437 Death poems

Came the dread Archer up yonder lawn — Night is the time for the old to die — But woe for an arrow that smote the fawn, When the hind that was sick unscathed went by. Father lay moaning, Her fault was sore (Night is the time when the old must die), Yet, ah to bless her, my child, once more, For heart is failing: the end is nigh. Daughter, my daughter, my girl, I cried (Night is the time for the old to die) Woe for the wish if till morn ye bide — Dark was the welkin and wild the sky. Heavily plunged from the roof the snow — (Night is the time when the old will die), She answered, My mother, 'tis well, I go. Sparkled the north star, the wrack flew high. First at his head, and last at his feet (Night is the time when the old should die), Kneeling I watched till his soul did fleet, None else that loved him, none else were nigh. I wept in the night as the desolate weep (Night is the time for the old to die), Cometh my daughter? the drifts are deep, Across the cold hollows how white they lie. I sought her afar through the spectral trees (Night is the time when the old must die), The fells were all muffled, the floods did freeze, And a wrathful moon hung red in the sky. By night I found her where pent waves steal (Night is the time when the old should die), But she lay stiff by the locked mill-wheel, And the old stars lived in their homes on high.

I thought about his death for so many hours, tangled there in the wires of the night, that it came to have a body and dimensions, more than a voice shaking over the telephone or the black obituary boldface of name and dates. His death now had an entrance and an exit, doors and stairs, windows and shutters which are the motionless wings of windows. His death had a head and clothes, the white shirt and baggy trousers of death. His death had pages, a dark leather cover, an index, and the print was too minuscule for anyone to read. His death had hinges and bolts that were oiled and locked, had a loud motor, four tires, an antenna that listened to the wind, and a mirror in which you could see the past. His death had sockets and keys, it had walls and beams. It had a handle which you could not hold and a floor you could not lie down on in the middle of the night. In the freakish pink and gray of dawn I took his death to bed with me and his death was my bed and in every corner of the room it hid from the light, and then it was the light of day and the next day and all the days to follow, and it moved into the future like the sharp tip of a pen moving across an empty page.

Because the dark suit is worn it is worn warm with a black tie and a kiss at the head of the stairs When you hear the dark suit rip on the heart’s curb the hurt is big rose flesh caught on the orange woman’s buttons As you talk metropole monotone antique intelligence as you dress wounds by peyotl looming the boulevards women hunt their children from you who look out lit still inside of a dark suit

—in borrowed language in honor and memory of Bill Ice Like a horse’s tail so thick, black down past his waist beautiful.    Wanyaka. Chemotherapy— white man’s man-made cancer . . . doesn’t distinguish between good or bad cells . . . just kills. The spirit is connected to the hair at the crown—pahin hocoka. The hair falls the spirit goes, the will is connected no more. Leukemia— cancer of the White Blood Cell. Lakota wicasa Oglala wica Ha Luta Oyate    wicozani sni Kuja, unsika Canku Wakan o mani ma wanagi o mani wasigla ceya wokiksuye wokiksuye wopilamaye miksuya Canku Luta o mani Canku Waste o mani wohitika iyomakpi, iyomakpi ake—anpetu anpetu waste I knew him well.

In Japan, when you die, they wheel what’s left of you out of the incinerator, and what’s left of your family takes turns picking with special chopsticks. It looks like they have gathered to dine over a dead campfire, but they are not, of course, eating you. They are feeding you to the round mouth of an urn: only in pieces, Father, to the fire. In their bright swimsuits, my daughters spill warm sand over my skin as I lie still, watching the sun needle the sky. The baby licks her fingers to tell, perhaps, if I am ready, her bald head white with lotion, her mouth full of vowels. The older one says nothing above the ocean’s slow rush, but scoops and pats to get me done and gone. I’ve never been to Japan, but once, a globe of glass found me at the clear end of a wave. It drifted from the other side, my mother said. Cold and slick, it glistened as I held it up with both hands and looked through to the green flames of the sun before tasting the salt with my tongue.

