437 Death poems

We called off the search, and the weary climbed down from the glacier with their dogs exhausted in the spring sun too tired to eat the ice in their paws. We had called his name, mostly for show, a ritual that kept us moving: in the high bowls, their stunted pines predating the flood, in the steep ravines sliding loose with scree, loudly at first, then speaking it to each other then spelling it out on forms required by law. It is a form of praying, he claimed, to walk out to the very edge of your life. Every time the reply comes clear as a stone at our thin crowns. It misses almost every time, humming as it goes.

My mother died one summer— the wettest in the records of the state. Crops rotted in the west. Checked tablecloths dissolved in back gardens. Empty deck chairs collected rain. As I took my way to her through traffic, through lilacs dripping blackly behind houses and on curbsides, to pay her the last tribute of a daughter, I thought of something I remembered I heard once, that the body is, or is said to be, almost all water and as I turned southward, that ours is a city of it, one in which every single day the elements begin a journey towards each other that will never, given our weather, fail— the ocean visible in the edges cut by it, cloud color reaching into air, the Liffey storing one and summoning the other, salt greeting the lack of it at the North Wall and, as if that wasn't enough, all of it ending up almost every evening inside our speech— coast canal ocean river stream and now mother and I drove on and although the mind is unreliable in grief, at the next cloudburst it almost seemed they could be shades of each other, the way the body is of every one of them and now they were on the move again—fog into mist, mist into sea spray and both into the oily glaze that lay on the railings of the house she was dying in as I went inside.

And, the last day being come, Man stood alone Ere sunrise on the world’s dismantled verge, Awaiting how from everywhere should urge The Coming of the Lord. And, behold, none Did come,—but indistinct from every realm Of earth and air and water, growing more And louder, shriller, heavier, a roar Up the dun atmosphere did overwhelm His ears; and as he looked affrighted round Every manner of beast innumerable All thro’ the shadows crying grew, until The wailing was like grass upon the ground. Asudden then within his human side Their anguish, since the goad he wielded first, And, since he gave them not to drink, their thirst, Darted compressed and vital.—As he died, Low in the East now lighting gorgeously He saw the last sea-serpent iris-mailed Which, with a spear transfixèd, yet availed To pluck the sun down into the dead sea.

My body, laid out on a marble slab. Naked but for a linen sheet tucked under Its chin, as though to keep the patient warm. A solemn band approached; identified The late departed with what looked like mingled Relief, mild satisfaction, and bereavement. One of them took away an arm—the right, Was it?—and loped off with a spring in his step. Which prompted others to do likewise: here A shoulder (suitable for crying on), there a foot, there an eye and there an ear. Plump already, one scooped out the belly. Just who you’d imagine claimed the head. Not the one I hoped tugged loose a rib. Some, by no means all, I knew as friends; But felt no bitterness, instead, acceptance. This, while watching their several withdrawals, Travelers moving farther out and deeper Into the ringing distance—who all began To flourish, somehow more intently themselves Than they had earlier resolved to be. Was glad of that, despite a fit of shivers (Simple human nature still presiding) When I took note of the rummage that remained, Wishing a greener plot had been marked out For what had breathed with so much spark and promise. My turn, then, to come forward for a closer Look; and, since no one else had carried off That steady, flexibly strung pump at rest Beneath the sternum, take it for my own, Sensing its mute but anchored trust that parts Lucky for others would befriend as well— Oh love —even the heir that flesh once named.

