by Michael Gessner

It’s good you died when you did,
or you would have lived to see
your darling daughter’s demise
in her prime, with two little ones
in the next room, precious as honey in a hive.

But you escaped—talk about an act
of god—in medias res—something I suppose
that was itself a justified grace.
She beat you up, you know, your daughter did
in her letter to the dead.

To the scholar of the bumblebee,
let’s set the record straight:
you no more had ‘a love of the rack
and screw’ than your daughter was ‘poor
and white’ or you, a brute.

It doesn’t quite seem to mix
Panzer-man and Harvard entomologist,
or the German language ‘obscene’.
It was the language your parents spoke
before making the love that was you.

It was the language of Bonhoeffer and Rilke—
you were closer to their ilk—
than what your daughter made of you.
It was the language of my father too,
interrogated like you, accused

when muscled from a train with his designs,
a tube of blueprints for aircraft executives
during World War II.  The FBI
suspected him as they suspected you,
and ended up with nothing

other than sinister suggestions
to justify their indiscretions,
and like you, was never a military man,
neither abuser or abused by family
but by the conjectures of  a Government

that never seem to end,
and like you, sent from position to position
for his last name, and what
is born of that?  What’s in a name?
A life’s work. Exclusion.

And Sylvia, as long as I’m writing letters,
I’ll write one to you.  Yes, it’s true,
it’s over, you’re through,
your Daddy is dead twice over,
a manic overkill.

A poem’s epitaph that will stand-in
for the man, an anthem
for strangers everywhere,
high with hate and cant,
yours was an adolescent’s rant.

Still we forgive our saints for what they do
just as we forgive you for being you.
We might even say it wasn’t true,
it wasn’t really you writing him off
as you did out of hate, for him having left

you alone through no fault of his own.
A perfect life you said before the age of eight,
an impossible garden behind a locked gate
gone to weed.  So much for what I’ve said,
so much for letters to the dead.