To the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns, exiles by the Falk Laws, drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th, 1875 I Thou mastering me God! giver of breath and bread; World's strand, sway of the sea; Lord of living and dead; Thou hast bound bones & veins in me, fastened me flesh, And after it almost unmade, what with dread, Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh? Over again I feel thy finger and find thee. I did say yes O at lightning and lashed rod; Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess Thy terror, O Christ, O God; Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night: The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod Hard down with a horror of height: And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress. The frown of his face Before me, the hurtle of hell Behind, where, where was a, where was a place? I whirled out wings that spell And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host. My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell, Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast, To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace. I am soft sift In an hourglass—at the wall Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift, And it crowds and it combs to the fall; I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane, But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ's gift. I kiss my hand To the stars, lovely-asunder Starlight, wafting him out of it; and Glow, glory in thunder; Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west: Since, tho' he is under the world's splendour and wonder, His mystery must be instressed, stressed; For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand. Not out of his bliss Springs the stress felt Nor first from heaven (and few know this) Swings the stroke dealt— Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver, That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt— But it rides time like riding a river (And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss). It dates from day Of his going in Galilee; Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey; Manger, maiden's knee; The dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat; Thence the discharge of it, there its swelling to be, Though felt before, though in high flood yet— What none would have known of it, only the heart, being hard at bay, Is out with it! Oh, We lash with the best or worst Word last! How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe Will, mouthed to flesh-burst, Gush!—flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet, Brim, in a flash, full!—Hither then, last or first, To hero of Calvary, Christ,'s feet— Never ask if meaning it, wanting it, warned of it—men go. Be adored among men, God, three-numberéd form; Wring thy rebel, dogged in den, Man's malice, with wrecking and storm. Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue, Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm; Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung: Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then. With an anvil-ding And with fire in him forge thy will Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring Through him, melt him but master him still: Whether at once, as once at a crash Paul, Or as Austin, a lingering-out swéet skíll, Make mercy in all of us, out of us all Mastery, but be adored, but be adored King. II "Some find me a sword; some The flange and the rail; flame, Fang, or flood" goes Death on drum, And storms bugle his fame. But wé dréam we are rooted in earth—Dust! Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same, Wave with the meadow, forget that there must The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come. On Saturday sailed from Bremen, American-outward-bound, Take settler and seamen, tell men with women, Two hundred souls in the round— O Father, not under thy feathers nor ever as guessing The goal was a shoal, of a fourth the doom to be drowned; Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing Not vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in? Into the snows she sweeps, Hurling the haven behind, The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps, For the infinite air is unkind, And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow, Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind; Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snow Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps. She drove in the dark to leeward, She struck—not a reef or a rock But the combs of a smother of sand: night drew her Dead to the Kentish Knock; And she beat the bank down with her bows and the ride of her keel: The breakers rolled on her beam with ruinous shock; And canvass and compass, the whorl and the wheel Idle for ever to waft her or wind her with, these she endured. Hope had grown grey hairs, Hope had mourning on, Trenched with tears, carved with cares, Hope was twelve hours gone; And frightful a nightfall folded rueful a day Nor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone, And lives at last were washing away: To the shrouds they took,—they shook in the hurling and horrible airs. One stirred from the rigging to save The wild woman-kind below, With a rope's end round the man, handy and brave— He was pitched to his death at a blow, For all his dreadnought breast and braids of thew: They could tell him for hours, dandled the to and fro Through the cobbled foam-fleece, what could he do With the burl of the fountains of air, buck and the flood of the wave? They fought with God's cold— And they could not and fell to the deck (Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled With the sea-romp over the wreck. Night roared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble, The woman's wailing, the crying of child without check— Till a lioness arose breasting the babble, A prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told. Ah, touched in your bower of bone Are you! turned for an exquisite smart, Have you! make words break from me here all alone, Do you!