437 Death poems

When I watch the living meet, And the moving pageant file Warm and breathing through the street Where I lodge a little while, If the heats of hate and lust In the house of flesh are strong, Let me mind the house of dust Where my sojourn shall be long. In the nation that is not Nothing stands that stood before; There revenges are forgot, And the hater hates no more; Lovers lying two and two Ask not whom they sleep beside, And the bridegroom all night through Never turns him to the bride.

The time you won your town the race We chaired you through the market-place; Man and boy stood cheering by, And home we brought you shoulder-high. To-day, the road all runners come, Shoulder-high we bring you home, And set you at your threshold down, Townsman of a stiller town. Smart lad, to slip betimes away From fields where glory does not stay And early though the laurel grows It withers quicker than the rose. Eyes the shady night has shut Cannot see the record cut, And silence sounds no worse than cheers After earth has stopped the ears: Now you will not swell the rout Of lads that wore their honours out, Runners whom renown outran And the name died before the man. So set, before its echoes fade, The fleet foot on the sill of shade, And hold to the low lintel up The still-defended challenge-cup. And round that early-laurelled head Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead, And find unwithered on its curls The garland briefer than a girl's.

[FOR WARREN WINSLOW, DEAD AT SEA] Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air and the beasts of the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth. I A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket— The sea was still breaking violently and night Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet, When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light Flashed from his matted head and marble feet, He grappled at the net With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs: The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites, Its open, staring eyes Were lustreless dead-lights Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk Heavy with sand. We weight the body, close Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came, Where the heel-headed dogfish barks its nose On Ahab’s void and forehead; and the name Is blocked in yellow chalk. Sailors, who pitch this portent at the sea Where dreadnaughts shall confess Its hell-bent deity, When you are powerless To sand-bag this Atlantic bulwark, faced By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste In his steel scales: ask for no Orphean lute To pluck life back. The guns of the steeled fleet Recoil and then repeat The hoarse salute. II Whenever winds are moving and their breath Heaves at the roped-in bulwarks of this pier, The terns and sea-gulls tremble at your death In these home waters. Sailor, can you hear The Pequod’s sea wings, beating landward, fall Headlong and break on our Atlantic wall Off ’Sconset, where the yawing S-boats splash The bellbuoy, with ballooning spinnakers, As the entangled, screeching mainsheet clears The blocks: off Madaket, where lubbers lash The heavy surf and throw their long lead squids For blue-fish? Sea-gulls blink their heavy lids Seaward. The winds’ wings beat upon the stones, Cousin, and scream for you and the claws rush At the sea’s throat and wring it in the slush Of this old Quaker graveyard where the bones Cry out in the long night for the hurt beast Bobbing by Ahab’s whaleboats in the East. III All you recovered from Poseidon died With you, my cousin, and the harrowed brine Is fruitless on the blue beard of the god, Stretching beyond us to the castles in Spain, Nantucket’s westward haven. To Cape Cod Guns, cradled on the tide, Blast the eelgrass about a waterclock Of bilge and backwash, roil the salt and sand Lashing earth’s scaffold, rock Our warships in the hand Of the great God, where time’s contrition blues Whatever it was these Quaker sailors lost In the mad scramble of their lives. They died When time was open-eyed, Wooden and childish; only bones abide There, in the nowhere, where their boats were tossed Sky-high, where mariners had fabled news Of IS, the whited monster. What it cost Them is their secret. In the sperm-whale’s slick I see the Quakers drown and hear their cry: “If God himself had not been on our side, If God himself had not been on our side, When the Atlantic rose against us, why, Then it had swallowed us up quick.” IV This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale Who spewed Nantucket bones on the thrashed swell And stirred the troubled waters to whirlpools To send the Pequod packing off to hell: This is the end of them, three-quarters fools, Snatching at straws to sail Seaward and seaward on the turntail whale, Spouting out blood and water as it rolls, Sick as a dog to these Atlantic shoals: Clamavimus, O depths. Let the sea-gulls wail For water, for the deep where the high tide Mutters to its hurt self, mutters and ebbs. Waves wallow in their wash, go out and out, Leave only the death-rattle of the crabs, The beach increasing, its enormous snout Sucking the ocean’s side. This is the end of running on the waves; We are poured out like water. Who will dance The mast-lashed master of Leviathans Up from this field of Quakers in their unstoned graves? V When the whale’s viscera go and the roll Of its corruption overruns this world Beyond tree-swept Nantucket and Woods Hole And Martha’s Vineyard, Sailor, will your sword Whistle and fall and sink into the fat? In the great ash-pit of Jehoshaphat The bones cry for the blood of the white whale, The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears, The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail, And hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags And rips the sperm-whale’s midriff into rags, Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather, Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers Where the morning stars sing out together And thunder shakes the white surf and dismembers The red flag hammered in the mast-head. Hide Our steel, Jonas Messias, in Thy side. VI OUR LADY OF WALSINGHAM There once the penitents took off their shoes And then walked barefoot the remaining mile; And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows file Slowly along the munching English lane, Like cows to the old shrine, until you lose Track of your dragging pain. The stream flows down under the druid tree, Shiloah’s whirlpools gurgle and make glad The castle of God. Sailor, you were glad And whistled Sion by that stream. But see: Our Lady, too small for her canopy, Sits near the altar. There’s no comeliness At all or charm in that expressionless Face with its heavy eyelids. As before, This face, for centuries a memory, Non est species, neque decor, Expressionless, expresses God: it goes Past castled Sion. She knows what God knows, Not Calvary’s Cross nor crib at Bethlehem Now, and the world shall come to Walsingham. VII The empty winds are creaking and the oak Splatters and splatters on the cenotaph, The boughs are trembling and a gaff Bobs on the untimely stroke Of the greased wash exploding on a shoal-bell In the old mouth of the Atlantic. It’s well; Atlantic, you are fouled with the blue sailors, Sea-monsters, upward angel, downward fish: Unmarried and corroding, spare of flesh Mart once of supercilious, wing’d clippers, Atlantic, where your bell-trap guts its spoil You could cut the brackish winds with a knife Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time When the Lord God formed man from the sea’s slime And breathed into his face the breath of life, And blue-lung’d combers lumbered to the kill. The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.

