437 Death poems

You ignore the way light filters through my cells, the way I have of fading out—still there is a constant tug, a stretching, what is left of me is coming loose. Soon, I will be only crumbs of popcorn, a blue ring in the tub, an empty toilet paper roll, black mold misted on old sponges, strands of hair woven into carpet, a warped door that won’t open, the soft spot in an avocado, celery, a pear, a metallic taste in the beer, a cold sore on your lip—and when I finally lose my hold you will hear a rustle and watch me spill grains of rice across the cracked tile.

— Gaetano Donizetti, “Lucia di Lammermoor” Be remote A while from malice and from murdering. — Gwendolyn Brooks water this fountain where I am yoked sun-break he holds you how once I this secret dark dagger my body rip off the collar your cage don’t wait my neck his breath these woods this water my waist his ring his grip blood sister

He reads:What soul suffers in secret, the flesh shows openly. Deep within, in a region hardly accessible, a bold self-image sends messages of bloodshed and conquest, which reverberate in his heart of hearts. [I forget which hand is writing.] He does not doubt that he exists. The five senses have left their mark on him. It is a record of what has happened to him, but he cannot talk or travel until he finds a body of water. A man who has lived on reindeer’s flesh amuses himself with ripples. In this cage was once a nightingale. In the echo, new words for wind. The usual convulsions,and a green cat. And, after all, months or years are nothing to him. [My image contains his body.] His body contains bodies. Blemishes. Inglories. Vague figures, in a howling wind, and with no notion of perspective. Of countless ruined worlds, he would appropriate the essential emblem. Wall struggling with wall, shadow with shad- ow. Thousands of miles a day. He gazes across an unguarded cemetery—gazes idly, waiting for new equipment. As through a fixed window, he finds a kind of space, the visible world foreshortened. He does not see deeply, but—still—one thing behind another. He keeps a tiny bird, folded like a sheet of paper. Twice two is four—still—and a circle has no angles. Body sheds shoulder, jaw.However body may appear, the soul comes back in scars. [There are no dead. Only names.] Too close, ruin wrinkles the surface—his breath bothers reality. The sun pours down. The pots are mended. An unfolding, from where it is all contained. The ships have been salvaged. [I do not know what body he has in mind.] Clothing is resumed. Temples are rebuilt. “Which body?” we inquire, while all the liars cry out, “Verily!” As though all this were in the dark. Here is a column of soldiers, a heap of apples, an avenue of trees. Here a swarm of bees, of birds, a row of equidistant lines. A set of unequal objects distributes the field of vision. Here is the painted world in an actual image. [I have no theory for the clouds he sees.]

Sleep to sleep through thirty years of night, a child herself with child, for whom we searched through here, or there, amidst bones still sleeved and trousered, a spine picked clean, a paint can, a skull with hair Sewn into the hem of memory: Fire. God of Abraham,God of Isaac,God of Jacob, God not of philosophers or scholars. God not of poets. Night to night: child walking toward me through burning maize over the clean bones of those whose flesh was lifted by zopilotes into heaven. So that is how we ascend! In the clawed feet of fallen angels. To be assembled again in the work rooms of clouds. She rose from where they found her lying not far from a water urn, leaving herself behind on the ground where they found her, holding her arms before her as if she were asleep. That is how she appears to me: a ghost in heaven. Carrying her arms in her arms. Blue smoke from corn cribs, flap of wings. On the walls of the city streets a plague of initials. Walking through a fire-lit river to a burning house: dead Singer sewing machine and piece of dress. Outside a cashew tree wept blackened cashews over lamina. Outside paper fireflies rose to the stars. Bring penicillin if you can, surgical tape, a whetstone, mosquito repellent but not the aerosol kind. Especially bring a syringe for sucking phlegm, a knife, wooden sticks, a surgical clamp, and plastic bags. You will need a bottle of cloud for anesthesia. Like the flight of a crane through colorless dreams. When a leech opens your flesh it leaves a small volcano. Always pour turpentine over your hair before going to sleep. Such experiences as these are forgotten before memory intrudes. The girl was found (don’t say this) with a man’s severed head stuffed into her where a child would have been. No one knew who the man was. Another of the dead. So they had not, after all, killed a pregnant girl. This was a relief to them. That sound in the brush? A settling of wind in sorghum. If they capture you, talk. Talk. Please yes. You heard me right the first time. You will be asked who you are. Eventually, we are all asked who we are. All who come All who come into the world All who come into the world are sent. Open your curtain of spirit.

