TWO POEMS FROM THE ARCHIVES

What shall I call him? Ten years further on

He’ll be my father but now, 1941, he is fifteen

At one in the morning, as usual

He is awake. The new day expects

To find him reading or thinking

Or raising a casual hand to welcome it.

In the kitchen, his mother sits rapt,

Reading a newspaper she has saved since 1924.

Real news endures though the pages are yellow.

In a few moments she’ll climb to the attic room

Bringing her youngest an apple, a cookie,

Some tea with lemon in a blue glass cup.

In 1905 in Dublin, New Hampshire

Patrick McAleer held a rabbit

I have seen the photograph of them

Captioned Patrick McAleer holding a rabbit

The rabbit – small, brown, alert -- looks untroubled;

He, though, would have called the picture

Rabbit in landscape, with McAleer.

It is hard to tell if McAleer is smiling

His enormous mustache hides his lips

But he is certainly calm; pleased, I think,

That he, the rabbit, the leafless trees behind them

Are so casually become immortal.

(Patrick McAleer was quite real, as was the rabbit. They both worked for Mark Twain. I suspect that McAleer was the Patrick who was Jonathan Swift's servant {see Journal to Stella, which you really should read} -- he has that look about him).