437 Death poems

I call and hear your voice on the answering machine weeks after your death, a fledgling ghost still longing for human messages. Shall I leave one, telling how the fabric of our lives has been ripped before but that this sudden tear will not be mended soon or easily? In your emptying house, others roll up rugs, pack books, drink coffee at your antique table, and listen to messages left on a machine haunted by the timbre of your voice, more palpable than photographs or fingerprints. On this first day of this first fall without you, ashamed and resisting but compelled, I dial again the number I know by heart, thankful in a diminished world for the accidental mercy of machines, then listen and hang up.

for TNH There are those who will never return to us as we knew them. Who if they return at all visit our sleep, or daydreams, or turn up in the features of total strangers. Or greet us face to face in the middle of some rush hour street, but from a great distance—and not in the full flush of bodies that once wanted nothing more from us than the laying of our hands upon them, as a healer lays hands upon the afflicted. There are those who by their absence are an affliction. I imagine that sometimes in your dark bed you still want to know why. Why the man you were just coming to love, who liked you close as he raced through the city at night, why he had to swerve suddenly. Why he had to end up on an operating table, dead. Why you of all people had to live, to repeat this unanswerable question. I could tell you about a woman good at ritual who, hardly believing in herself, was good at making vows the two of us could believe. Then one day I had to drive her to an early flight. The dawn was blinding. She was off to look for the soul no one else could provide. But was this the way to do it? She didn’t know. She wanted me to tell her. Tears down her face. And I kept driving. I can look back and say: on that day, that’s when I died. Since then, you and I have had a hard time believing anything could bring us back. And yet your brown body breathes new life into a cotton print from the fifties, and picks parsley from the garden for spaghetti carbonara, and cues up Mozart’s French horn solo, and fills up the kitchen with the aroma of sourdough, and gets my body to anticipate the taste of malt as the tops of American beer cans pop: good rituals all, because they waited out our every loss, patient with the slow coming back to our senses, undeterred by our neglect. As if they knew all along how much we would need them.

Sunday, September Sunday ... Outdoors, Like an early page from The Appalachian Book of the Dead, Sunlight lavishes brilliance on every surface, Doves settle, surreptitious angels, on tree limb and box branch, A crow calls, deep in its own darkness, Something like water ticks on Just there, beyond the horizon, just there, steady clock ... Go in fear of abstractions ... Well, possibly. Meanwhile, They are the strata our bodies rise through, the sere veins Our skins rub off on. For instance, whatever enlightenment there might be Housels compassion and affection, those two tributaries That river above our lives, Whose waters we sense the sense of late at night, and later still. Uneasy, suburbanized, I drift from the lawn chair to the back porch to the dwarf orchard Testing the grass and border garden. A stillness, as in the passageways of Paradise, Bell jars the afternoon. Leaves, like ex votos, hang hard and shine Under the endlessness of heaven. Such skeletal altars, such vacant sanctuary. It always amazes me How landscape recalibrates the stations of the dead, How what we see jacks up the odd quotient of what we don’t see, How God’s breath reconstitutes our walking up and walking down. First glimpse of autumn, stretched tight and snicked, a bad face lift, Flicks in and flicks out, a virtual reality. Time to begin the long division.

1. hear them cry the long dead the long gone speak to us from beyond the grave guide us that we may learn all the ways to hold tender this land hard clay direct rock upon rock charred earth in time strong green growth will rise here trees back to life native flowers pushing the fragrance of hope the promise of resurrection 2. such then is beauty surrendered against all hope you are here again turning slowly nature as chameleon all life change and changing again awakening hearts steady moving from unnamed loss into fierce deep grief that can bear all burdens even the long passage into a shadowy dark where no light enters 3. night moves through the thick dark a heavy silence outside near the front window a black bear stamps down plants pushing back brush fleeing manmade confinement roaming unfettered confident any place can become home strutting down a steep hill as though freedom is all in the now no past no present 4. earth works thick brown mud clinging pulling a body down heard wounded earth cry bequeath to me the hoe the hope ancestral rights to turn the ground over to shovel and sift until history rewritten resurrected returns to its rightful owners a past to claim yet another stone lifted to throw against the enemy making way for new endings random seeds spreading over the hillside wild roses come by fierce wind and hard rain unleashed furies here in this touched wood a dirge a lamentation for earth to live again earth that is all at once a grave a resting place a bed of new beginnings avalanche of splendor 5. small horses ride me carry my dreams of prairies and frontiers where once the first people roamed claimed union with the earth no right to own or possess no sense of territory all boundaries placed by unseen ones here I will give you thunder shatter your hearts with rain let snow soothe you make your healing water clear sweet a sacred spring where the thirsty may drink animals all 6. listen little sister angels make their hope here in these hills follow me I will guide you careful now no trespass I will guide you word for word mouth for mouth all the holy ones embracing us all our kin making home here renegade marooned lawless fugitives grace these mountains we have earth to bind us the covenant between us can never be broken vows to live and let live