Airport bus from JFK cruising through Queens passing huge endless cemetery by Long Island’s old expressway (once a dirt path for wheelless Indians) myriad small tombstones tilted up gesturing statues on parapets stone arms or wings upraised lost among illegible inscriptions And the setting yellow sun painting all of them on one side only with an ochre brush Rows and rows and rows and rows of small stone slabs tilted toward the sun forever While on the far horizon Mannahatta’s great stone slabs skyscraper tombs and parapets casting their own long black shadows over all these long-haired graves the final restless places of old-country potato farmers dustbin pawnbrokers dead dagos and Dublin bouncers tinsmiths and blacksmiths and roofers house painters and house carpenters cabinet makers and cigar makers garment workers and streetcar motormen railroad switchmen and signal salesmen swabbers and sweepers and swampers steam-fitters and key-punch operators ward heelers and labor organizers railroad dicks and smalltime mafiosi shopkeepers and saloon keepers and doormen icemen and middlemen and conmen housekeepers and housewives and dowagers French housemaids and Swedish cooks Brooklyn barmaids and Bronxville butlers opera singers and gandy dancers pitchers and catchers in the days of ragtime baseball poolroom hustlers and fight promoters Catholic sisters of charity parish priests and Irish cops Viennese doctors of delirium now all abandoned in eternity parcels in a dead-letter office inscrutable addresses on them beyond further deliverance in an America wheeling past them and disappearing oblivious into East River’s echoing tunnels down the great American drain

