Connie Stadler		Evening walk   Softly dying In pirouette    A leaf                    Touched   A man                          Mourned   A dénouement.		Surviving Relatives: for Sharon Olds   I.  I put The Father back on the shelf.  Feeling violation in the bobbing public acknowledgements of the chin next to me, buried deep in her copy of the plain beige text.                 ... sensing the certainty of fresh incineration,                 the doubtless torment of your words, I left                 the slim bookshop steeped in literati musk.   Safe abed, husband to my right. I gazed at the closed copy of your earliest words, at balance in open palm:                 Glossy, fire red cover                 Black gothic title                 Your white Garamond name.     II.  The first poem that touched all the hollows and swells of my emergent  I was culled by Woman, crafted of women And while I did not yet know the full meaning of unforgettable abortions, I, too, had heard "those voices of the wind."   She was flame and she was knife and she was rocking chair, riding soft, on an August porch. Black, fierce, woman sobs hurled to the air, to the Ashes, to those who could pause to listen.  She was The Mother I never had, and the image for my own soul, still in the making.     III. In the broken house, I began speaking with other poets, often, all the time.  I turned my back to Whitman's Everyman and the world splayed according to Eliot.  I became intimate with Poe's caress of sound, and embodiment of beautiful fear.  I let Thomas' Welch-flecked cadenzas spill all over, brim to the very top of my Bronx teenaged room.   But where, I wondered, were the women? I searched and I strained. I pushed out of Plath's suffocating Bell-Jar and pushed against Sexton's awful upward stroking.  They violated my immunity and touched my violations.                 Besides, they telegraphed their endings. A decade further on, I still stayed to the path of mindless meanderings, in flight from the death-grip of a murdered childhood.                                                                                IV.  I found, in time, new voices.  The steel tongued warrior songs of born-again victims. Black, lesbian, female screams and shouts.  Parker, Hooks and Lorde, who took up the stiletto, giving form and incantation -- Slaying social and self hates in incising tongues and irrepressible images.  I cleaved to them, moving behind, now towards, ever nearing, even when pale, man-centric, raw pieces of me, might not all be welcome.                   Then we met, though you did not know it. Now you do.  After all, this is your poem. Kinnell offered you his book, the new one, the one with iridescent Garamond lettering on Gallic landscape (by Klimt). A good book, with soft words, a fine book.                 But this is your poem.     V.  Satan Says so much.  Doesn't He? Everyday.  He Speaks.  Your father's heaping, heavy body, studded with bile and waste, hurled me back to other places, sites of distant, deliberate, time, sites of desecrated 'lamb-white, mustard seed, green and golden' impress. I tried to dismiss you -- to fight the life grip of your paged heart.  Your brutal exaltations. Your gratuitous vulgarity. 'a veritable thesaurus of filth, a litany of genitalia.'   But your truth impaled denial  Exquisite, anguished written communion drew me into the vortex of ravaged souls.  Yours and mine, now joined. And from that union, I wanted out.  I closed you quickly and often.  I even tried in quiet time to re-edit you. But the siren would not be silenced.     VI.  So having said all this. Having shared all this, having partaken in this ritual, the formalities of introduction. I have something to say, to share with you.   Just as you are most welcome to embrace and eviscerate these words, I will tell you frankly, that in That Year you discovered your name -- as Jew, as survivor, in that moment of impoverishment and birth, you left something out, sold us both short.  For, as you well know, when the prison guard, the tormentor is your God and your guardian.  It is much worse   Than the space spanned in that last stanza, in the space between Auschwitz and armistice, there is, as Satan knows, as you know, as I know, a hideous abyss.  You cannot rage as collectivity in your barracked cells, in the dignity of your emaciation with your disemboweled brethren, rocking and cradling a dying parent.   You cannot wear your yellow star, your pink triangle, with secret pride, if Hell and Home and Home and Hell                are one. And your Goebbels is your world -- both Mother and The Father.