437 Death poems

1. Footfalls on the brickwork road many fathers laid by hand and heavy mallet make a sandy sound. You can hear, in the dusted scuff, a kind of gasp as from the crumpled lungs of those bent double by depression, by wagonloads of work— you can hear huffs of hot wind kick the dust around them. You can feel the brickwork give. This is how the town found a way from starving. Three summers running: nothing but dust rained down to choke out cornfields and wheat. The council paid any man driven to his knees to lay a road from here to Cedar City to keep working. They tapped in bricks from the limekiln one season. They turned each one one-quarter twist the next. 2. All night, so far, I have waited for the train to come calling through a cotton curtain on its breeze. It always does—low as a mourning dove long minutes over the far, darkening fields and many trees. How huge the world must be to hear so far beyond the shade, beyond the grasp of night. There are apple boughs brushing my fine screen lightly. And a dozen stars, I know, like pinpricks on an arm. Before it stops, a train will hiss, grind, clatter all the way back while its car-locks bang. Then the engine at idle—hubbub, wood smoke, and trouble in the hobo camp below the trestle. How sad the world is to hear nothing for so long. It always comes. Sweet night wind like cider. 3. I was watching the road where his car went and thirty years burned off, as in a drop of oil. I was scanning for dust on the rise, a cartoon cowboy’s gallop. It’s where he drove each morning off to work somewhere hard with the road crew— he returned each evening, burned and hurt. I have a good life and hands too soft for labor. Who would guess it takes this long to come home? All week I have checked the old road, as if nothing had come to pass—jars of peaches pinging on the kitchen sill, her voice like silverware. I was playing with a soldier and blue truck. There’s a road to everywhere, the song sweeps on. I am watching the road where the car drove. 4. You can feel the brickwork give beneath your step. Each such shift in sand and balanced earth is kindred to the world’s intrinsic drift. Cars kick up a clatter, rumbling down the road— their tires grind brick to brick, turn dust to dust. When a truck goes by, the whole street quakes. You can feel your life begin to shake. 5. Hanging primrose breeze. Haze of barbeque. The many children quieted by baths, put to bed— they wait for the locusts’ buzz and homing trains. One lone bat recurrent in the streetlamp glow. Four blocks down the road gives way to asphalt blacktop. But here the block stamp macon brick hasn’t rubbed off the red clay bars the many fathers wrecked their knees to pack tightly back into earth. How small a world it is to want such work. I will come here only once more to lie down too, having lived to praise one thing made so well it sings with each slow passage, rimmed with sleepers safe in all their loved and many beds. Flowers line every sidewalk down the breathing road.

Someone’s coming from the other world. Hiss of night rain. Someone’s going there now. The two are sure to meet. Translated from the Korean

Earth took of earth, earth with woe, Earth other earth to the earth added; Earth laid earth in an earthen grave. Then had earth of earth enough earth.

you see so many graveyards around these little towns— out in the open spaces & places. i guess big cities have not enough space for the living, let alone the dead. there is so much water here and back home in chicago we would call them rocks, lying all on the ground(s) lots of rocks around/but you would call them stones here. see how much smoother the world is. the farther east we go the more frequent are the stops at rich small quaint towns and the more frequent are the admonitions to “watch one’s ticket on the rack above the seat or to be very sure to take it with you if you leave your seat!” apparently, the very wealthy, steal. as i ride the train watching the many white students eating out of brown paper sacks, saving their now money so that they can be the very wealthy later on, also.

—“mu” forty-eighth part— “While we’re alive,” we kept repeating. Tongues, throats, roofs of our mouths bone dry, skeletons we’d someday be... Panicky masks we wore for effect more than effect, more real than we’d admit... No longer wanting to know what soul was, happy to see shadow, know touch... Happy to have sun at our backs, way led by shadow, happy to have bodies, block light... Afternoon sun lighting leaf, glint of glass, no matter what, about to be out of body it seemed... Soon to be shadowless we thought, said we thought, not to be offguard, caught out. Gray morning we meant to be done with, requiem so sweet we forgot what it lamented, teeth turning to sugar, we grinned • Day after day of the dead we were desperate. Dark what the night before we saw lit, bones we’d eventually be... At day’s end a new tally but there it was, barely begun, rock the clock tower let go of, iridescent headstone, moment’s rebuff... Soul, we saw, said we saw, invisible imprint. No one wanted to know what soul was... Day after day of the dead we were deaf, numb to what the night before we said moved us, fey light’s coded locale... I fell away, we momentarily gone, deaf but to brass’s obsequy, low brass’s croon begun. I fell away, not fast, floated, momentary mention an accord with the wind, day after day of the dead the same as day before day of the dead... “No surprise,” I fell away muttering, knew no one would hear, not even me • We wore capes under which we were in sweaters out at the elbow. Arms on the table, we chewed our spoons... Mouthing the blues, moaned an abstract truth, kept eating. The dead's morning-after buffet someone said it was. Feast of the unfed said someone else... What were we doing there the exegete kept asking, adamant, uninvited, morose... Elbows in the air like wings, we kept eating, rolled our eyes, kept shoveling it in... Day after day of the dead we were them. We ate inexhaustibly, ate what wasn't there, dead no longer dying of thirst, hung over, turned our noses up to what was ________________ It was me, we were it, insensate, sugared sweat what what we drank tasted like. Even so, the tips of our tongues tasted nothing, we sipped without wincing... We ate cakes, we ate fingernail soup, a new kind of gazpacho, no one willing to say what soul was... Knucklebone soufflé we ate, we ate gristle, eyes we took from flies flying backward a kind of caviar, none of us wanting to say what soul was

