

Was it simply that I had stolen away

in the wilderness to go fishing on your birthday,

twelve years after your death, and you

less than your rusty pliers in my fishing box?

It is late August in the moral North.

To answer your first question,

I obey the fish and game laws

of New York State, Ontario and Quebec.

The odd branch has already turned red.

As for me I have turned inside out,

I cry for revolution against myself—

no longer red, I’m parlor pink and gray,

you, less than a thumb print on a page.

Matters still outstanding: you will not remember—

a boy, I cut school, sneaked out

to the 42nd Street library to read among readers

like a stray lion cub taken into a great pride.

I have kept your Greek grammar,

your 78 revolutions per minute

recording of Rossini’s Barber

you played to stop me from crying,

almost my first memory.

Your “valuable papers,” now valuable

only to me, I fed to a fire years ago.

Frankly I am tired of receiving letters from the dead

every day, and carrying you on my back,

out of the burning city,

in and out of the bathroom and bedroom,

you less than the smoke you wanted for a shroud.

Let us dance with Sarah behind the curtain

where God in his divine humor

tells Abraham Sarah will at ninety bear a son,

and she asks laughing within herself, “Will I have pleasure?”

Take one foot, then the other … Imitate a departure

if you make it not, and each going

will lend a kind of easiness to the next.

Father, you poisoned my father.

I am standing alone, telling the truth

as you commanded. (Without too many

of the unseemly details, like the sounds of you in bed

sucking, I thought, on fruit I later would not eat.)

You, less than a seed of a wild grape.

Today, in the last moments of light

I heard a fish, a “Musky,” your nickname, break water.

As I sing my song of how you

will be remembered, if I could

out of misericordia, I’d tie you to the mast

and stuff your ears with wax. I regret

some parts of the body forgive, some don’t. Father,

do not forget your 18 inch Board of Education ruler

on which I measured my penis, marking its progress.

You kept it on your desk before you till your old age.

One reason, perhaps, for the archaic Greek smile

I wore on my face through boyhood.

I never thought I’d dig your grave with laughter.

Copyright Credit: Stanley Moss, “The Inheritance” from A History of Color: New and Collected Poems. Reprinted with the permission of Seven Stories Press, www.sevenstories.com.

Source: A History of Color: New and Collected Poems (Seven Stories Press, 2003)