The year my father was born
Hart Crane died by suicide while
sailing between Mexico and New York—
Harold Hart Crane of Garrettsville, Ohio
whose body was never recovered since he
leapt overboard into the Gulf of Mexico.

My father would have had nothing to do with
a poet committing suicide after a steamship crew
savagely beat him for being who and what he was.
Horseshit, he’d have called it. Especially the gay-
poet part of it since I wrote and published poems.
I guess I’m afraid, he said once, that you’re gay.

No wonder Hart Crane skreiched Goodbye
and went over the side (and in broad daylight)
with one big, effeminate wave for the shit-world—
Hart Crane whose father invented the Lifesaver
candy, held the patent, and was a businessman.
Crane may not have told his father he was gay.

Just the phrase sucking cock would piss him off,
my father. If he heard it, he’d stop a conversation.
Announce there was no need to be so pornographic.
Wouldn’t let it slide. Not that. Maybe the n-word
but not cock—nothing having to do with cocks
or someone saying he might like to suck one

or take one inside him as an act of love and of
male tenderness for which there is no metaphor
only a past in which homophobia and 1932 were
acquainted. Just that, though: no hand-holding
and no one sucking anyone’s cock, then having
to jump the fuck overboard and be lost at sea.