437 Death poems

I chose the place where I would rest When death should come to claim me, With the red-rose roots to wrap my breast And a quiet stone to name me. But I am laid on a northern steep With the roaring tides below me, And only the frosts to bind my sleep, And only the winds to know me.

Getting drunk, a friend called women He had slept with, men he hated, And then 911, repeating "Emergency" like a schoolboy. "Try 999," I suggested, Giving him the hot-line number That Malaysians, once, imagined Was the extension of the dead, Their calls, instead, directed to The homes for police and firemen And medical help, dispatchers Picking up for thousands who thought, Immediately, they had linked With the calm voices of the dead. Cautions? Disclaimers? Those callers, Regardless, asked about heaven's Lifestyle, what it meant to be dead. They chanted incantations to Ward off whatever might travel Through phone lines from the afterlife. "What's the story with you," my friend Kept on repeating, receiving Sympathy, curses, threats, a fine. And the Malaysians? They, at last, Asked for help with the lottery— Because surely the selfless dead Knew the winning numbers, the sort Of thing you heard in paradise.

How much death works, No one knows what a long Day he puts in. The little Wife always alone Ironing death’s laundry. The beautiful daughters Setting death’s supper table. The neighbors playing Pinochle in the backyard Or just sitting on the steps Drinking beer. Death, Meanwhile, in a strange Part of town looking for Someone with a bad cough, But the address is somehow wrong, Even death can’t figure it out Among all the locked doors ... And the rain beginning to fall. Long windy night ahead. Death with not even a newspaper To cover his head, not even A dime to call the one pining away, Undressing slowly, sleepily, And stretching naked On death’s side of the bed.

He fell and died, the skier, high up there in the snow. And now, spring having come, his father leaves his home, dark in the valley, to throw a hook in the heavy river.

She never said I’m going to die. I was with her nearly every minute that week, reading, sleeping on the cot beside the high-tech bed that kept shifting her slight weight while the window shadowed over, then grew brighter, and she drifted or got changed or was given another shot. None of us said it, though finally when she was barely talking anymore, I asked something like Mom, are you ready?—I just want Brad to be ok was what she replied. I told her he would be, as if her wish or mine could preside at his sentencing hearing. After that she was almost entirely silent, but when Dad came the last afternoon, edgy without a cigarette, checking over the monitors, Mom said she wanted to see him for a while alone, and he was startled.Pull the door closed, I heard her tell him, and he did. Out in the hall, staring at the pattern of alternating tiles, I thought of Saturday mornings when Brad and I were little, and Dad and Mom’s room would be not just shut for a time, but locked. Secretly I tried the knob once. In that house nobody was allowed to lock a door but Dad. Grandma would shoo us to the TV with cinnamon toast to watch cartoons, one fool panic after the next—bolted dungeons, lies and threats, a saw-blade inching toward the tied-up body. Then real people like us, finally: Roy Rogers saving them with his amazing calm.

Baudelaire: "The dead, the poor dead, have their bad hours." But the dead have no watches, no grief and no hours. At first not smoking took all my time: I did it a little by little and hour by hour. Per diem. Pro bono. Cui bono? Pro rata. But the poor use English.Off and on. By the hour. "I'm sorry but we'll have to stop now." There tick but fifty minutes in the psychoanalytic hour. Vengeance is mine, yours, his or hers, ours, yours again (you-all's this time), and then (yikes!) theirs. I prefer ours. Twenty minutes fleeing phantoms at full tilt and then the cat coils herself like a quoit and sleeps for hours.