—mother of being in me, heart. O unteachably after evil, but uttering truth, Why, tears! is it? tears; such a melting, a madrigal start! Never-eldering revel and river of youth, What can it be, this glee? the good you have there of your own? Sister, a sister calling A master, her master and mine!— And the inboard seas run swirling and hawling; The rash smart sloggering brine Blinds her; but she that weather sees one thing, one; Has one fetch in her: she rears herself to divine Ears, and the call of the tall nun To the men in the tops and the tackle rode over the storm's brawling. She was first of a five and came Of a coifèd sisterhood. (O Deutschland, double a desperate name! O world wide of its good! But Gertrude, lily, and Luther, are two of a town, Christ's lily and beast of the waste wood: From life's dawn it is drawn down, Abel is Cain's brother and breasts they have sucked the same.) Loathed for a love men knew in them, Banned by the land of their birth, Rhine refused them, Thames would ruin them; Surf, snow, river and earth Gnashed: but thou art above, thou Orion of light; Thy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth, Thou martyr-master: in thy sight Storm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers—sweet heaven was astrew in them. Five! the finding and sake And cipher of suffering Christ. Mark, the mark is of man's make And the word of it Sacrificed. But he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken, Before-time-taken, dearest prizèd and priced— Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token For lettering of the lamb's fleece, ruddying of the rose-flake. Joy fall to thee, father Francis, Drawn to the Life that died; With the gnarls of the nails in thee, niche of the lance, his Lovescape crucified And seal of his seraph-arrival! and these thy daughters And five-livèd and leavèd favour and pride, Are sisterly sealed in wild waters, To bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to breathe in his all-fire glances. Away in the loveable west, On a pastoral forehead of Wales, I was under a roof here, I was at rest, And they the prey of the gales; She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails Was calling "O Christ, Christ, come quickly": The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wildworst Best. The majesty! what did she mean? Breathe, arch and original Breath. Is it love in her of the being as her lover had been? Breathe, body of lovely Death. They were else-minded then, altogether, the men Woke thee with a we are perishing in the weather of Gennesareth. Or ís it that she cried for the crown then, The keener to come at the comfort for feeling the combating keen? For how to the heart's cheering The down-dugged ground-hugged grey Hovers off, the jay-blue heavens appearing Of pied and peeled May! Blue-beating and hoary-glow height; or night, still higher, With belled fire and the moth-soft Milky way, What by your measure is the heaven of desire, The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for the hearing? No, but it was not these. The jading and jar of the cart, Time's tasking, it is fathers that asking for ease Of the sodden-with-its-sorrowing heart, Not danger, electrical horror; then further it finds The appealing of the Passion is tenderer in prayer apart: Other, I gather, in measure her mind's Burden, in wind's burly and beat of endragonèd seas. But how shall I . . . make me room there: Reach me a ... Fancy, come faster— Strike you the sight of it? look at it loom there, Thing that she ... there then! the Master, Ipse , the only one, Christ, King, Head: He was to cure the extremity where he had cast her; Do, deal, lord it with living and dead; Let him ride, her pride, in his triumph, despatch and have done with his doom there. Ah! there was a heart right There was single eye! Read the unshapeable shock night And knew the who and the why; Wording it how but by him that present and past, Heaven and earth are word of, worded by?— The Simon Peter of a soul! to the blast Tarpeian-fast, but a blown beacon of light. Jesu, heart's light, Jesu, maid's son, What was the feast followed the night Thou hadst glory of this nun?— Feast of the one woman without stain. For so conceivèd, so to conceive thee is done; But here was heart-throe, birth of a brain, Word, that heard and kept thee and uttered thee outright. Well, she has thee for the pain, for the Patience; but pity of the rest of them! Heart, go and bleed at a bitterer vein for the Comfortless unconfessed of them— No not uncomforted: lovely-felicitous Providence Finger of a tender of, O of a feathery delicacy, the breast of the Maiden could obey so, be a bell to, ring of it, and Startle the poor sheep back! is the shipwrack then a harvest, does tempest carry the grain for thee? I admire thee, master of the tides, Of the Yore-flood, of the year's fall; The recurb and the recovery of the gulf's sides, The girth of it and the wharf of it and the wall; Staunching, quenching ocean of a motionable mind; Ground of being, and granite of it: past all Grasp God, throned behind Death with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides; With a mercy that outrides The all of water, an ark For the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides Lower than death and the dark; A vein for the visiting of the past-prayer, pent in prison, The-last-breath penitent spirits—the uttermost mark Our passion-plungèd giant risen, The Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in the storm of his strides. Now burn, new born to the world, Doubled-naturèd name, The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame, Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne! Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came; Kind, but royally reclaiming his own; A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fíre hard-hurled. Dame, at our door Drowned, and among our shoals, Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward: Our Kíng back, Oh, upon énglish sóuls! Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east, More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls, Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest, Our hearts' charity's hearth's fire, our thoughts' chivalry's throng's Lord.

