437 Death poems

Buffalo Bill ’s defunct who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat Jesus he was a handsome man and what i want to know is how do you like your blue-eyed boy Mister Death

Then the pulse. Then a pause. Then twilight in a box. Dusk underfoot. Then generations. — Then the same war by a different name. Wine splashing in the bucket. The erection, the era. Then exit Reason. Then sadness without reason. Then the removal of the ceiling by hand. — Then pages & pages of numbers. Then the page with the faint green stain. Then the page on which Prince Theodore, gravely wounded, is thrown onto a wagon. Then the page on which Masha weds somebody else. Then the page that turns to the story of somebody else. Then the page scribbled in dactyls. Then the page which begins Exit Angel. Then the page wrapped around a dead fish. Then the page where the serfs reach the ocean. Then a nap. Then the peg. Then the page with the curious helmet. Then the page on which millet is ground. Then the death of Ursula. Then the stone page they raised over her head. Then the page made of grass which goes on. — Exit Beauty. — Then the page someone folded to mark her place. Then the page on which nothing happens. The page after this page. Then the transcript. Knocking within. Interpretation, then harvest. — Exit Want. Then a love story. Then a trip to the ruins. Then & only then the violet agenda. Then hope without reason. Then the construction of an underground passage between us.

Everyone comes back here to die as I will soon. The place feels right since it’s half dead to begin with. Even on a rare morning of rain, like this morning, with the low sky hoarding its riches except for a few mock tears, the hard ground accepts nothing. Six years ago I buried my mother’s ashes beside a young lilac that’s now taller than I, and stuck the stub of a rosebush into her dirt, where like everything else not human it thrives. The small blossoms never unfurl; whatever they know they keep to themselves until a morning rain or a night wind pares the petals down to nothing. Even the neighbor cat who shits daily on the paths and then hides deep in the jungle of the weeds refuses to purr. Whatever’s here is just here, and nowhere else, so it’s right to end up beside the woman who bore me, to shovel into the dirt whatever’s left and leave only a name for some- one who wants it. Think of it, my name, no longer a portion of me, no longer inflated or bruised, no longer stewing in a rich compost of memory or the simpler one of bone shards, dirt, kitty litter, wood ashes, the roots of the eucalyptus I planted in ’73, a tiny me taking nothing, giving nothing, and free at last.

“We do not dig graves or put caskets into graves any longer. The decision was made and funeral homes were notified that families andfuneral homes would have to supply grave-digging personnel.” —Ed Mazoue, New Orleans City Real Estate Administrator and Person in Charge of the City’s Cemeteries There’s nothing but mud. The ground looks dry and firm, but underneath is a stew of storm. Stout shovels, rusted, grow gummed and heavy with what I heft and rearrange. Progress is slow. The sun so often steams me shut, and I have to stop to gulp sugared bites of tea, flick away sweat with my swollen fingers, swat hard at sluggish flies who hover, like they know. And when I start again, there’s a rhythm to it, some ticking jazz that gets my square hips involved. I craft a chant purely for downbeat: Plunge.   Push.   Lift.   Toss it. Plunge.   Push.   Lift.   Toss it. My untried muscles blaze, joints click, pulse clutches my chest. Whole clocks later, I pause to relish the feat, to marvel at the way I’ve compromised the earth, how I’ve been that kind of God for a minute. But only time has moved. It’s like trying to reach the next world with a spoon. My boy would have laughed. Daddy, you better sit down and watch some ball game, and we’d settle, Sunday lazy, his squirm balanced on my belly. He needed what I was and what I wasn’t. Giggling in little language, he lobbed me the ball soft, walked slower when I was at his side, shared puffed white bread and purple jelly. He waited patiently for me after dark while I shuffled piles of books, looking for a bedtime drama of spacemen or soldiers, some crayoned splash to wrap his day around. But every night, when I opened the door to his room, all I saw was a quivering mountain of Snoopys, Blues, and Scoobys. Underneath them, his happy body could barely cage breath. Giggles unleashed his toes. My line, then:Where are yoooou? Plunge.   Push.   Lift.   Toss it. Plunge.   Push.   Lift.   Toss— With the dirt balanced high, screaming my shoulder, I think hard on those nights of tussle and squeal. I want to feel his heat and twist in my arms again. I have to dig.

The Bustle in a House The Morning after Death Is solemnest of industries Enacted opon Earth – The Sweeping up the Heart And putting Love away We shall not want to use again Until Eternity –

You that seek what life is in death, Now find it air that once was breath. New names unknown, old names gone: Till time end bodies, but souls none. Reader! then make time, while you be, But steps to your eternity.

That narrow cot, hardly any bigger than a child’s, is where Droste died (it’s there in her museum in Meersburg), on that sofa Hölderlin in his tower room at the carpenter’s, Rilke and George in hospital beds presumably, in Switzerland, in Weimar, Nietzsche’s great black eyes rested on white pillows till they looked their last— all of it junk now, or no longer extant, unattributable, anonymous in its insentient and continual disintegration. We bear within us the seeds of all the gods, the gene of death and the gene of love— who separated them, the words and things, who blended them, the torments and the place where they come to an end, the few boards and the floods of tears, home for a few wretched hours. Can be no sorrow. Too distant, too remote, bed and tears too impalpable, no No, no Yes, birth and bodily pain and faith an undefinable surge, a lurch, a power stirring in its sleep moved bed and tears— sleep well!

Written at Norfolk, in Virginia “They made her a grave, too cold and damp For a soul so warm and true; And she’s gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp, Where, all night long, by a fire-fly lamp, She paddles her white canoe. “And her fire-fly lamp I soon shall see, And her paddle I soon shall hear; Long and loving our life shall be, And I’ll hide the maid in a cypress tree, When the footstep of death is near.” Away to the Dismal Swamp he speeds— His path was rugged and sore, Through tangled juniper, beds of reeds, Through many a fen where the serpent feeds, And man never trod before. And when on the earth he sunk to sleep, If slumber his eyelids knew, He lay where the deadly vine doth weep Its venomous tear and nightly steep The flesh with blistering dew! And near him the she-wolf stirr’d the brake, And the copper-snake breath’d in his ear, Till he starting cried, from his dream awake, “Oh! when shall I see the dusky Lake, And the white canoe of my dear?” He saw the Lake, and a meteor bright Quick over its surface play’d— “Welcome,” he said, “my dear one’s light!” And the dim shore echoed for many a night The name of the death-cold maid. Till he hollow’d a boat of the birchen bark, Which carried him off from shore; Far, far he follow’d the meteor spark, The wind was high and the clouds were dark, And the boat return’d no more. But oft, from the Indian hunter’s camp, This lover and maid so true Are seen at the hour of midnight damp To cross the Lake by a fire-fly lamp, And paddle their white canoe!

Blood of an eye: tamarisk gall. Blood from a shoulder: bear’s breach. From the loins: chamomile. Blood from a head: lupine. A hawk’s heart: heart of wormwood. — From Coptic & Greek Magical Papyri

The day the fat woman In the bright blue bathing suit Walked into the water and died, I thought about the human Condition. Pieces of old fruit Came in and were left by the tide. What I thought about the human Condition was this: old fruit Comes in and is left, and dries In the sun. Another fat woman In a dull green bathing suit Dives into the water and dies. The pulmotors glisten. It is noon. We dry and die in the sun While the seascape arranges old fruit, Coming in and the tide, glistening At noon. A woman, moderately stout, In a nondescript bathing suit, Swims to a pier. A tall woman Steps toward the sea. One thinks about the human Condition. The tide goes in and goes out.