You see, they have no judgment. So it is natural that they should drown, first the ice taking them in and then, all winter, their wool scarves floating behind them as they sink until at last they are quiet. And the pond lifts them in its manifold dark arms. But death must come to them differently, so close to the beginning. As though they had always been blind and weightless. Therefore the rest is dreamed, the lamp, the good white cloth that covered the table, their bodies. And yet they hear the names they used like lures slipping over the pond: What are you waiting for come home, come home, lost in the waters, blue and permanent

They’d been warned on every farm that playing in the silos would lead to death. You sink in wheat. Slowly. And the more you struggle the worse it gets. ‘You’ll see a rat sail past your face, nimble on its turf, and then you’ll disappear.’ In there, hard work has no reward. So it became a kind of test to see how far they could sink without needing a rope to help them out. But in the midst of play rituals miss a beat—like both leaping in to resolve an argument as to who’d go first and forgetting to attach the rope. Up to the waist and afraid to move. That even a call for help would see the wheat trickle down. The painful consolidation of time. The grains in the hourglass grotesquely swollen. And that acrid chemical smell of treated wheat coaxing them into a near-dead sleep.

A drunk cadet had hit them on a bad bend near the river, two broken necks. On the notice-board there’s an A4 page with a blurred digital photo of Beck laughing, leaning into her friends in a nightclub and below that, writing: We Love You Beck – from Kristin, Colette and Mandy. I sit like an automaton in the big lounge room my back teeth snapping against each other, rocks in my gut. That night we watch on an iMac a video of Beck, an eight minute film Colette had taken on her phone. Two of the men are crying. Kristin and Mandy are numb. I move to the noticeboard, reading anything: ‘Live-in nanny required Balmain 5 min from city’ ‘Experience life on an outback station help mustering mobs of 2000 animals on horseback or quadbike’. Near me two women are whispering. Talking about their first-ever girlfriend. One says, Other people are always either versions or not-versions of her. Fourteen, it’s an age to break your heart. You know nothing. On the edge of knowing too much. I lean forward, my head on the foyer koala. Voices travel to me from distant realms: I hear again the singer’s plea for his wife. Blurred from too much experience I prowl around the leaflet racks, groaning. Late that night on the vinyl lounges the people remaining are Kristin and me, alone. My eyes are swollen, my ears still buzzing from the headphones at work. We talk over Beck till no more can be said. Now Kristin begins to tell her own story how her uncle had his boat down the back of their block, and one day he said he wanted to show her something, took her down the lantana path to the boat, something she might like, he said – Kristin was raped at times twice a day or sometimes not for a week and sometimes after it he gave her pocket money once a twenty dollar bill which down the gully later she tore into thin red strips and buried. Back at the house her mother bashed her for lying about the uncle, who was her brother, and who had loaned them the deposit on the house where Kristin and Odette her sister were fortunate enough to live. When Kristin grew up, her mother apologised to her. The uncle was still alive. He had sent her a Christmas card this year. She sat on the lounge, looking down at her runners, her mouth closed. Behind her the stereogram and Elvis, a silent witness. The uncle had said she was a rude girl, she should keep quiet about their secret otherwise he’d give her little sister a taste of the same. Kristin was quiet from then on. The reason she was telling me now, her hand on my arm was that last week she’d had a call from Odette who was living in London. The uncle during those primary school years had done the same to her, tricked her the same way, used the same words. I feel the weight of my empty useless arms. But later I hold her – hug her goodnight. She touches my shoulder. I was convinced, she says, I was saving my sister. My head clatters: Virgin, May I help you? Back in the Furies’ bunk-room it’s beauty night, they’re whisking egg whites for a face mask … After they’ve done each other they sit me on the bed and paint my face with their fingers the egg white sets quickly and they tell me not to smile. I dream of Alecto’s iron tower and bloody clothes – then I’m on TV being interviewed: So, the oldest Fury – and who is your god? I am asked – I once served Artemis, I say. And before that? – Athena, I say – Anath, Isis. I do not mention Dionysis or the Thracian women.

Nevermind that keeping ashes on the mantel feels ghoulish, and comically impractical: not just another thing, a miniature memento urn, to dust, but dust to dust— I dread the conversational Hara-kiri, not,that’s what’s left of my brother, but,he died of suicide: the chasm of silence following the leap— so the cremains stay in the office closet till they migrate through no will of their own to a moving box I haven’t unpacked and likely won’t.