437 Death poems

I saw then the white-eyed man leaning in to see if I was ready yet to go where he has been waiting to take me. I saw then the gnawing sounds my faith has been making and I saw too that the shape it sings in is the color of cast-iron mountains I drove so long to find I forgot I had been looking for them, for the you I once knew and the you that was born waiting for me to find you. I have been twisting and turning across these lifetimes where forgetting me is what you do so you don’t have to look at yourself. I saw that I would drown in a creek carved out of a field our incarnations forged the first path through to those mountains. I invited you to stroll with me there again for the first time, to pause and sprawl in the grass while I read to you the poem you hadn’t known you’d been waiting to hear. I read until you finally slept and all your jagged syntaxes softened into rest. You’re always driving so far from me towards the me I worry, without you, is eternity. I lay there, awake, keeping watch while you snored. I waited, as I always seem to, for you to wake up and come back to me.

The Bone-man lives in a stucco house. He ticks his heels on the cold terrazzo floor. He parks his ragtruck in the yard, instructs his crew on the white telephone. I am training my dog to attack the red-capped hunter bearing his long package. I am training the tethered jay to cry out against the killer who cracks the latch. On the open map, the road to my house bulges like a vein. He takes a train, he rents a car, he lurches in with an open fly. Sweet Eve was just the Farmer’s Daughter, he wooed her with a wormy apple. He’s a dirty joke, he’s always everybody’s last lover, he’s a regular can of worms—you wry Medusa, I am a mongoose staring you down.

One sung of thee who left the tale untold, Like the false dawns which perish in the bursting; Like empty cups of wrought and daedal gold, Which mock the lips with air, when they are thirsting.

When we for age could neither read nor write, The subject made us able to indite. The soul, with nobler resolutions deckt, The body stooping, does herself erect: No mortal parts are requisite to raise Her, that unbodied can her Maker praise. The seas are quiet, when the winds give o’er, So calm are we, when passions are no more: For then we know how vain it was to boast Of fleeting things, so certain to be lost. Clouds of affection from our younger eyes Conceal that emptiness, which age descries. The soul’s dark cottage, batter’d and decay’d, Lets in new light through chinks that time has made; Stronger by weakness, wiser men become As they draw near to their eternal home: Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view, That stand upon the threshold of the new.

With their harsh leaves old rhododendrons fill The crevices in grave plots’ broken stones. The bees renew the blossoms they destroy, While in the burning air the pines rise still, Commemorating long forgotten biers. Their roots replace the semblance of these bones. The weight of cool, of imperceptible dust That came from nothing and to nothing came Is light within the earth and on the air. The change that so renews itself is just. The enormous, sundry platitude of death Is for these bones, bees, trees, and leaves the same. And splayed upon the ground and through the trees The mountains’ shadow fills and cools the air, Smoothing the shape of headstones to the earth. The rhododendrons suffer with the bees Whose struggles loose ripe petals to the earth, The heaviest burden it shall ever bear. Our hard earned knowledge fits us for such sleep. Although the spring must come, it passes too To form the burden suffered for what comes. Whatever we would give our souls to keep Is merely part of what we call the soul; What we of time would threaten to undo All time in its slow scrutiny has done. For on the grass that starts about the feet The body’s shadow turns, to shape in time, Soon grown preponderant with creeping shade, The final shadow that is turn of earth; And what seems won paid for as in defeat.

1. Language must suffice. Years ago, under a sweet June sky stung with stars and swept back by black leaves barely rustling, a beautiful woman nearly killed me. Listen, she said, and turned her lovely face to the stars, the wild sky.... 2. No. No: years ago, under a sweet, June sky strung with stars and swept back by black leaves barely rustling, under this sky broad, bright, all rung around with rustling elders—or intoxicating willows, or oaks, I forget— under this sky, a beautiful woman killed me, nearly. I say beautiful. You had to see her. Listen, she said, and turned a lovely shell of her ear to the swirl of stars and the moon smudged as a wingtip in one tree, not far. 3. Yes: she scraped my back bloody against a rough trunk. Yes: she flung back her lovely face and her hair, holding me down, and the tree shook slowly, as in a mild, persistent laugh or wind, and the moon high in that black tree swung to and fro ... there were millions of stars up where she stared past us, and one moon, I think. 4. Excuse me. My friend, who loves poetry truly, says too much nature taints my work. Yes. Yes. Yes. Too many birds, stars— too much rain, too much grass— so many wild, bowing limbs howling or groaning into the natural night ... and he might be right. Even here. That is, if tree were a tree. That is, if star or moon or even beautiful woman craning the shell of her ear were what they were. They are, I think, not. No: and a poem about nature contains anything but. 5. When they descended to us, they were a cloud of stars sweeping lightly. They sang to us urgently about our lives, they touched us with a hundred thousand hair-soft, small legs— and held down by such hungers, we let them cover us, this beautiful woman, this me, who couldn’t move, who were stung—do you hear?— who were stung again, were covered that quickly, crying to each other to fly away! 6. ... I just can’t erase the exquisite, weeping language of the wasps, nor her face in starlight and so tranquil under that false, papery, bobbing moon just minutes before, saying listen, listen, nor then the weight of her whole natural body pinning down mine until we both cried out for fear, and pain, and still couldn’t move. 7. Language must suffice. First, it doesn’t. Then, of course, it does.Listen, listen. What do you hear? This nearly killed me. I’ll never know why she didn’t just whisper Here they come, warn Move! cry They’ll kill us! Yes:I will save you ... Yes:I love you too much to watch you suffer! But it’s all I recall, or now need. And, anyway, I loved her, she was so beautiful. And that is what I have had to say before it’s too late, before they have killed me, before they have killed you, too, or before we have all become something else entirely, which is to say before we are only language.

