I couldn’t pronounce it, but that didn’t stop me 
from going door to door in my neighborhood, 
collecting money for a cure. Not only that, 
 
but multiple sclerosis, emphysema, and more—
I would carry the metal tins like a pilgrim, 
ring the bell, and wait, full of virtue for
 
the current cause, until a stay-at-home mom 
answered and rummaged through her purse, 
finding coins for my sake. I never wondered 
 
if that money actually reached the afflicted. 
It was the 60s, when us kids took off all day 
who knows where, when the Good Humor 
 
truck crawled past on summer nights and 
we ran out for a treat. We fiddled with silver 
balls of mercury, rarely ate vegetables, 
 
called flavored Jello a fruit, and stayed inside
while planes strafed the neighborhood, 
spraying DDT to kill gypsy moth caterpillars
 
that denuded our trees. Then we went 
back to the woods and played army.
It’s a miracle any of us survived. 
                        

“Mom’s favorite place,” she writes 
in the caption. She’s in her teens, 
standing on the bridge over 16 Mile 
 
Creek with the half-smile of someone 
who’s home. She wears her own coat, 
not a hand-me-down from her sister—
 
dark gloves, bobby socks, sensible shoes—
but her calves are bare in the spring chill, 
under bare branches waiting for leaves. 
 
There’s water enough for a river, rapids 
tumbling over rocks. Towering trees 
line the slim country lane, shady 
 
in summer. I imagine her walking
that road year-round to hear herself 
think, talk to woods and water, 
 
take home their answers, keep them 
under her pillow—How will I leave? 
What will I become? Now the land’s 
 
sold for custom homes—the ruins 
of the old mill gone, my mother 
holding the hollow in her heart.
                        

In my dream, you are no longer dead, 
but roaming around in my town, 
doing who knows what with your time. 
Now you’re outside the 7-11, 
 
aimless, as you were at the end, 
and alone the way only an outcast
can be. Brilliant, wounded, you told 
your glory-day stories over and over, 
 
boring your friends—I was one of them,
shocked when your body was found 
in an empty bathtub. With no slashed 
wrists, and no autopsy, you left us 
 
a final mystery, which must be why
you’re smiling now. I expect you’re stuck 
in a bardo somewhere, trying to talk 
your way out with your stories,
 
or trying to confound obscurity 
with a replay of the book that made your name—
a sequel unfinished, in fact, barely begun.
A dream voice wakes me, intones, 
 
He hung himself. I don’t want to believe 
a metaphor that grim would do—
but Ken, wherever you are, let go, 
untie that final knot!