His daughter pulls on her father’s frayed dishdasha to go check the bees. Today she doesn’t carry the smoke canister with her to the field. She opens a tray while talking down their high whine, breaks off honeycomb and rubs it over her face and hair, over white cloth, down to her feet. Each of her hands holds the crumbling comb like a sponge while she waits for them. When the first one comes she feels wings against her toes, a tongue unscrolling. She wills herself not to laugh as the next alights on her neck, tickling her hairs as it walks. Then they descend to shoulders, forearms, chest, thighs, eyes she shuts—she feels the thousand tongues on the cloth. Feather-like wings churn in her ears, rustle and hum with agitated talk. Never been so loved. Her father’s alive, she’s a torch of burning bees, tears course across cheeks. When her mother sees the apparition of bees walking towards their door she falls on her knees. It is the end of the world. But when the angel speaks with her daughter’s voice she’s not amazed. Mama, how do I end this? Her mother brushes bees away from her eyes, pulls them from her hair and undresses her child, hanging the winged dishdasha on the clothes line. Carries her naked girl into the house to bathe. The bee-like angels take all day to strip honey from the robe, return it to their tiered home.

for Hannah The way my daughter sleeps it’s as if she’s talking to the dead. Now she is one. I watch her eyes roll backwards in her head, her senses fold one by one, and then her breathing quiets to a beat. Every night she fights this silent way of being with all the whining ammunition that she has. She wins a tired story, a smothered song, the small and willful links to life that carry her away. Welcome to the Egyptian burial. She’s gone to Hades with her stuffed animals. When she wakes, the sad circles disappeared, she blinks before she knows me. I have listened to one million breaths of her. And every night my body seizes when she leaves to go where I am not, and yet every night I urge her, go.

The dead girl by the beautiful Bartlett. I'm sad. I make horrible sentences. A woman alone in the park waves. The water. The dead girl by the beautiful Bartlett. Put down the cell phone. I'm sad. The waves. The horrible staring. A woman alone in the park. Waves. The leaves. Leaves along in the park. I'm staring. The dead girl by the beautiful Bartlett. I'm sad. Put down your cell phone. A wave. The sad girl alone in the park. Leaves. Put down your cell phone. The Bartlett. The staring. A leaf alone in the horrible leaves. The dead girl. The staring.

Some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to endless night. —William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence” We spend our lives trying to grasp the premise. William Blake is not, for instance, William Blake, but rather a 19th century accountant from Cleveland on the lam for murder & the theft of a horse. In the closing scene, he is going to die, & so is Nobody, his half-Blackfoot, half-Blood guide. Sure, this is a Western, a morality tale about a destiny made manifest through the voice of a gun & a hero whose mythic flight from innocence destroys him. But we all come to the end of the line soon enough. The obvious just seems wiser when Nobody says it.Time, it turns out, is the most common noun in the English language, as if by constant invocation, we could keep it at bay. Yesterday, I sat in another state on a large rubber ball in my brother’s basement bouncing my newborn nephew in my arms. His mother, on the phone with a friend, asks what we should fear more, the hobo spider or the poison that kills it. I want to whisper into his ear something that feels like knowledge: Once upon a time, there was nothing & one day, there will be nothing again. This is the faraway place to which his tiny weight calls me. If he could understand the words. I think, he would know what I mean, having only just sprung himself from that fine sea. Sometimes we coo to soothe him:Don’t cry, Little Bird. I know, I know. But only the roar of the vacuum finally calms him, for nothing sounds as much like the lost world of the womb as the motors of our machines. The root of travel means torture, having passed from Medieval Latin into Old French. As the action opens, Johnny Depp, shot in black & white, is already rocking into night on a train. And soon, he will begin his dying. This is not to say that the inky band fanning across the morning blue of a kestrel’s tail feathers has no meaning, or the first fingers of rust coming into bloom on the green enameled chassis of a Corona typewriter left in the rain. Direct observation, the naturalist Niko Tinbergen assures us, is the only real thing. Perhaps this is what I should tell him. Or that this moment, too, is a part of some migration. Every snow bunting composes its own song, & a careful watcher can tell one kittiwake from its neighbor by the little dots on the tips of its wings. The most used verb is also the most humble— merely to be. Nobody can teach to William Blake the auguries of William Blake. We are, instead, our own vatic visions, bumbling prophets. Our sense of ourselves as invented as film. Later, in an ocean-going canoe lined with cedar boughs, he will drift out into cold breakers, two bullets in his chest. But, here, in his small hat & wire glasses, he still seems sweetly comic. He holds up a letter; someone’s promised him a job. His fancy plaid suit makes him look like a clown.

They hail me as one living, But don't they know That I have died of late years, Untombed although? I am but a shape that stands here, A pulseless mould, A pale past picture, screening Ashes gone cold. Not at a minute's warning, Not in a loud hour, For me ceased Time's enchantments In hall and bower. There was no tragic transit, No catch of breath, When silent seasons inched me On to this death .... — A Troubadour-youth I rambled With Life for lyre, The beats of being raging In me like fire. But when I practised eyeing The goal of men, It iced me, and I perished A little then. When passed my friend, my kinsfolk, Through the Last Door, And left me standing bleakly, I died yet more; And when my Love's heart kindled In hate of me, Wherefore I knew not, died I One more degree. And if when I died fully I cannot say, And changed into the corpse-thing I am to-day, Yet is it that, though whiling The time somehow In walking, talking, smiling, I live not now.