Old poem from Way Stations :

         The Granary
       
                                          for J.P.
    
         There were huge comfortable rooms,
 dusty with archaeological bric-a-brac,
 brass rubbings of the Black Prince,
 and a photograph of your tiny sister
 smiling, holding a shard in a trench.

  
         I loved the cozy smells of your house,
 perfumed with antiquity and your mother's
 potato cooking, her high throaty
 European sparrow voice, calling Johnny!
 Johnny!  Dinner's on the table, boys!

  
         Your father a kindly cultivated man,
 modest, his speech dry and bright
 like a cello – questioning us
 at the table with witty attention –
 a doctor who treated Guillaume Barré.

  
         We were twelve-year-old friends
 when I became your apprentice –
 careless for numb noon,
 caught up in steady response
 to crafty forms and riddling shades.

  
         You inhabited a cloudy solitude
 like a meditative Leonardo, yet you
 marshalled all the armies of Europe
 in brilliant colors for us to survey,
 clashing and surging across the floor.
 
 And all history lay buried in the big
 Egyptian attic, that family granary
 of Time, steaming through the deep quiet
 sustained chord of Minnesota summer,
 the dense last hours of childhood.

  
         All except for the room set aside
 for your older brother, with the bright
 football pennants and the trophies –
 a father's eldest son, whom I never
 met, who never came home from Vietnam.