To Love an Alcoholic [1]
             Elaine de Kooning, Bacchus #81, 1983

A blizzard blew in sideways. I found,
in the caves my boots made, the lightest

shade of blue. Like somewhere else
I was dead. The place where you’re dead, too.

The wind knocks against the door
like a drunk uncle. Foreshortened,

your belly’s a satyr, your long beard a nymph.
This is a cliche you don’t mind swallowing.

You circle the periphery of your life
like a confused shark, teeth falling out

and in your back, no bone. You want
to push it to the limit. In a story

my mother used to tell, a woman
fell down the stairs to her death.

At the estate sale, a neighbor chose a pair
of silver candlesticks and discovered a dent.

The murder weapon. The son had killed
his mother. I draw the devil upside down.

The horns make a bowl; his attendants
fall away, their chains a swing

with no child. Between the legs, nothing
but gravity. I have helped my mother

save every man in our family
again and again, to no end.


To Love an Alcoholic [2]

At the end of the war, Giacometti
carried his work in his pocket:

six matchboxes, each containing
a miniature that, with a deft

swoop of a thumb, could disappear.
When you died for a year—

some god’s hand pushed
into form a cast of the original self.

Your two long legs like sticks
under a blanket of leaves.

Your face a carving
of a face. I sat in your room

to hold your hands’ long
bones. You could not speak.

The pond of your eyes balanced
our life in the air like molten bronze,

hot as now. The end of everything
I know: I hold it in my palm.

After, I take one sweater
from your closet. The pockets

are full of coins, decorated
with the heads of tiny men

who could almost be my father.