As soon as possible, I will confront the wren’s doings, rinse the white streaks from the porch bricks drawing lizards from their shade, the immediate smell of water too much for all of us. But first is lunch. The remains we’ll scatter over the driveway away from the bricks. Wrens come, crusts from our dishes make drama. Then history. What is possible in memory is disingenuous. Limestone, impressed with the archaic smile of bone and reptilian wrists, wishbones and feathers, describes. It cups the transitional form, naturally selecting one’s best side. There was the time you forgot your legs no longer could recall how to stand—then rose up straight and sang You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me Probably I’ve been thinking of that since August. The indelible wrens grate like shovels outside—exhumed, one voice rises from wilderness, echoes, settles, rests —then another, and, between them, the keep of an unerring quiet.

Okay part of it’s here. See it, I want you to see my brother, dead smiling in a red short-sleeved shirt, You look so much better I got through. How does time work for you? I can see where — when — I felt bad. Goes past. I’m not in it any more But this change hasn’t happened in time — a kind of before and after but no ... continuum. You look brilliant! I never let you down — he says — did I? It wasn’t possible,          Why not? Sisters and brothers are loyal, we are the primal particles. I saw how we connected to make a shape in the eyes of the beholder who chose it: But we are not that. What I see is free to change its outline. My story: the shadow of one. Why did I shrink into a story? It’s easier to talk as a person, but why? I guess we decided to, talking. Coyote throws the stars up into the sky.

When we arrive at the lounge of everything with our bags handfuls of earth     the lives of our grandparents in our memory devices we expect an exchange of sorts     that is what we expect and I think everyone deep down expects that we will not turn back Through a high window we will connect stars like line drawings translate the sparkles of the poet we will sign the fascinating mouth of the speaker we will sing lyrics that someone thought were pretty good we will sing them and we will not turn back     we will not When our footsteps awaken fresh from a long complicated journey during which the planet slid otherwise we will likely remember a dream we had once and tell a version of it to the next person and the next and realize hopefully they also have a dream to tell and we will not do that thing where we won’t listen to anyone else’s dream we will listen and interpret     signing     singing     saying even though we have been instructed not to use ings we will use the wisdom disseminated by our devices we will not turn back we will not If on arrival there is wringing of hands we will shake hands and in the eye of a storm we will make tea with our brilliant fading bodies we will do a variety of things while we can we will bed down on the steps of the assembly if we have to we will bed down in a court of law and all beds anyway are temporary and when we see that and realize we have traveled through the night we have traveled and are not turning back     that will be the point at which we will arrive

Adriaen het Kint, dead prisoner, passes back through the eye of the needle into the wombed-shaped anatomy theater in a caul of umbra mortis, lo. Tho I pass through the valley of the shadow of death, I wear a caul stitched by the needle through which a camel passed, like the condom passed through the drug mule, sperm through the pierced condom, a camera through a heart.  Just as the face of every Dutchman is lit by a flashbulb conceived two hundred years in the future, Adriaen het Kint now lifts a flayed hand to demonstrate how to put the god back together once he’s been dismembered and scattered among the reeds. Adriaen het Kint, shall we gather at the river to scoop up the disjecta membra? How, with flayed hand, shall we pluck the white lyre that rides the black thorax of the zika mosquito, resplendent in her viral robes? She is a messenger to all nations as she lowers her improbable proboscis into the human layer and vomits an inky toxin from the Greek for arrow ink for arrow, an arrow that sinks its bleat into the alien chordata so that the future contracts into itself, slinks off, slips further down the drain, sinks further down the wall outside the clinic, the infected needle blocking the stoma of the future with a crusty pus. The sleeper juts a canine up through the gum without meaning to, and an answering moon orbiting Jupiter winks back a salt signature, betrays a vein of water asleep beneath the frozen strata whereunto a white-clad nurse or rover soon will sink a toothed cannula to draw it off How complete ly she circumvents the eye of the needle how completely she bypasses that camel-route to Heaven as she drains away for human use the plasma and the data

Someone else’s child, not you, is running and running down the beach. Both feet dig into the burning sand. Two others heave one yellow bucket full of sugar-brown seaweed, their twin suits flowering a conflation of pink over blue behind the water. So landmark cactus and landmine rock battlefield uphill toward the early moon’s white horse head and each wave collapses to your right, unsettles, shouting every half minute:have me, shhhh, have me, shhhh, halve me, shhhh

The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay, Where through the lattice ivy-shadows crept. He leaned above me, thinking that I slept And could not hear him; but I heard him say, ‘Poor child, poor child’: and as he turned away Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept. He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold That hid my face, or take my hand in his, Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head: He did not love me living; but once dead He pitied me; and very sweet it is To know he still is warm though I am cold.