In one day

I read (we live so much by reading) of fish

A hundred feet down in an Alaskan lake soon clear there

There in that cold new silent old unspoiled place.

I read poems, in a book lost twenty years ago,

Dredged up from what forgetfulness, but warm after that long cold,

And wrote to tell about that fishing, that heat and gold.

Noon, and the four family faces over the four green plates.

This is the day we changed the big son's life with a phone call,

Bringing him home. This is the day, remember,

My brother my blood and his sons from six hundred miles came

To this house on the short uphill summer street,

Night now, and I lie content and as a man would,

By his wife, and hold in my head

This third floor, rooms of her mother and her son, and

Levels below, floors under to the earth full full of my name,

The loud bright stalk and sprawl of the cousins,

Their face-bones, voices, printed from my father changed,

Moving through these rooms in him.

I write this in the back cover of a book, in bed.

I roof them with my love, but here

My love lies near near I watch her in the late reading-light-shine,

She turns her page, moves a little, oh beautiful new

In her slight change half under the white drape of the sheet.

All day I watched her fine legs, her dark thick hair,

Imagined her known nakedness, waiting for her .

Today she watched me reading to our child she

Stepped quietly away wet-eyed loving us both for

Memory in the making, a story of the ducklings, the scene there

In the big chair, like a story, story she had searched the books for.

But she had written this part, this is hers,

And I am hers. Her way of the house is my way.

Now she and I are sleeping, or toward sleep, now this day

Not unlike other days but fuller and happier than most, ends.

But I write in the page at my hand, a book of poems,

Stub pencil from the bedside table, scribble in the back cover,

Saying I want it not to end or be forgotten, not

The books, boys, or this summer midnight murmuring and long kissing

Ever to end.

All this in one day.