437 Death poems

As the dead prey upon us, they are the dead in ourselves, awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you, disentangle the nets of being! I pushed my car, it had been sitting so long unused. I thought the tires looked as though they only needed air. But suddenly the huge underbody was above me, and the rear tires were masses of rubber and thread variously clinging together as were the dead souls in the living room, gathered about my mother, some of them taking care to pass beneath the beam of the movie projector, some record playing on the victrola, and all of them desperate with the tawdriness of their life in hell I turned to the young man on my right and asked, “How is it, there?” And he begged me protestingly don’t ask, we are poor poor. And the whole room was suddenly posters and presentations of brake linings and other automotive accessories, cardboard displays, the dead roaming from one to another as bored back in life as they are in hell, poor and doomed to mere equipments my mother, as alive as ever she was, asleep when I entered the house as I often found her in a rocker under the lamp, and awaking, as I came up to her, as she ever had I found out she returns to the house once a week, and with her the throng of the unknown young who center on her as much in death as other like suited and dressed people did in life O the dead! and the Indian woman and I enabled the blue deer to walk and the blue deer talked, in the next room, a Negro talk it was like walking a jackass, and its talk was the pressing gabber of gammers of old women and we helped walk it around the room because it was seeking socks or shoes for its hooves now that it was acquiring human possibilities In the five hindrances men and angels stay caught in the net, in the immense nets which spread out across each plane of being, the multiple nets which hamper at each step of the ladders as the angels and the demons and men go up and down Walk the jackass Hear the victrola Let the automobile be tucked into a corner of the white fence when it is a white chair. Purity is only an instant of being, the trammels recur In the five hindrances, perfection is hidden I shall get to the place 10 minutes late. It will be 20 minutes of 9. And I don’t know, without the car, how I shall get there O peace, my mother, I do not know how differently I could have done what I did or did not do. That you are back each week that you fall asleep with your face to the right that you are present there when I come in as you were when you were alive that you are as solid, and your flesh is as I knew it, that you have the company I am used to your having but o, that you all find it such a cheapness! o peace, mother, for the mammothness of the comings and goings of the ladders of life The nets we are entangled in. Awake, my soul, let the power into the last wrinkle of  being, let none of the threads and rubber of the tires be left upon the earth. Let even your mother go. Let there be only paradise The desperateness is, that the instant which is also paradise (paradise is happiness) dissolves into the next instant, and power flows to meet the next occurrence Is it any wonder my mother comes back? Do not that throng rightly seek the room where they might expect happiness? They did not complain of life, they obviously wanted the movie, each other, merely to pass among each other there, where the real is, even to the display cards, to be out of hell The poverty of hell O souls, in life and in death, make, even as you sleep, even in sleep know what wind even under the crankcase of the ugly automobile lifts it away, clears the sodden weights of goods, equipment, entertainment, the foods the Indian woman, the filthy blue deer, the 4 by 3 foot ‘Viewbook,’ the heaviness of the old house, the stuffed inner room lifts the sodden nets and they disappear as ghosts do, as spider webs, nothing before the hand of man The vent! You must have the vent, or you shall die. Which means never to die, the ghastliness of going, and forever coming back, returning to the instants which were not lived O mother, this I could not have done, I could not have lived what you didn’t, I am myself netted in my own being I want to die. I want to make that instant, too, perfect O my soul, slip the cog II The death in life (death itself) is endless, eternity is the false cause The knot is other wise, each topological corner presents itself, and no sword cuts it, each knot is itself its fire each knot of which the net is made is for the hands to untake the knot’s making. And touch alone can turn the knot into its own flame (o mother, if you had once touched me o mother, if I had once touched you) The car did not burn. Its underside was not presented to me a grotesque corpse. The old man merely removed it as I looked up at it, and put it in a corner of the picket fence like was it my mother’s white dog? or a child’s chair The woman, playing on the grass, with her son (the woman next door) was angry with me whatever it was slipped across the playpen or whatever she had out there on the grass And I was quite flip in reply that anyone who used plastic had to expect things to skid and break, that I couldn’t worry that her son might have been hurt by whatever it was I sent skidding down on them. It was just then I went into my house and to my utter astonishment found my mother sitting there as she always had sat, as must she always forever sit there her head lolling into sleep? Awake, awake my mother what wind will lift you too forever from the tawdriness, make you rich as all those souls crave crave crave to be rich? They are right. We must have what we want. We cannot afford not to. We have only one course: the nets which entangle us are flames O souls, burn alive, burn now that you may forever have peace, have what you crave O souls, go into everything, let not one knot pass through your fingers let not any they tell you you must sleep as the net comes through your authentic hands What passes is what is, what shall be, what has been, what hell and heaven is is earth to be rent, to shoot you through the screen of flame which each knot hides as all knots are a wall ready to be shot open by you the nets of being are only eternal if you sleep as your hands ought to be busy. Method, method I too call on you to come to the aid of all men, to women most who know most, to woman to tell men to awake. Awake, men, awake I ask my mother to sleep. I ask her to stay in the chair. My chair is in the corner of the fence. She sits by the fireplace made of paving stones. The blue deer need not trouble either of us. And if she sits in happiness the souls who trouble her and me will also rest. The automobile has been hauled away.