Clouds spout upon her Their waters amain In ruthless disdain, – Her who but lately Had shivered with pain As at touch of dishonour If there had lit on her So coldly, so straightly Such arrows of rain: One who to shelter Her delicate head Would quicken and quicken Each tentative tread If drops chanced to pelt her That summertime spills In dust-paven rills When thunder-clouds thicken And birds close their bills. Would that I lay there And she were housed here! Or better, together Were folded away there Exposed to one weather We both, – who would stray there When sunny the day there, Or evening was clear At the prime of the year. Soon will be growing Green blades from her mound, And daisies be showing Like stars on the ground, Till she form part of them – Ay – the sweet heart of them, Loved beyond measure With a child’s pleasure All her life’s round.

ready to receive remains built for death, ready to receive the flatly desolate superficial deeply commissioned intellectual offer of suggestive actions, for the hunger assassin to fall back on and become forcefull psychological damage, bottled for drinkable agitation. riding a back seat writing construction, contesting the oncoming molten universe, immersed in villagers, city dwellers, trembling, laughing, (white teeth redone for the perfect test of time), to inhale flesh and stone from long ago, forgetting the horrors of holy oil infusion clocks and gritty body galleries, leaving behind the mourning river’s crimson fragrance smoldering from the previous unbearable fever. in a posture of myself on a speeding body, without hands and feet, I am ready to receive the vomit of consciousness and proceed down the avenues of suggestion to become a limited option.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes In their stone boots. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone. —Anne Sexton Pick up the smooth stone at your boot tip— Quickly blow the dust off the edge. This is for Sexton’s mother who died March 1959. This is for Sexton’s father who died June 1959. This is for love born in September 1949. When Autumn came, it left the trees bare. Leaves are but whisper ready to become snow. No sign of a harvest, no corn. This is for Anne. I breathe out carbon, breathe in carbon, in early October 1971. The stones in the river’s currents Are polished. I was conceived in the empty Winter. Little did I know when Coyote threw His one stone into the perfect pool, it meant One by one, we die just as amber mosquitoes. For the Navajo people, Coyote threw the stone Into the ocean for our survival. Across the ocean, Past television screens—Marie, sweet Marie— This is for Marie’s voice and scrolling words: Tumor in the back of the head. The black birds Fill the sky as icy hail: It Must Have Been Love. September 2002, I have lived another year. I wish Sweden to keep her goddess of music. Another new moon passes and I understand The word terminal. This is for Coyote And his ability to hide his life force. This again Is for understanding Sexton today. This is for My mother who will weave an AIDS quilt. She’ll use a loom and yarn and tears, this is for Love and hoping that when the universe ends We never hear the splash. We never hear th—

Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land; When you can no more hold me by the hand, Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay. Remember me when no more day by day You tell me of our future that you plann'd: Only remember me; you understand It will be late to counsel then or pray. Yet if you should forget me for a while And afterwards remember, do not grieve: For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad.

Sing the mass— light upon me washing words now that I am gone. The sky was a hot, blue sheet the summer breeze fanned out and over the town. I could have lived forever under that sky. Forgetting where I was, I looked left, not right, crossed into a street and stepped in front of the bus that ended me. Will you believe me when I tell you it was beautiful— my left leg turned to uselessness and my right shoe flung some distance down the road? Will you believe me when I tell you I had never been so in love with anyone as I was, then, with everyone I saw? The way an age-worn man held his wife’s shaking arm, supporting the weight that seemed to sing from the heart she clutched. Knowing her eyes embraced the pile that was me, he guided her sacked body through the crowd. And the way one woman began a fast the moment she looked under the wheel. I saw her swear off decadence. I saw her start to pray. You see, I was so beautiful the woman sent to clean the street used words like police tape to keep back a young boy seconds before he rounded the grisly bumper. The woman who cordoned the area feared my memory would fly him through the world on pinions of passion much as, later, the sight of my awful beauty pulled her down to tears when she pooled my blood with water and swiftly, swiftly washed my stains away.

Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did too! Her mirth the world required; She bathed it in smiles of glee. But her heart was tired, tired, And now they let her be. Her life was turning, turning, In mazes of heat and sound. But for peace her soul was yearning, And now peace laps her round. Her cabin'd, ample spirit, It flutter'd and fail'd for breath. To-night it doth inherit The vasty hall of death.