There are more things to love than we would dare to hope for. —Richard of St. Victor where the car hit him, fireweed sprang with blazons of fennel and umbels of dill fell through the spokes of a wheel on Whistun holiday to the sun, Denton Welch spun a web in his crushed cycle, sat in the seat, spine curled up like a spider— and spied: “saw the very drops of sweat glittering frostily between the shoulder blades” of a lad …on and on he spied and bled from the blades of his cycle, small as a spider, hiding in the fireweed, getting wet from the skins of many human suns aground at the Kentish river near Tunbridge Wells, where the dill lulls, and all boys spoil…

But so tangled in the branches they had to leave it, the conquistador’s black beard cut from his head whose neck had snapped, his deadness the others had to burn then, for the wind to take evenly away. If not for his lust, his sickness to chase, to claim her; if not for that Native woman’s quick intelligence, out-climbing

I imagined the atmosphere would be clear, shot with pristine light, not this sulphurous haze, the air ionized as before a thunderstorm. Many have pictured a river here, but no one mentioned all the boats, their benches crowded with naked passengers, each bent over a writing tablet. I knew I would not always be a child with a model train and a model tunnel, and I knew I would not live forever, jumping all day through the hoop of myself. I had heard about the journey to the other side and the clink of the final coin in the leather purse of the man holding the oar, but how could anyone have guessed that as soon as we arrived we would be asked to describe this place and to include as much detail as possible— not just the water, he insists, rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water, not simply the shackles, but the rusty, iron, ankle-shredding shackles— and that our next assignment would be to jot down, off the tops of our heads, our thoughts and feelings about being dead, not really an assignment, the man rotating the oar keeps telling us— think of it more as an exercise, he groans, think of writing as a process, a never-ending, infernal process, and now the boats have become jammed together, bow against stern, stern locked to bow, and not a thing is moving, only our diligent pens.

Wyatt resteth here, that quick could never rest; Whose heavenly gifts increased by disdain, And virtue sank the deeper in his breast; Such profit he of envy could obtain. A head, where wisdom mysteries did frame, Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain As on a stith, where some work of fame Was daily wrought, to turn to Britain’s gain. A visage, stern and mild; where both did grow, Vice to condemn, in virtues to rejoice; Amid great storms whom grace assured so, To live upright and smile at fortune’s choice. A hand that taught what might be said in rhyme; That reft Chaucer the glory of his wit; A mark the which (unperfited, for time) Some may approach, but never none shall hit. A tongue that served in foreign realms his king; Whose courteous talk to virtue did enflame Each noble heart; a worthy guide to bring Our English youth, by travail unto fame. An eye whose judgment no affect could blind, Friends to allure, and foes to reconcile; Whose piercing look did represent a mind With virtue fraught, reposed, void of guile. A heart where dread yet never so impressed To hide the thought that might the truth avaunce; In neither fortune lift, nor so repressed, To swell in wealth, nor yield unto mischance. A valiant corps, where force and beauty met, Happy, alas! too happy, but for foes, Lived, and ran the race that nature set; Of manhood’s shape, where she the mold did lose. But to the heavens that simple soul is fled, Which left with such, as covet Christ to know Witness of faith that never shall be dead: Sent for our health, but not received so. Thus, for our guilt, this jewel have we lost; The earth his bones, the heavens possess his ghost. Amen.