By Mary Karr
Sunday, June 15, 2008; BW12

Nearly 30 years after my daddy's death, I can still miss him with throat-clenching force. As a child, I shadowed him through pool halls, but -- with time and alcohol -- he eventually dwindled into a form that fit nowhere except on a barstool at the Veterans' Club. Maybe vets of that great generation created a distance inside them that distanced their kids, a sadness that's made for some great poems.

Edward Hirsch (who once squired this column into print) portrays a father who sold containers while himself containing mysteries. His "Special Orders" conjures the man at work: "sawdust clinging to his shoes./Give me back his tape measure and his keys/his drafting pencil . . ./his daydreams on lined paper."

I don't understand this uncontrollable grief.

Whatever you had that never fit,

whatever else you needed, believe me,

my father, who wanted your business,

would squat down at your side

and sketch you a container for it.

In "Preserved," Michael Milburn captures the slot in a man's life when he lives wedged between an aging father and a blooming son. Here we see the poet running video footage of his once dynamic father, now in decline and lying on a sofa:

When Nancy brings the video out,

years of brittle spools copied onto

one cassette, we all watch.

Dad sits too, blind, a book-on-tape

shouting through headphones,

pausing to grumble questions

when we laugh or exclaim.

"There's Grandpa," my son calls,

and there he is: hair slate black,

belly like a washboard. "That must be

Bermuda, 1950," Mom murmurs.

He's thirty-two, all movement,

slapping a polo ball,

clowning with a shotgun

as he picks off clay pigeons

flung into the sky. And here

he nestles a newborn

for the camera. "You look like me,"

my son says, nudging me.

When the screen switches abruptly

to snow, Mom sighs and I flick it off. The boy sniffles

and goes over to rest his head

on the swelled stomach. "Poor Grandpa,"

he whispers. The old man

touches his hair. "Hello, small grandson," he says, startled,

swinging his head toward the mute t.v.

"Is it over?"

The poet wants to preserve what's passing, even if only on video (or in print), but the patriarch's senses are shutting down. For the poem to end with the grandfather wondering, "Is it over?" says -- with understated grace -- how soon and sadly it is.

("Special Orders" is the title poem from the most recent collection of poems by Edward Hirsch. Knopf 2008. Copyright by Edward Hirsch. Michael Milburn's "Preserved" is from "The Blessings of Motion and Silence," Copyright 2007 by Michael Milburn.)