17.

Son, you were allergic to filberts then

And the moon on my Inuit shirt

Was more than an artificial paradise.

The flâneurs in the park would stare

At the Finnish jackets you and your sister

Wore all those years, which, like Niagara

Poured like our blood in the riverrun.

It’s hard to speak of love to a child

On the verge, you will shape and speak

Your changes, think, perhaps that girls

Make the world worth something. Your poems

Were real from the first: you shook

The neck of rhetoric and threw it out

And taught my heart with your first shout.