More years pass. My grandmother poem has rubberbanded outward and snapped back tight and gone through bits of every phase: narrative, sublime, moral, surreal, epic, epistolary, postmodern. The “I” slips in and out. The poem is not about me, but there I am all the same, holding a candle in the darkness and noticing my own nose glow.

Then I’m twenty-two — and my uncle is dying. I think of an old friend, a poet, who used to argue with med students about the use of poetry. “Medicine doesn’t save lives,” she’d say, “it only delays death. Poetry saves lives.” By now I’ve graduated from college and been disillusioned by the job market and the very idea of a career. The secret mantra of growing up has come to beat beside my heart every day: Then what? Then what? The future: an abyss of disposable names and dollars. We all die, goes the other refrain, which is a kind of nostrum.

Yet I keep writing. My feeling becomes a metaphor, a memory made. Anything written is something affirmed. Language feeds itself. I’ve only removed a mirror in a room of mirrors designed to get the sunlight blazing on the walls.

My uncle is in a quiet, damp nursing home north of Berkeley and will be the first of two uncles this summer to be taken, independently, by lymphoma. When my mother and I walk in, he smiles with real color for longer than is comfortable for me. At first I think it’s the morphine, but he’s been refusing to take it. Which means his smile is real surprise and real pleasure, a holy glimpse. It is better here than it was for my grandmother. He sits up; his wife is with him; minus the grimace and the clock, there is life in the room, a slow consumption of food, drink, medicine; his slippered feet wag underneath the table when he talks about the difficulty of walking; his mug of warm water slaps the table loudly when he lets his hand fall to gravity.

Grief hits us differently at different ages. This time it howls at my own mortality, which howls back in kind. And the guilt of responsibility emerges when I’m asked, a week later, to read something at his wake. How will I remember this goodbye, this man who was a father to me? How will I write it? My grandmother poem is magnetizing inside me again, and already I’m brushing it away. I think: No more of these words, these doughy things we’re pounding at. But what else can we do if unable to re-enter the box of routine and status quo? Language is the only individualizing power.

So I write, and what emerges is a palinode. Nietzsche said that sometimes the value of a thing is not in what we gain from it, but what we give for it, what we lose. Like getting your first tattoo, or giving up your virginity: self-ownership embodied in the choice of self-destruction. For me, the palinode is verse in contradictio, resisting convenience, pushing toward unease. It’s a poem upset with itself. This new poem rejects the objectivity of its earlier drafts. And with its deluge of drama, I find myself fed up with an anesthesia that doesn’t work, this music that never resolves. On the day of the wake, I tell them I don’t have anything, that I can’t read or speak. None of my drafts have been quite honest; and I sense that when I reach that point, it won’t be an honesty designed for heroism or public weeping. The dead die twice in our veneers.

So I sit silently in a pew, molding a lifelong regret.

Yet I keep writing. My feeling becomes a metaphor, a memory made. Anything written is something affirmed. Language feeds itself. I’ve only removed a mirror in a room of mirrors designed to get the sunlight blazing on the walls. The light reflects against anything that will take it; every small adjustment has kaleidoscopic ramifications. The process of the poem — the palinode, the poem and anti-poem — is itself a life experience. It marks a becoming: the work of a life lived, of visions wrestled.