437 Death poems

Mourn, mourn, ye Muses, all your loss deplore, The young, the noble Strephon is no more. Yes, yes, he fled quick as departing light, And ne’er shall rise from Death’s eternal night, So rich a prize the Stygian gods ne’er bore, Such wit, such beauty, never graced their shore. He was but lent this duller world t’ improve In all the charms of poetry, and love; Both were his gift, which freely he bestowed, And like a god, dealt to the wond’ring crowd. Scorning the little vanity of fame, Spight of himself attained a glorious name. But oh! in vain was all his peevish pride, The sun as soon might his vast luster hide, As piercing, pointed, and more lasting bright, As suffering no vicissitudes of night. Mourn, mourn, ye Muses, all your loss deplore, The young, the noble Strephon is no more. Now uninspired upon your banks we lie, Unless when we would mourn his elegy; His name’s a genius that would wit dispense, And give the theme a soul, the words a sense. But all fine thought that ravisht when it spoke, With the soft youth eternal leave has took; Uncommon wit that did the soul o’ercome, Is buried all in Strephon’s worshipped tomb; Satire has lost its art, its sting is gone, The Fop and Cully now may be undone; That dear instructing rage is now allayed, And no sharp pen dares tell ’em how they’ve strayed; Bold as a god was ev’ry lash he took, But kind and gentle the chastizing stroke. Mourn, mourn, ye youths, whom fortune has betrayed, The last reproacher of your vice is dead. Mourn, all ye beauties, put your Cyprus on, The truest swain that e’re adored you’s gone; Think how he loved, and writ, and sighed, and spoke, Recall his mien, his fashion, and his look. By what dear arts the soul he did surprise, Soft as his voice, and charming as his eyes. Bring garlands all of never-dying flowers, Bedewed with everlasting falling showers; Fix your fair eyes upon your victimed slave, Sent gay and young to his untimely grave. See where the noble swain extended lies, Too sad a triumph of your victories; Adorned with all the graces Heaven e’er lent, All that was great, soft, lovely, excellent You’ve laid into his early monument. Mourn, mourn, ye beauties, your sad loss deplore, The young, the charming Strephon is no more. Mourn, all ye little gods of love, whose darts Have lost their wonted power of piercing hearts; Lay by the gilded quiver and the bow, The useless toys can do no mischief now, Those eyes that all your arrows’ points inspired, Those lights that gave ye fire are now retired, Cold as his tomb, pale as your mother’s doves; Bewail him then oh all ye little loves, For you the humblest votary have lost That ever your divinities could boast; Upon your hands your weeping heads decline, And let your wings encompass round his shrine; In stead of flowers your broken arrows strow, And at his feet lay the neglected bow. Mourn, all ye little gods, your loss deplore, The soft, the charming Strephon is no more. Large was his fame, but short his glorious race, Like young Lucretius lived and died apace. So early roses fade, so over all They cast their fragrant scents, then softly fall, While all the scattered perfumed leaves declare, How lovely ’twas when whole, how sweet, how fair. Had he been to the Roman Empire known, When great Augustus filled the peaceful throne; Had he the noble wond’rous poet seen, And known his genius, and surveyed his mien, (When wits, and heroes graced divine abodes), He had increased the number of their gods; The royal judge had temples rear’d to’s name, And made him as immortal as his fame; In love and verse his Ovid he’ad out-done, And all his laurels, and his Julia won. Mourn, mourn, unhappy world, his loss deplore, The great, the charming Strephon is no more.

A day will come I’ll watch you reading this. I’ll look up from these words I’m writing now— this line I’m standing on, I’ll be right here, alive again. I’ll breathe on you this breath. Touch this word now, that one. Warm, isn’t it? You are the person come to clean my room; you are whichever of my three children opens the drawer here where this poem will go in a few minutes when I’ve had my say. These are the words from immortality. No one stands between us now except Death: I enter it entirely writing this. I have to tell you I am not alone. Watching you read, Eternity’s with me. We like to watch you read. Read us again.

When I painted, everybody saw. When I played piano, everybody heard. I ate your raspberries. The sign no trespassing applied to me. Now, the hemlocks have grown higher than the house. There’s moss on my stoop, a little mildew In the shower but you’ve never seen my shower. I can undress by the window, I can sleep in the barn. The sky, which is cloudy, Suits the earth to which it belongs.

The Roman Catholic bells of Princeton, New Jersey, wake me from rousing dreams into a resounding hangover. Sweet Jesus, my life is hateful to me. Seven a.m. and time to walk my dog on a leash. Ice on the sidewalk and in the gutters, and the wind comes down our one-way street like a deuce-and-a-half, a six-by, a semi, huge with a cold load of growls. There's not only leaf left to bear witness, with twitch and scuttle, rattle and rasp, against the blatant roaring of the wrongway wind. Only my nose running and my face frozen into a kind of grin which has nothing to do with the ice and the wind or death and December, but joy pure and simple when my black and tan puppy, for the first time ever, lifts his hind leg to pee.

