437 Death poems

Carried her unprotesting out the door. Kicked back the casket-stand. But it can't hold her, That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her, The lid's contrition nor the bolts before. Oh oh. Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise, She rises in the sunshine. There she goes, Back to the bars she knew and the repose In love-rooms and the things in people's eyes. Too vital and too squeaking. Must emerge. Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss, Slops the bad wine across her shantung, talks Of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework, walks In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge Of happiness, haply hysterics. Is.

God knows the law of life is death, and you can feel it in your warbler neck, your river-quick high stick wrist at the end of day. But the trophies: a goldfinch tearing up a pink thistle, a magpie dipping her wing tips in a white cloud, an ouzel barreling hip-high upstream with a warning. You wish you had a river. To make a river, it takes some mountains. Some rain to watershed. You wish you had a steady meadow and pink thistles bobbing at the border for your horizons, pale robins bouncing their good postures in the spruce shadows. Instead, the law of life comes for you like three men and a car. In your dreams, you win them over with your dreams: a goldfinch tearing up a pink thistle. A magpie so slow she knows how to keep death at bay, she takes her time with argument and hides her royal blue in black. Shy as a blue grouse, nevertheless God doesn’t forget his green mountains. You wish you had a river.

After it came in like a dark bird Out of the snow, barely whistling The notes father,mother,child, It was hard to say what made us happiest. Seeing the branches where it had learned To stir the air? The air that opened Without fear? Just the branches And us in a room of wild things? Like a shapeless flame, it flew A dozen times around the room. And, in a wink, a dozen more. Into the wall, the window, the door. You said the world turns to parts. You said the parts are cunning spheres. You said you always love the face of sin. You said it’s here, the lips and eyes and skin. Outside the snow deepened With heaves of discontent. Inside, the tremor of our life Flew in and in and in.

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers - Untouched by Morning - and untouched by noon - Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone - Grand go the Years, In the Crescent above them - Worlds scoop their Arcs - and Firmaments - row - Diadems - drop - And Doges surrender - Soundless as Dots, On a Disk of Snow.

Now he has silver in him. When sometime Death shall boil down unnecessary fat To reach the nub of our identity, When in the run of crime The skull is rifled for the gold in teeth, And chemistry has eaten from the spine Superfluous life and vigor, why then he Will show a richness to be wondered at, And shall be thought a mine Whose claim and stake are stone and floral wreath. The body burns away, and burning gives Light to the eye and moisture to the lip And warmth to our desires, but it burns Whatever body lives Into extinction though it wear a plate Of armor in it: therefore do we thrive In fear of fire, in terror of the ship That carries us to fire. A soldier learns To bear the silver weight Where in his head the fire is most alive.

I

The grave has more power than the eyes of the beloved. An open grave with all its magnets. This weight on the wings. The sky is waiting for an airship. I have the feeling that I haven’t got much life left. Three hours after the celestial attack. Why don’t I respond when I’m being offended? Because my religion doesn’t allow me to. Exterior maps: geography. Interior maps: psychography. And in your hard cathedral I kneel. Mountains pass camels pass like the history of wars in antiquity. Of all the men I am, I can’t find any of them without the control of the intruding eye. Problems. Mysteries that fasten themselves to my chest. All I want is not to see businesses nor gardens nor markets nor eyeglasses nor elevators. In order to serve all radio listeners, without discriminating between social classes, I speak a tongue that fills hearts with the law of communicating clouds. I have my brain or whatever it is full of skull moths. For the world to go on being what it is it must —per force—take another form. True poems are fires. When something cherished burns instead of the fireman I call, rushes forth the incendiary. It says: live, live, live! It is Death.

for Michele (1966-1972) Michele has become another dead little girl. An easy poem. Instant Praxitelean. Instant seventy-five year old photograph of my grandmother when she was a young woman with shadows I imagine were blue around her eyes. The beauty of it. Such guarded sweetness. What a greed of bruised gardenias. Oh Christ, whose name rips silk, I have seen raw cypresses so dark the mind comes to them without color. Dark on the Greek hillside. Dark, volcanic, dry and stone. Where the oldest women of the world are standing dressed in black up in the branches of fig trees in the gorge knocking with as much quickness as their weakness will allow. Weakness which my heart must not confuse with tenderness. And on the other side of the island a woman walks up the path with a burden of leaves on her head, guiding the goats with sounds she makes up, and then makes up again. The other darkness is easy: the men in the dreams who come in together to me with knives. There are so many traps, and many look courageous. The body goes into such raptures of obedience. But the huge stones on the desert resemble nobody’s mother. I remember the snake. After its skin had been cut away, and it was dropped it started to move across the clearing. Making its beautiful waving motion. It was all meat and bone. Pretty soon it was covered with dust. It seemed to know exactly where it wanted to go. Toward any dark trees.