"If you cut off my hands, I'll offer you my stumps." If you knock out my teeth, I'll still go down on you, conscientiously, vine along a trellis, and suck you with my gums. If you smash my toes, employing an ice crusher, one by one, I'll heal myself with such truancy that someday I'll run on my knees. "If you cut off my hands, I'll offer you my stumps," and orchestrate a standing ovation with the memory of my hands representing each that are dying, each that are dead, each forgotten that we refuse to remember like the lost hands of stumps. So much misery in plain sight like tears streaming down a face; so much misery hidden like the eventuality of the anti-Christ; and so much incognito like the accompanying instruments of a torch song: like the fire in the torch itself, like the torched interior of the song. If you cut off my ears, I will listen with my eyes to the spitting death of cavalrymen as they're roasted over an open fire; to the smallest bones snap, dry as sun-seasoned kindling of the young and truant witch when she's pressed by a thousand stones; to the brave convulsions of the communist strapped in the electric chair, dying by degree...not unlike the commonfolk plucked from the village, arbitrarily, one last December night, stripped to the flesh and heaved high into the freezing air upon a whittled stave, tall and sharp, thrust deep into the asshole they die by degree, ever so slowly and often only (if not by freezing first, which, if merciful, God deems) when the wooden point finally pierces the brain, brain-dead already from the mauve anticipation and ear-splitting prerequisite of pain. If you cut out my tongue, I will write you a letter, a love letter lovelorn for that taste of your tongue. If you fuck me hard I can never make love again, I'll plant hyacinth bulbs in an effort to replace my abolished fecundity. I will turn eternally on my side and pull down my pants and listen to your masturbate while fantasizing about my ass. I'll admire the willow out the window when I hear you come and allow as if in tribute to the times I used to participate, a vague expression of pleasure, albeit contrived to wash across my face the way my desire for you, real as a willow, once had done.

Not your ordinary ice cream, though the glaze of these skeletal figures affects the disposition of those grinning candies one finds in Mexico, say, at the start of November, though here, each face is troublingly familiar, exhibits the style adopted just as one declines any further style—nectar one sips just as he draws his last, dispassionate breath, becomes citizen of a less earnest electorate. One learns in that city finally how to enjoy a confection, even if a genuine taste for this circumstance has yet to be acquired, even if it is oneself whose sugars and oils now avail a composure which promises never to end, nor to alter.

Elegy for my sister I take the penny from father’s hardwood drawer. I turn the standing upright penny, its copper head cold, turn and turn till a small whorl-well of a circle bores into the center of the brick laid in our fireplace. Brick dust cradle. Thumb place. This fireplace is wingless and cold. The penny multiplies in swarms. Nine cloud coffins full of pennies are open and floating as bees float, looking for my ears. Lynne’s car washed violently down off the cliff. I am too young to drive. Today, all memory ruins downstream to the bee-swarm, becomes a plea from then till now and grows reason’s garden pulled out at the roots. There’s an ocean treading its own water to the waist of the coastline, water-skin flexing. I am standing upright: absent-me in a house full of grief and thievery. Above the thumb place. I was a child there once, both boy and girl, standing upright. I turned the penny over on the desert brick, in the fire, stepped into the cold downstream ruin of  bees swarming in the hard rain’s garden. I did not know what I was doing. It was all made of the same shape and sound down there.

Some little splinter Of shadow purls And weals down The slewed stone Chapel steps, Slinks along The riverrock wall And disappears Into the light. Now ropy, riffled, Now owlish, sere, It smolders back To sight beneath A dwarfish, brindled tree That chimes and sifts And resurrects In something’s sweet And lethal breath. This little shadow Seems to know (How can it know? How can it not?) Just when to flinch Just where to loop and sag And skitter down, Just what to squirrel And what to squander till The light it lacks Bleeds it back And finds My sleeping dark-haired girl — O personal, Impersonal, Continual thrall — And hammocks blue In the hollows of her eyes.