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood, Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it. And from there those that lifted eyes could count Five mountain ranges one behind the other Under the sunset far into Vermont. And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled, As it ran light, or had to bear a load. And nothing happened: day was all but done. Call it a day, I wish they might have said To please the boy by giving him the half hour That a boy counts so much when saved from work. His sister stood beside him in her apron To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw, As if to prove saws knew what supper meant, Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap— He must have given the hand. However it was, Neither refused the meeting. But the hand! The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh, As he swung toward them holding up the hand Half in appeal, but half as if to keep The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all— Since he was old enough to know, big boy Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart— He saw all spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off— The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’ So. But the hand was gone already. The doctor put him in the dark of ether. He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath. And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright. No one believed. They listened at his heart. Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it. No more to build on there. And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

The Bergman image of a game of chess with Death, though not in a dreamscape black-and-white as melancholy films clanking with symbols, but in a garden in Provence with goldfish in the fountain and enormous palms whose topmost fronds cut into the eternal blue of sky above the Roman ruins and the dusty streets where any door may lead to life’s most perfect meal: that is what I think of when I remember I have AIDS. But when I think of how AIDS kills my friends, especially the ones whose paths through life have least prepared them to resist the monster, I think of an insatiable and prowling beast with razor teeth and a persistent stink that sticks to every living branch of flower its rank fur brushes as it stalks its prey. I think of that disgusting animal eating my beautiful friends, innocent as baby deer. Dwight: so delicate and vain, his spindly arms and legs pinned down with needles, pain of tubes and needles, his narrow chest inflated by machine, his mind lost in the seven-minute gap between the respirator’s failure and the time the nurses noticed something wrong. I wrapped my limbs around that fragile body for the first time seven years ago, in a cheap hotel by the piers, where every bit of his extravagant wardrobe—snakeskin boots, skin-tight pedal pushers in a leopard print, aviator’s scarves, and an electric- green capacious leather jacket— lay wrapped in a corner of his room in a yellow parachute. It's hard enough to find a parachute in New York City, I remember thinking, but finding one the right shade of canary is the accomplishment of the sort of citizen with whom I wish to populate my life. Dwight the dancer, Dwight the fashion illustrator and the fashion plate, Dwight the child, the borderline transvestite, Dwight the frightened, infuriating me because an anti-AZT diatribe by some eccentric in a rag convinced him not to take the pills with which he might still be alive, Dwight on the runway, Dwight on the phone suggesting we could still have sex if we wore “raincoats,” Dwight screwing a girl from Massapequa in the ladies’ room at Danceteria (he wore more makeup and had better jewelry than she did), Dwight planning the trip to London or Berlin where he would be discovered and his life transformed. Dwight erased, evicted from his own young body. Dwight dead. At Bellevue, I wrapped my arms around his second skin of gauze and scars and tubing, brushed my hand against his plats, and said goodbye. I hope I’m not the one who loosed the devouring animal that massacred you, gentle boy. You didn’t have a clue to how you might stave off the beast. I feel so confident most days that I can stay alive, survive and thrive with AIDS. But when I see Dwight smile and hear his fey delighted voice inside my head, I know AIDS is no chess game but a hunt, and there is no way of escaping the bloody horror of the kill, no way to bail out, no bright parachute beside my bed.

Lilacs look neon in fading light. Death makes life shine: a tiredness, a flickering between ages, which is each age; a piling up to tottering and falling back to sand. So much for cycle. The front door lock sticks each fall when we’re first back. We are advised to oil it. Olive oil in the keyhole: again the old key turns. Once again to meander along the edge of water, whether tideless sea or tidal river, pushing the stroller, dreaming oil in the lock; the key dipped in lubricity the boychild’s shining skin me tired to the bone

Passing away, saith the World, passing away: Chances, beauty and youth, sapp'd day by day: Thy life never continueth in one stay. Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to grey That hath won neither laurel nor bay? I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May: Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decay On my bosom for aye. Then I answer'd: Yea. Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away: With its burden of fear and hope, of labour and play, Hearken what the past doth witness and say: Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array, A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay. At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain day Lo, the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay: Watch thou and pray. Then I answer'd: Yea. Passing away, saith my God, passing away: Winter passeth after the long delay: New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray, Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven's May. Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray. Arise, come away, night is past and lo it is day, My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say. Then I answer'd: Yea.

By noon your breathing had changed from normal to shallow and panicky. That’s when the nurse said Nearly there now, in the gentle voice of a parent comforting a child used to failure, slipping her arms beneath your shoulders to hoist you up the pillows, then pressing a startling gauze pad under your jaw. Nearly there now. The whole world seemed to agree— as the late April sky deepened through the afternoon into high August blue, the vapour trails of two planes converged to sketch a cross on the brow of heaven. My brother Kit and I kept our backs turned to that except now and again. It was the room I wanted to see, because it contained your last example of everything: the broken metal window-catch that meant no fresh air; your toothbrush standing to attention in its plastic mug; the neutral pink walls flushed into definite pale red by sunlight rejoicing in the flowering cherry outside; your dressing-gown like a stranger within the wardrobe eavesdropping. That should have been a sign to warn us, but unhappiness made us brave, or do I mean cowardly, and Kit and I talked as if we were already quite certain you could no longer hear us, saying how easy you were to love, but how difficult always to satisfy and relax— how impossible to talk to, in fact, how expert with silence. You breathed more easily by the time we were done, although the thought you might have heard us after all, and our words be settling into your soft brain like stones onto the bed of a stream—that made our own breathing tighter. Then the nurse looked in:Nothing will change here for a while boys, and we ducked out like criminals. I was ordering two large gins in the pub half a mile off when my mobile rang. It was the hospital. You had died. I put my drink down, then thought again and finished it. Five minutes later we were back at the door of your room wondering whether to knock. Would everything we said be written on your face, like the white cross on the heavens? Of course not. It was written in us, where no one could find it except ourselves. Your own face was wiped entirely clean— and so, with your particular worries solved, and your sadness, I could see more clearly than ever how like mine it was, and therefore how my head will eventually look on the pillow when the wall opens behind me, and I depart with my failings.

No moss nor mottle stains My parents’ unmarked grave; My word on them remains Stouter than stone, you told me. “Martyred to words”, you have thought, Should be your epitaph; At other times you fought My self-reproaches down. Though bitterly once or twice You have reproached me with how Everything ended in words, We both know better now: You understand, I shall not If I survive you care To raise a headstone for You I have carved on air.