Rachel Sherwood 1954-1979 "What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?" —Erich Segal, Love Story The first time we talked was in the rooftop cafeteria at Cal State Northridge. Misplaced poets, we sat amidst a crop of clean-cut freshmen while, round the college, smog-smudged San Fernando Valley beckoned, panoramic and bland. I’d just returned from my debauched year up north—sad, drunken sex at the baths, in dark parks. You still yearned for St. David’s, your stint as a foreign exchange student. In Wales, something fearless woke you up: you drank, wrote, fucked. Now, stuck in the suburbs, we talked poets, punk rock. This was the late seventies, disco’s zenith. We both wanted to look like Patti Smith. We both wanted to look like Patti Smith on her Horses album: disheveled, pale, thin, intense. You were scanning Meredith’s “Modern Love” for British Lit. I thought stale anyone before Sexton. You laughed, threw back your head. I puffed a Marlboro Light. In truth, you were too hearty, and I too uptight, to do punk. I praised, as twilight dimmed the gray valley, a poem you’d read at the student reading: a pitcher cracks, foreshadows a car crash. The skyline bled behind you. I’d also read that night—racked with stage fright, trembling uncontrollably. You seemed at ease, more confident than me. You seemed at ease, more confident than me, more independent. Lived on Amigo Avenue with a roommate, a moody science major; and your alter ego, a tomcat named Baby Tubbs. Still at home, I had no wheels. You drove a battered white hatchback full of newspapers, beer cans, comb, brush, books—half wastebasket, half purse. One night early on, we split a fifth of scotch, spread your tarot cards on the living room floor. You predicted long life for me, then said of yourself: “I might make twenty-five.” Your roommate walked by, shot a look. Later, I passed out beneath Lord Byron’s watchful eye. Passed out beneath Lord Byron’s watchful eye— the poster tacked above your secondhand couch—I dreamt I was falling down the side of a mountain, a scarecrow, twisted and limp, limbs ripped, bouncing from rock to rock. On every wall an idol: Toulouse-Lautrec cancan in kitchen, young Chatterton’s wan figure over your desk. Shuffling the deck, you asked the same question, drew the same black card: Death. Together we consulted all your oracles: Ouija board, zodiac, I Ching, palm, a fickle Magic 8 Ball. Hoping for more time, you inquired, believed like a convict praying for a reprieve. Like a convict praying for a reprieve, you were more alive than the complacent suburbanites I despised. Drunk and peeved at the world, I started an argument that ended with you hurling a full Coors at me as I fumed down your stairs. Four weeks passed before we spoke, a rift I endured by writing a poem about the freak- ish night a black cloud followed us—we lit candles, toasted oblivion. Battle scarred, we entered the undergraduate poetry contest at Northridge. Daniel Halpern guest judged...or was it May Swenson? After your death, I’d be happy you won. What can you say about a twenty-five- year-old girl who died? That as a child she loved horses. And dogs. And cats. That Monty Python made her laugh. That she was alive to the disruptions of her time. That she liked Byron, Rod Stewart, Mozart, Waugh, Poe, Keats, the Cars. That she lived on Amigo and was my friend. That she once threw her keys in anger; once threw a New Yorker, shout- ing “I hate John Ashbery!” And that she once, after a speed- and scotch-fueled orgy— Some Girls blasting, her last boyfriend passed out beside us—straddled, rode me like a horse. Rachel, can I say this: your cunt felt coarse. After your death, I’d be happy you won the contest—at least you had that. “Don’t turn on me,” you pleaded. Losing wasn’t fun, but I couldn’t begrudge you your prize. Burned out from an abortion, a vicious bite— a German shepherd lunged at your nose, slit its tip—and a violent unrequit- ed affair with your “Don J,” a closet case obsessed with Kerouac, you spoke of making a change. By then it was summer: Blondie on the car radio, Fourth of July, craving fireworks. I remember headlights; reaching for the steering wheel, you. Next thing I knew, I woke in ICU. Next thing I knew, I woke in ICU: machines beeping around me, doctors and nurses hovering in an eerie blue light. Tube down my throat, I scrawled, with bruised hand, your name, question mark. My sister was steered in, wept to tell you were dead. The night they moved me to a private room, you appeared, pulsating white presence, in the hallway outside my door. “I’m all right,” you said, “You don’t have to worry about me.” I’d lie there in traction for six weeks, almost two decades ago, a ghost that fell from my own scarecrow dream, numb to that deadly drop. The first time we talked was on a rooftop.

It had better been hidden But the Poets inform: We are chattel and liege Of an undying Worm. Were you, Will, disheartened, When all Stratford’s gentry Left their Queen and took service In his low-lying country? How many white cities And grey fleets on the storm Have proud-builded, hard-battled, For this undying Worm? Was a sweet chaste lady Would none of her lover. Nay, here comes the Lewd One, Creeps under her cover! Have ye said there’s no deathless Of face, fashion, form, Forgetting to honor The extent of the Worm? O ye laughers and light-lipped, Ye faithless, infirm, I can tell you who’s constant, ’Tis the Eminent Worm. Ye shall trip on no limits, Neither time ye your term, In the realms of His Absolute Highness the Worm.