I saw him His body a very pale sea, almost green Soaring above me in a different sphere With gold wings He had a blissful expression One maybe he never had Certainly he was always smiling, somewhere When he died I had just gotten betrayed by a friend I thought was mine I forgave him Was more just said You live through any of it But what is the red shoulder we long to see I thought that I too would reach a great canyon My arms and legs blissed out Instead I blossomed inside Oh I loved his wife and children But they were still here with me When my father died he went straight up to heaven When the ghost died he stayed with us for a while I forgot to mention that the wings were gold and green And the winds were heavy They held his body Afloat in air as if in the ocean I forgot to say that when it was summer I too measured the red bell heads I said the hell with it All of it Heavy air will you hold me Suspended in the ocean of time Where I will never see you again My skin gold and green Sweet king, you left us I know it Dark is dark The darkness, darnit It surrounds With heavy air Arms and legs suspended The head

When I got the box home from the gun shop, I let it sit on my kitchen table in its wax wrapping for hours before I opened it. Safe from the elements. Protected from rust and more esoteric forms of corrosion. My father gave me a rosewood chess set when I turned twelve. I’d never felt so loved through and through, almost literally, as if 
I were transparent — and it probably wasn’t love, just a lucky, last-minute guess at the toy store, which is probably what most love is, anyway. I took the set into my room, shut the door, determined to master every fork and zugzwang, that strange position where you’d be safe if only you didn’t have to make a move. Now I’d given myself a perfect gift. I imagined the gun at rest in a velvet sack next to its dainty box of   bullets. I wouldn’t need many. And no sequined wrapping paper could have been more beautiful than the brown waxed sheet the clerk had unrolled and cut along the steel edge in one long, smooth stroke. When I finally slit through the layers to open it, the paper was as delicate and rich as sheets of pastry in baklava, with a mass of dark chocolate in the center. I’d never touched a gun. I loved how perfectly its handle fit my hand: centuries of engineering and design coming together in the “unit,” and I knew it would work. Unlike toys, religious rituals, erotic techniques, and works of art, I could depend on it. The only other device I own that fulfills its function so well is my reading glasses, and I used a soft gray cloth just like the one I clean them with to wipe the oil from my fingertips as I dropped the bullets one by one into the somber chambers. I just need to know it’s there, like the extra purse I keep hidden in the closet with a money clip and a neatly folded change of clothes. I don’t need a class in safety or marksmanship. If I ever use it, it will be at close range. It may be the only way to get rid of the stranger inside. It may be the only way to get inside someone I love when every other route has been systematically barred.

More than ample a deadfall of one meter eighty to split my temple apart on the herringbone parquet and crash the operating system, tripping an automated shutdown in the casing and halting all external workings of the moist robot I inhabit at the moment: I am out cold and when my eyes roll in again I sit on the edge of the bed and tell you just how taken I am with the place I’d been, had been compelled to leave, airlifted mid-gesture, mid-sentence, risen of a sudden like a bubble or its glisten or a victim snatched and bundled out, helplessly, from sunlight, the usual day, and all particulars of life there fled except the sense that stays with me for hours and hours that I was valuable and needed there.

After the murder, I called a meeting to see if we were happy. I declared I was not — I said I liked the man we shot. You all disagreed with this. I asked if you knew him, his wife, none of you did. “Kill me, then,” I said. You all stared at me. “Why, Bernard? Of course we won’t.” “Why not?” I said. “He was a good man, a better man than me. And look at what I’ve brought you — rubbish, dodgy tales, dross.” “Easy to dismiss that,” you said. “We appreciated it all. And you wandered the wild paths to bring it back to us — your songs, your legends, magic stories, your gold.” I thanked you, but shook my head. The good man was dead. I didn’t care what I’d brought you. I needed to go. I packed up my sagas, my song lyrics, my alchemy potions, my gold, and I disappeared.

When I have heard small talk about great men I climb to bed; light my two candles; then Consider what was said; and put aside What Such-a-one remarked and Someone-else replied. They have spoken lightly of my deathless friends, (Lamps for my gloom, hands guiding where I stumble,) Quoting, for shallow conversational ends, What Shelley shrilled, what Blake once wildly muttered .... How can they use such names and be not humble? I have sat silent; angry at what they uttered. The dead bequeathed them life; the dead have said What these can only memorize and mumble.

As if he had been poured in tar, he lies on a pillow of turf and seems to weep the black river of himself. The grain of his wrists is like bog oak, the ball of his heel like a basalt egg. His instep has shrunk cold as a swan's foot or a wet swamp root. His hips are the ridge and purse of a mussel, his spine an eel arrested under a glisten of mud. The head lifts, the chin is a visor raised above the vent of his slashed throat that has tanned and toughened. The cured wound opens inwards to a dark elderberry place. Who will say 'corpse' to his vivid cast? Who will say 'body' to his opaque repose? And his rusted hair, a mat unlikely as a foetus's. I first saw his twisted face in a photograph, a head and shoulder out of the peat, bruised like a forceps baby, but now he lies perfected in my memory, down to the red horn of his nails, hung in the scales with beauty and atrocity: with the Dying Gaul too strictly compassed on his shield, with the actual weight of each hooded victim, slashed and dumped.