Unified Theory of Emptiness

Before I get sentimental, let's acknowledge

Thanks, Grandpa.

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I
On the night I was born, my grandfather wrote:
	Big news — S. gave birth to a 10lb. baby boy
	this day — baby & mother doing fine! — 
	we are grateful to Heavenly Father
	for the safe birth!!!

Before I get sentimental, let’s acknowledge
the first thing you noticed: were I truly born
at ten pounds, that would place me somewhere
in the ninety-ninth percentile of fat babies.
Where I come from, this is taken as a sign

of incredible fortune. A “he-will-last-the-winter”
kind of certainty. Grandpa was happy to find me
larger than life. Reading over his journals, 
I’m feeling now the relief grandfathers feel 
when their families survive love’s destructive forces. 

Of course this is only the beginning of many 
problems for my brain and body alike: 
it is difficult to lie with both.
It is a land of sleeplessness with limitless
conjecture, accusation — derivative, like sheep.


II
As I would have it, Pops said this about the inner life:
	Today I saw a cardinal abandon its nest.
	It flew off with finality,
	but I will see cardinals again.
	Very grateful to Heavenly Father for all blessings!

He was quiet in the way that invites you
to guess at what he was feeling. But I don’t have to guess.
He tells me how he’s feeling all the time.
Keep your hands off my guns! he’ll say, or What kind of jet is that?
He’ll work through math problems in my head.

A part of him practices living whenever I speak.
Especially the part that says “very grateful” — 
even when I find myself caught in a state
of graceless unrepentance. When Grandpa kneels
in my skull to undertake an act of prayer,

I rarely understand what he means.
I don’t have my Heavenly Father on speed dial —
just my earthly one, and his. In fact I survived 
a long line of fathers each overcome by void, 
passing a gem-encrusted chalice full of nothing 

to their sacred sons so that they might also 
struggle with meaning. Now it’s my turn
to burn my hands on the metaphysical hot potato.
Without children of my own, who will take 
this nothingness from my chest?


III
This is why Plato said all the poets are liars.
The lyric poem is supposed to hinge upon a trigger,
some present happening that throws us
into memory’s warm embouchure.
But I don’t need a trigger to think 

about what I’ve lost. The river of ghosts 
flows naturally through me, unhindered by convention 
of what I should feel and when.
Even at his lowest, Grandpa was full of endless thanks.
Grandpa knew something I don’t.

Even as the sense of emptiness decays 
from one generation to the next, the joy 
he felt when seeing my fat-baby form 
still fuels me. The relief when he knew I’d make it.
As if something more personal than personal was at stake.


IV
Without memory there would be no life or death.
My family is divided: some of us are stuck within time,
while others have long since passed beyond.
I want to believe like Grandpa believed.
I betray him all the time when I don’t.

Thrice removed from the truth, it’s up to me
to decide where to place our faith. It lasts
the winter as a negotiated thing, an energy
that spins in my body with no outlet.
Wherever I go, Grandpa is going with me.

He tells me that to be an angel of forgiveness,
first I must see with many eyes, speak in something
like tongues. That to drink from the gem-encrusted
chalice I must submerge it in the river,
lift it from the cold, raise it to my lips,

give names to the birth that swims inside.

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