When the puppy snarfles for breakfast I wake to the radiator gurgling then feet crunching the reticent snow. Before I was born, Mother sewed her own suits. What do her ashes know? • Father shoved snow off the supine roof. Mother crafted Christmas ornaments: glue and glitter and red balls. No tinsel, no angels. Her death started in the living room. • For bonsai, pliers the size of a nail clipper, spools of wire and a fist-sized rock. One bore a petite pomegranate, never to eat, not to touch. Her death began with a baseball bat. • In the vineyard, he secured the strongest cane from training stake to fruiting wire. Pruning with handsaw and lopper. He’d leave a spur for the next season. He shoved her away with direct objects. • In a cold snap if one pipe freezes, the rest may freeze as well. Even before the puppy snarfles. Even before a baby brother arrived in the misleading car in Mother’s arms. • After the war, after she met Father, she smoked cigarettes but didn’t cha-cha anymore. She’d light up and blow smoke out the apoplectic window. He found the ashes on the sill. • Fireflies blinked for mates or prey outside the savvy window of my own first home. On the stereo, a bluesman cried, I need my ashes hauled! The dress was too smart to wear. • I tucked away our baby’s pink layette in circumspect mothballs for a christening that never took place. As well, a doll that Auntie crocheted. More than anything, I love tidal pools. • I know her ashes are at Father’s, lost in his charnel of junk mail. He claims that thieves have stolen that box, his knob cutter and root hook. He says, remains aren’t ashes anyways. • Winter stripped everything to the limb and dejected nest. No angels, no crèche. I don’t know whose recollections are suspect: after leaving Maui, Mother learned to swim. She loved tidal pools more than anything. • In my kitchen, the logs blink in the fire — through blinds, the wind blusters and the browbeaten trees creak in the orchard. The rain pours then stops for sun. If he lost Mother’s ashes what more could I stand? • Omusubi tastes best on black beaches. Since Mother never learned to swim, did she watch her five brothers from a blanket? On the intransigent subway, I don’t know if I’ve passed my station. (His mother said yes—) Iron: I bit my lip again. • Mother showed our baby how to sift flour and how to crank an eggbeater. After Father lost her, he barred everyone from the rooms and the yard where at night long red worms slither up from the ground. • Her ashes know: before the puppy snarfles, Father shoves snow off the supine roof; for bonsai, use pliers the size of a nail clipper; in the vineyard, the strongest canes; in a cold snap, a hair dryer on frozen pipes; fireflies blinked for mates or prey outside while I tucked away my baby’s pink layette. Her ashes know their box is in the living room where she didn’t cha-cha anymore. Where has winter stripped everything to the nest? In my kitchen, the logs blink in the fire and I know omusubi tastes best on black beaches. She knew to show her granddaughter how to sift flour.

You were carried here by hands and now the wind has you, gritty as incense, dark sparkles borne in the shape of blowing, this great atmospheric bloom, spinning under the bridge and expanding— shape of wind and its pattern of shattering. Having sloughed off the urn's temporary shape, there is another of you now— tell me which to speak to: the one you were, or are, the one who waited in the ashes for this scattering, or the one now added to the already haunted woods, the woods that sigh and shift their leaves— where your mystery billows, then breathes.

Someone is looking for us. I sensed it earlier at the creek while floating on my back, and again on Route 8 near Brookline. So we’ve detoured to this hillside eroding and crazy with markers. We’re looking for row mm or nn or something like that. I lug the baby; my wife runs ahead. This neighborhood knows her– she passes so easily between stones. She finds the grave, her father dead ten years now. In the time it takes to say kaddish the sun’s dropped. I set down my son and he crawls in the dimness, pulling himself up on the headstone. How delicately he fingers the marble. Quickly he rounds its corner. Vanishes. I’m thinking:grass, stone, quiet– then babbling from another world.

Your death must be loved this much. You have to know the grief—now. Standing by the water’s edge, looking down at the wave touching you. You have to lie, stiff, arms folded, on a heap of earth and see how far the darkness will take you. I mean it, this, now— before the ghost the cold leaves in your breath, rises; before the toes are put together inside the shoes. There it is—the goddamn orange-going-into-rose descending circle of beauty and time. You have nothing to be sad about.

