54 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 4, 2014 told his father that he worried too much. One day in 2011, Gabriel was at the apartment on West 109th Street where his friend Joe Straw, who was a little older than Gabriel, lived with his mother. Gabriel and Straw were playing a video game. Their games grew so heated that they played standing up. "Gabriel was a little bit in back of me,"Straw told me. "He was saying, 'Oh yeah, watch, 'cause I got you now,' and then I just heard him hit the floor." Straw real- ized that Gabriel was having a seizure, and he put his hand in Gabriel's mouth to keep him from bit- ing his tongue. Straw's mother called 911 and, while they waited, Straw said he held Gabriel as tight as he could. "The medics asked him what year it was, and he didn't say the right year," Straw said. "He kept taking o his oxygen mask and saying hello into it, like it was a phone." A few weeks later, Landay and Hirsch took Gabriel to a hospital for tests. Gabriel was hopeful that the tests would identify the reason for all his problems and that there would be a treatment to cure him, but the tests didn't really show anything. "Nobody had any idea what was wrong with him," Hirsch said. Gabriel was dis- consolate. He had another seizure, in Chi- cago, while he and Tamar were visiting Hirsch's mother. At lunch at a restaurant, his eyes rolled back, and he fell on Tamar's shoulder. They were sitting in a booth be- side a window, and he began to punch the window. The seizure lasted about a min- ute. Then he started kissing Tamar, and she held him. His knuckles were bruised, he had a terrible headache, and he couldn't recall anything that had happened. Hirsch and I had been talking for a cou- ple of hours. Evening was falling and the windows were turning darker. He walked around the o ce, collecting his things. "I didn't just worry about his present well-be- ing," he said. "He was so unworldly that it was hard to imagine a path for him into the future. He seemed so unsuited to the prac- tical world that I could never quite see him as a middle-aged man. It never occurred to me that he would die, of course, especially so young. It was too awful a thing to think about. He sometimes put his trust in the wrong people, and made poor choices, but he was also so touching and full of joy. He was incomparably alive, and so unexpect- edly charismatic. My heart was lifted whenever I saw him. It's really impossible to believe he's left the world for good." He paused, and for a moment he seemed over- come. Then he said, "I feel so grateful to have had him for my son." Writing "Gabriel" required Hirsch, for the first time, to sort through a huge body of material for which he had to find a shape and a form. He found an organizing principle in the model of three-line stanzas. He liked that each stanza had a be- ginning, a middle, and an end. Usually, the three-line stanza is "a dialect of the un- derworld," Eavan Boland pointed out to me. "A signal that the poem is about grief. " This is mainly be- cause it invokes terza rima, the three-line rhyming scheme of the "Divine Comedy."Dante's lines rhyme aba, bcb, cdc, and so on, but Hirsch's lines are unrhymed. Hirsch's stanzas are also unpunctuated, which al- lows them to move adroitly and to bear what the poet C. K. Williams described to me as "both trivial things and grandly non-trivial things"---Gabriel's antics, his humor and presence, but also the weight of Hirsch's own desolate feelings. Charles Simic told me that the stanzas' pace and fluidity reminded him of "the way memories pour out of us." The final structure---sections of ten stanzas, each section occupying a page--- occurred to Hirsch after four months. The sections sometimes carry the poem's narrative, and sometimes convey associa- tions that are a kind of commentary.They aren't poems themselves; Hirsch calls them "near-poems."He liked that the fast alternations of tone and subject seemed to evoke the willfulness and impulsivity that were hallmarks of Gabriel's temperament. One day, I sat with Hirsch in his o ce and looked through drafts of "Gabriel," which filled one of those cardboard boxes called Bankers Boxes. Hirsch held the box on his lap and leafed through the pages. Now and then, he lifted several pages from the file. "Oh wow, you see a lot of mistakes when you read it this way," he said. "This was a whole section that I didn't include where I was calling him 'Dada boy.' I had a lot of anecdotes under Dada boy. Dada boy captured something, but in the end I didn't think it worked that well." He put the pages back and re- moved some others. "The boy with a headset," he said. "I had 'The boy with a headset did not have the patience of a flâneur. He did not like to take his time and linger along the avenues.' It was going on like that for a while. I decided it was a false track." The next section Hirsch examined, about Gabriel's manner, is part of the final poem. "I had a surfeit of stories about Ga- briel's impulsivity, and I decided to make one particular section about Mr. Impul- sive, which I hoped would have a droll feeling," he said. The section begins: Mr. Impulsive walked out of class When he did not like what the teacher said It was boring Mr. Impulsive scurried out in a storm Wearing shorts and a wife beater Soon he was shivering The neighbors complained to the landlord Complained to me but Mr. Impulsive Could not be bothered to close the gate. All the schools that Gabriel attended, Hirsch condensed into a section written using the structure of a blues lyric. "I love the blues, and it seemed like a good sub- ject for the form, since that's how he felt about school."The section begins: He's singing the Poe Elementary School blues He's singing the Shlenker School blues a day school For the offspring of upper-middle-class strivers He's singing the Montessori School blues He's singing the Monarch School blues For kids with executive function disorders And ends: There are no more academies to attend He was not befriended by study A therapist called him one of the lost boys. Grasping another set of pages, he said, "I thought I hadn't captured enough about worrying. Janet and I were end- lessly worrying. So there's a section about worry. I changed the ending from 'we' to 'I.' " The section reads: The evening with its lamps burning The night with its head in its hands The early morning I look back at the worried parents Wandering through the house What are we going to do