He was a solemn and delicate little boy. His father was a physicist, and I could see on the day that I watched him on the beach in La Jolla, that the shell in his hand was no toy to him. He had learned to look at things. Also to treat information with great seriousness. So he studied it carefully and explained to me that the successive ridges on the curvature were the stages of its growth, and what form of carbon calcium was, and how evolution had worked its way up to invertebrates. He would brush back a shock of blond hair from his eyes to look up and see if I followed him. The hole in his heart was not what killed him; it was the way that his lungs had to labor because of the defect. The surf was breaking through irises of light, quick small rainbows down the beach as far as one could see. He had to have been a very avid listener. It seemed to me to mean that he’d been loved, and wanted to be like his father, which was why it was so delicious to him to be talking to almost any adult about all there is to know.
This poem came about when a nephew of mine died suddenly at the age of 33. I found myself thinking about the different qualities of feeling we experience because of the different ages at which people die, as if sorrow were music and the world saturated in several very different musics at the same time.
"A digital collection of manuscripts and photographs related to the Welsh poet and writer Dylan Thomas held at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin is now online thanks to an international collaboration just in time for International Dylan Thomas Day on May 14."
"I often think about the precision in Hayden's language. The words that take on the work of casting several meanings. 'What did I know, what did I know/of love’s austere and lonely offices?' I know all the words he used, but in this formation, with the repetition, the odd use of the word 'offices' and its proximity to the words 'austere' and 'lonely,' the words seem alien and strange in the best way."
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