437 Death poems

It disappeared. It reappeared as chimney smoke that burnt through carcasses of swallows stilled, and that it portrayed no will was why I followed that smoke with this pair of eyes. It was that it didn’t need or require my belief that I leant upon it as a tired worker upon a gate.

About the dead having available to them all breeds of knowledge, some pure, others wicked, especially what is future, and the history that remains once the waters recede, revealing the land that couldn’t reject or contain it, and the land that is not new, is indigo, is ancient, lived as all the trees that fit and clothe it are lived, simple pine, oak, grand magnolia, he said they frighten him, that what they hold in their silences silences: sometimes a boy will slip from his climbing, drown but the myth knows why, sometimes a boy will swing with the leaves.

(from Richard II , spoken by King Richard) No matter where; of comfort no man speak: Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs; Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth, Let’s choose executors and talk of wills: And yet not so, for what can we bequeath Save our deposed bodies to the ground? Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke’s, And nothing can we call our own but death And that small model of the barren earth Which serves as paste and cover to our bones. For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings; How some have been deposed; some slain in war, Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed; Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d; All murder’d: for within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits, Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, Allowing him a breath, a little scene, To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks, Infusing him with self and vain conceit, As if this flesh which walls about our life, Were brass impregnable, and humor’d thus Comes at the last and with a little pin Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king! Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood With solemn reverence: throw away respect, Tradition, form and ceremonious duty, For you have but mistook me all this while: I live with bread like you, feel want, Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus, How can you say to me, I am a king?

At first I felt shame because I had entered through the door marked Your Death. Not a valuable word written unsteeped in your death. You are the ruin whose arm encircles the young woman at the posthumous bar, before your death. The grass is still hungry above you, fed by your death. Kill whatever killed your father, your life turning to me again said before your death. Hard to grow old still hungry. You were still hungry at your death.

It was night, it had rained, there were pieces of cars and half-cars strewn, it was still, and bright, a woman was lying on the highway, on her back, with her head curled back and tucked under her shoulders so the back of her head touched her spine between her shoulder-blades, her clothes mostly accidented off, and her leg gone, a long bone sticking out of the stub of her thigh— this was her her abandoned matter, my mother grabbed my head and turned it and clamped it into her chest, between her breasts. My father was driving—not sober but not in this accident, we’d approached it out of neutral twilight, broken glass on wet black macadam, like an underlying midnight abristle with stars. This was the world—maybe the only one. The dead woman was not the person my father had recently almost run over, who had suddenly leapt away from our family car, jerking back from death, she was not I, she was not my mother, but maybe she was a model of the mortal, the elements ranged around her on the tar— glass, bone, metal, flesh, and the family.

This is the village where the funeral Stilted its dusty march over deep ruts Up the hillside covered with queen’s lace To the patch of weeds known finally to all. Of her virtues large tongues were loud As I, a stranger, trudged the streets Gay with huckstering: loud whispers from a few Sly wags who squeezed a humor from the shroud. For this was death. I should never see these men again And yet, like the swiftness of remembered evil— An issue for conscience, say— The cold heart of death was beating in my brain: A new figuration of an old phenomenon. This is the village where women walk the streets Selling eggs, breasts ungathered, hands like rawhide; Of their virtues the symbol can be washtubs But when they die it is a time of singing, And then the symbol changes with change of place. Let the wags wag as the pall-bearers climb the hill. Let a new slab look off into the sunset: The night drops down with sullen grace.

Sybaritic afterlife I don’t crave you. I like daylight. I like crowds. I don’t think it will be charming underground. The silence will be sudden then last. What’s chic will shrink. There won’t be any pretty, pity. Will never peaches there, or air. We’ll be so squashed and sour there. I don’t want a cold place. Don’t want a threadbare clamp and consequence all old. Our loneliness will be prolonged then go too far. Oh fuck it’s true. Then nothing left of you.

The silver swan, who living had no note, When death approached, unlocked her silent throat; Leaning her breast against the reedy shore, Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more: “Farewell, all joys; Oh death, come close mine eyes; More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.”

Since there is no escape, since at the end My body will be utterly destroyed, This hand I love as I have loved a friend, This body I tended, wept with and enjoyed; Since there is no escape even for me Who love life with a love too sharp to bear: The scent of orchards in the rain, the sea And hours alone too still and sure for prayer— Since darkness waits for me, then all the more Let me go down as waves sweep to the shore In pride, and let me sing with my last breath; In these few hours of light I lift my head; Life is my lover—I shall leave the dead If there is any way to baffle death.

take you where you don’t want to go. Where you’d been and had passed smilingly through, and were alive. Then.