All afternoon: the rain, monotonous, my prison bars.
This room, the monotony of my body, spirit up against it,

cell within the cell. How is it once
I had to call to you who daily now appear

wrapped in dark clouds, storming  my study’s view
upon the backyard, to soliloquize and brood,

utterly unasked for? Now you are here, ranting,
the black sun rising as melancholy locks me up

inside a moment I cannot move beyond.
Hamlet, I am sentenced to you, whom I hoped

after my youth to break out of, to be
as other men, outgrowing your indecisions,

vatic and manic, for the world of business
paved with busyness, reorganized each morning.

Now I am too long melancholy, fifty-three,
to shake off these poles in which I vacillate

unable to take hold, seize, articulate
even my love to three children or a wife

without some swoon or rage or savage quip
which answers to the name of action. I would banish

you to a foreign country under false pretense
did I know I would flee myself

in that self-same breath. Hush, brother,
the rain begins to fall more softly

hearing me confessing this. Now you can sleep.
I’ll keep the watch all night if need be for your sake.

We have the ghosts of more than fathers between us, stalking.