Dead Boys

One son is many sons.

A bundle, a putto, a grave

Boy with kind eyes. One blow

Cracks all their bones at once.

Pastes all the gold hair red.

Soft lip and toothless mouth

Drop blood on the breast.

A white-haired crawler on grass

Head like a dandelion-clock

Above daisy-faces that come,

Yellow and white and green

Year after year after year

Stops like a toy wound down.

Like a doll dropped in the wet.

I am a cold grey house.

In every room a boy

Gestures and halts and falls

Again and again and again,

A boy with his hamster curled

On his trembling extended palm,

Like a rigid ammonite,

“Is he dead, is he asleep?”

And the boy who leaned his head

On my shoulder in a bus.

He slept so deep, he jerked

And lolled as the bus ground on

Like a puppet, like a sack,

But he was warm that week –

My cheek was damp with his warmth –

And five days later cold.

Like a thicket of garden gnomes,

A memorial garden full

Of cherubs and sleeping babes,

Moulded in thick cement,

Angels in bright green coats

Moss-eaten, furred by mould,

My sons come with me and stand

Ceremonious and still

Round my table, my desk, my bed.

They do not speak, their tongues

Are stopped. They cannot touch

For their hundreds of fingers were burned

Years ago in the jets

Of gas. Their fingers are smoke.

They are more alive than I.

It is hard for me to know

If I love or fear them most.

I shall join them in the end.