Looking at the photograph is somehow not unbearable: My friends, two dead, one low on T-cells, his white T-shirt an X-ray screen for the virus, which I imagine as a single, swimming paisley, a sardine with serrated fins and a neon spine. I’m on a train, thinking about my friends and watching two women talk in sign language. I feel the energy and heft their talk generates, the weight of their words in the air the same heft as your presence in this picture, boys, the volume of late summer air at the beach. Did you tea-dance that day? Write poems in the sunlight? Vamp with strangers? There is sun under your skin like the gold Sula found beneath Ajax’s black. I calibrate the weight of your beautiful bones, the weight of your elbow, Melvin, on Darrell’s brown shoulder.

Everything measured. A man twists a tuft of your hair out for no reason other than you are naked before him and he is bored with nakedness. Moments before he was weighing your gallbladder, and then he was staring at the empty space where your lungs were. Even dead, we still say you are an organ donor, as if something other than taxes outlasts death. Your feet are regular feet. Two of them, and there is no mark to suggest you were an expert mathematician, nothing that suggests that a woman loved you until you died. From the time your body was carted before him to the time your dead body is being sent to the coffin, every pound is accounted for, except 21 grams. The man is a praying man and has figured what it means. He says this is the soul, finally, after the breath has gone. The soul: less than $4,000 worth of crack—21 grams— all that moves you through this world.

I here I’m here I’m here I’m here here here here

for J. L. D. Why should we do this? What good is it to us? Above all, how can we do such a thing? How can it possibly be done? —Freud 1 My name is James A. Wright, and I was born Twenty-five miles from this infected grave, In Martins Ferry, Ohio, where one slave To Hazel-Atlas Glass became my father. He tried to teach me kindness. I return Only in memory now, aloof, unhurried, To dead Ohio, where I might lie buried, Had I not run away before my time. Ohio caught George Doty. Clean as lime, His skull rots empty here. Dying’s the best Of all the arts men learn in a dead place. I walked here once. I made my loud display, Leaning for language on a dead man’s voice. Now sick of lies, I turn to face the past. I add my easy grievance to the rest: 2 Doty, if I confess I do not love you, Will you let me alone? I burn for my own lies. The nights electrocute my fugitive, My mind. I run like the bewildered mad At St. Clair Sanitarium, who lurk, Arch and cunning, under the maple trees, Pleased to be playing guilty after dark. Staring to bed, they croon self-lullabies. Doty, you make me sick. I am not dead. I croon my tears at fifty cents per line. 3 Idiot, he demanded love from girls, And murdered one. Also, he was a thief. He left two women, and a ghost with child. The hair, foul as a dog’s upon his head, Made such revolting Ohio animals Fitter for vomit than a kind man’s grief. I waste no pity on the dead that stink, And no love’s lost between me and the crying Drunks of Belaire, Ohio, where police Kick at their kidneys till they die of drink. Christ may restore them whole, for all of me. Alive and dead, those giggling muckers who Saddled my nightmares thirty years ago Can do without my widely printed sighing Over their pains with paid sincerity. I do not pity the dead, I pity the dying. 4 I pity myself, because a man is dead. If Belmont County killed him, what of me? His victims never loved him. Why should we? And yet, nobody had to kill him either. It does no good to woo the grass, to veil The quicklime hole of a man’s defeat and shame. Nature-lovers are gone. To hell with them. I kick the clods away, and speak my name. 5 This grave’s gash festers. Maybe it will heal, When all are caught with what they had to do In fear of love, when every man stands still By the last sea, And the princes of the sea come down To lay away their robes, to judge the earth And its dead, and we dead stand undefended everywhere, And my bodies—father and child and unskilled criminal— Ridiculously kneel to bare my scars, My sneaking crimes, to God’s unpitying stars. 6 Staring politely, they will not mark my face From any murderer’s, buried in this place. Why should they? We are nothing but a man. 7 Doty, the rapist and the murderer, Sleeps in a ditch of fire, and cannot hear; And where, in earth or hell’s unholy peace, Men’s suicides will stop, God knows, not I. Angels and pebbles mock me under trees. Earth is a door I cannot even face. Order be damned, I do not want to die, Even to keep Belaire, Ohio, safe. The hackles on my neck are fear, not grief. (Open, dungeon! Open, roof of the ground!) I hear the last sea in the Ohio grass, Heaving a tide of gray disastrousness. Wrinkles of winter ditch the rotted face Of Doty, killer, imbecile, and thief: Dirt of my flesh, defeated, underground.

As Death often sidelines us it is good to contribute even if so little as to shovel some earth into earth.