And thou art dead, as young and fair As aught of mortal birth; And form so soft, and charms so rare, Too soon return'd to Earth! Though Earth receiv'd them in her bed, And o'er the spot the crowd may tread In carelessness or mirth, There is an eye which could not brook A moment on that grave to look. I will not ask where thou liest low, Nor gaze upon the spot; There flowers or weeds at will may grow, So I behold them not: It is enough for me to prove That what I lov'd, and long must love, Like common earth can rot; To me there needs no stone to tell, 'T is Nothing that I lov'd so well. Yet did I love thee to the last As fervently as thou, Who didst not change through all the past, And canst not alter now. The love where Death has set his seal, Nor age can chill, nor rival steal, Nor falsehood disavow: And, what were worse, thou canst not see Or wrong, or change, or fault in me. The better days of life were ours; The worst can be but mine: The sun that cheers, the storm that lowers, Shall never more be thine. The silence of that dreamless sleep I envy now too much to weep; Nor need I to repine That all those charms have pass'd away, I might have watch'd through long decay. The flower in ripen'd bloom unmatch'd Must fall the earliest prey; Though by no hand untimely snatch'd, The leaves must drop away: And yet it were a greater grief To watch it withering, leaf by leaf, Than see it pluck'd to-day; Since earthly eye but ill can bear To trace the change to foul from fair. I know not if I could have borne To see thy beauties fade; The night that follow'd such a morn Had worn a deeper shade: Thy day without a cloud hath pass'd, And thou wert lovely to the last, Extinguish'd, not decay'd; As stars that shoot along the sky Shine brightest as they fall from high. As once I wept, if I could weep, My tears might well be shed, To think I was not near to keep One vigil o'er thy bed; To gaze, how fondly! on thy face, To fold thee in a faint embrace, Uphold thy drooping head; And show that love, however vain, Nor thou nor I can feel again. Yet how much less it were to gain, Though thou hast left me free, The loveliest things that still remain, Than thus remember thee! The all of thine that cannot die Through dark and dread Eternity Returns again to me, And more thy buried love endears Than aught except its living years.

Elliot Ray Neiderland, home from college one winter, hauling a load of Herefords from Hogtown to Guymon with a pint of Ezra Brooks and a copy of Rilke’s Duineser Elegien

Whenever I touch the cairn marking the summit of one of my parents, touch the top stone, an animal caution comes over me, sinew and muscle like the brook’s, a sudden shivering green-brown flame. Soon they will be constellations, and I a small tower of stones.

The mower flipped it belly up, a baby garter less than a foot long, dull green with a single sharp stripe of pale manila down its back, same color as the underside which was cut in two places, a loop of intestine poking out. It wouldn't live, so I ran the blades over it again, and cut it again but didn’t kill it, and again and then again, a cloud of two-cycle fuel smoke on me like a swarm of bees. It took so long my mind had time to spiral back to the graveyard I tended as a child for the dead ones, wild and tame: fish from the bubbling green aquarium, squirrels from the road, the bluejay stalked to a raucous death by Cicero the patient, the tireless hunter, who himself was laid to rest one August afternoon under a rock painted gray, his color, with a white splash for his white splash. Once in the woods I found the skeleton of a deer laid out like a diagram, long spine curved like a necklace of crude, ochre spools with the string rotted away, and the dull metal shaft of the arrow lying where it must have pierced not the heart, not the head, but the underbelly, the soft part where the sex once was. I carried home the skull with its nubs of not-yet-horns which the mice had overlooked, and set it on a rock in my kingdom of the dead. Before I chopped the little snake to bits of raw mosaic, it drew itself into an upward-straining coil, head weaving, mouth open, hissing at the noise that hurt it. The stripe was made of tiny paper diamonds, sharp-edged but insubstantial, like an x-ray of the spine or the ghost beginning to pull away. What taught the snake to make itself seem bigger than it was, to spend those last few seconds dancing in the roar and shadow of its death? Now I see, though none exists, its grave: harebells withered in a jar, a yellow spiral painted on a green-black stone, a ring of upright pine cones for a fence. That’s how the deer skull lay in state until one of the neighborhood dogs came to claim it, and carried it off to bury in the larger graveyard of the world.

This is what our dying looks like. You believe in the sun. I believe I can't love you. Always be closing, Said our favorite professor before He let the gun go off in his mouth. I turned 29 the way any man turns In his sleep, unaware of the earth Moving beneath him, its plates in Their places, a dated disagreement. Let's fight it out, baby. You have Only so long left—a man turning In his sleep—so I take a picture. I won't look at it, of course. It's His bad side, his Mr. Hyde, the hole In a husband's head, the O Of his wife's mouth. Every night, I take a pill. Miss one, and I'm gone. Miss two, and we're through. Hotels Bore me, unless I get a mountain view, A room in which my cell won't work, And there's nothing to do but see The sun go down into the ground That cradles us as any coffin can.

When I go back to earth And all my joyous body Puts off the red and white That once had been so proud, If men should pass above With false and feeble pity, My dust will find a voice To answer them aloud: “Be still, I am content, Take back your poor compassion— Joy was a flame in me Too steady to destroy. Lithe as a bending reed Loving the storm that sways her— I found more joy in sorrow Than you could find in joy.” October 1915