I Eat Poetry

Could someone direct me to a poem, which had a list of things the poet wants his son to know about after his death? A line in it was something like, "His grandfather is not my father?".
Thank you. Also a poem for you.


"Why do people stop breathing?"
- Pancho Alvarez

Do they? And if they do, perhaps
it's simply because they can't

anymore, the way the horizon draws
a sentence from a pair of lungs, beyond

or some other last word. The answer
lies in color, blue and the vast

resignation of a sky aware of how small
everything else is, how fleeting. Or gray,

ash and the natural spiral of dust
stalling on its journey to ground. What

I mean to say is, half of your heart
is already pulsing with the wild

rhythm of knowing. The other half
is the largest window you've ever seen.

What you mean to say is, Why do people
die? Imagine that window, now,

the stone-constant horizon, the beyond
where fragments of breath, colorless,

turn into ice then water
then back again to breath. People

don't stop breathing.
We do.


-- Mikael De Lara Co