437 Death poems

finish, lie dead on the sorrow bed. stiff and related to your furrowed, underlined, intention . . . shit there, with the injected vellum that seeks your heart. from machine with this Wake, this egg frost beacon on the SHORE — you, Wane, U.S., Wane itches on piled money spent, tiny boil. Seem, THEN your crucified microscope, shimmering train railed on decided work. this is WAKE, this means BEGIN, your main() with her. peace, walking through city pulses, end their made up Western, singing its shore borrowed and stained with missiles. LOG warns this is magical rivers, NOT tongue to be salvaged or interred with any one place that has hers. win there — placed like dirt on the shoe place warns. all letters, all Eastern locks penciled in with dog interiors, let go the chain. Hopped up winds, and the granite falling through any retrial that was schooling-less . . . without Agamemnon warning in pushed hires and radio made PINS. on THEN to an eye full of tunnels, real I/O

Then the day passed into the evening, a sovereign, darkening blue. And the twenty-six lost miners, if living at all, knew nothing of the hour: not the languid canter of light, or the wind curled through the hedgerows. Not pain. Not rage. If living at all then just this: a worm of black water at the lower back. At the lungs two tablets of air. What is it like there? the broadcaster asked, his voice and the slow reply cast down through the time zones of America. A stillness. All of the families asleep in the fire station. And the mineworks pale on the landscape. What else? Nothing. Blue lights of police cars. What else? Nothing. Nothing? ...The thrum of the crickets. A thousand files on a thousand scrapers. A thousand taut membranes called mirrors amplifying the breed-song. A landscape of cupped wings amplifying the breed-song. A thousand bodies summoned to a thousand bodies—and the song itself a body, so in tune with the dusk's warmth it slows when a cloud passes over. Today. Tomorrow. In that May Nova Scotia darkness when the earth flared and collapsed. Before that May. After that darkness. On the larch bud. On the fire station. On shale and the grind-steps of magma. On the gold straining in its seam bed. On the coal straining. On the twenty-six headlamps swaying through the drift tunnels. On the bud. On the leaves, on the meadow grass, on the wickerwork of shrubs: dark cape of desire.

Shook the box like a maraca. Stood around like a dope in my punch-colored dress, clutching your box to my chest. Opened your plastic receptacle, the size of a jack-in-the-box. But instead of gaudy stripes, your box is sober-suit blue, hymnal blue. Tasted them. You've gained a statue's flavor, like licking the pyramids, or kissing sandstone shoulders. I mean boulders. Remarked to your box: "REINCARNATION comes from roots meaning 'to be made flesh again.'" Stowed your box under my bed for a week to seed dreams in which you advise me. (This didn't work.) Opened the Babylonian Talmud at random. Read aloud to your gritty, gray-white powder: "There are three keys which the Holy One, blessed be He, has not entrusted into the hands of any messenger. These are: the key of rain, the key of birth, and the key of the resurrection of the dead." Worked myself up to watery eyes. Any intensity evaporated the instant I stopped reading. Tried to intuit your format, sift it from tides of void. Does shape play a role? My watch ticked in an exaggerated way. Closed my eyes, sent forth mental tendrils seeking the nothing of you. They curled back on them- selves, weaving around the wing chair, a dog's leg, a lamp stand, eventu- ally heading back toward the nothing of me.

Jan came this morning —I dreamt of my father he says he was riding in an oak coffin I walked next to the hearse and father turned to me: you dressed me nicely and the funeral is very beautiful at this time of year so many flowers it must have cost a lot don’t worry about it father —I say—let people see we loved you that we spared nothing six men in black livery walk nicely at our sides father thought for a while and said—the key to the desk is in the silver inkwell there is still some money in the second drawer on the left with this money—I say— we will buy you a gravestone a large one of black marble it isn’t necessary—says father— better give it to the poor six men in black livery walk nicely at our sides they carry burning lanterns again he seemed to be thinking —take care of the flowers in the garden cover them for the winter I don’t want them to be wasted you are the oldest—he says— from a little felt bag behind the painting take out the cuff links with real pearls let them bring you luck my mother gave them to me when I finished high school then he didn’t say anything he must have entered a deeper sleep this is how our dead look after us they warn us through dreams bring back lost money hunt for jobs whisper the numbers of lottery tickets or when they can’t do this knock with their fingers on the windows and out of gratitude we imagine immortality for them snug as the burrow of a mouse

Air here is like the water Of an aquarium that’s been lived in for a while—clear and still Beyond the rigors Of glass; appearing cold (and clear) as spring streams Fed by snow and ice, But unexpectedly warm to feel, and inviting; side-lit— A vitality of shadows Once you come into it, and long bars of light Burning like spots, Remarkable for the absence of dust in their sharp crossfires; Heavy, as crystal Is heavy, as if to move here would mean pushing against a force Palpable, and strong; Yet rich with prospects of life, comfortable With the idea of life, As if, put on its slide, every drop is stocked with wonders, Swarming, about to burst— Beautiful in a way, One element sustaining another, our message brought home So that the living Might come to see. Harder to say that without them We are nothing— Water without air; or to speak of our isolation, Or our special loneliness; Or say as they look right through us, at their plants, Pictures, books, Windows, reflections, and blank white walls, That we need them, To orient ourselves and to tell us who we are; Or that with each look They are swimming to within our sights; or that we are always casting Wider and wider And that even now they are fighting to avoid our nets.

Your dust will be upon the wind Within some certain years, Though you be sealed in lead to-day Amid the country’s tears. When this idyllic churchyard Becomes the heart of town, The place to build garage or inn, They’ll throw your tombstone down. Your name so dim, so long outworn, Your bones so near to earth, Your sturdy kindred dead and gone, How should men know your worth? So read upon the runic moon Man’s epitaph, deep-writ. It says the world is one great grave. For names it cares no whit. It tells the folk to live in peace, And still, in peace, to die. At least, so speaks the moon to me, The tombstone of the sky.

At the table, at the grave not knowing whether to grieve or celebrate, they seemed to find a way within the stalled noon clatter and the dusk over oily swamps and elder tangle along a locked stockade of heavy machines, as the blue heron, looking down, flew farther on. Nothing dissolved for them the mortal green and black in transparent power of spacious streams now gone from earth. The flickering they found, terror-hope-terror, in fire of sunset clouds remained unwavering in its progress to night and day and night. And yet the pleasure they took in everything did not wear out. The limestone quarry of a poorer century, lipped in birds and berries, treasured up, still treasures up, old rains beneath its surface of dusty jet— still waits behind their houses on airless nights to be the dreams and drownings of new children.

1. Josef Mengele Drowns While Swimming at a Beach in Brazil, 1979 His name then: Wolfgang Gerhard. How easy, slipping on another man’s skin. Another country, too, its sun’s heat and light as insistent as a pair of forceps. His pants, left crumpled on the beach, forged papers and a few hard candies in the pocket. Where the water was shallow, he could look down and see his shadow passing over the pale sand, a wobbly twin, matching him stroke for stroke for stroke. 2. Li Po Drowns Trying to Embrace the Reflection of the Moon in the Yangtze, 762 The moon is no drinker of wine, so I must compensate. Surely you’ve heard the crows and nightingales egging me on? The day has dispersed from the courtyards like a gang of sparrows, and nothing is left of the world that is not pecked-over, hard and dark as the dream of an apple seed. The young men laugh at an old man drinking alone, but here are my companions: my shadow, as loyal and thin as a starved dog, and the moon, his whole face wrinkling with laughter. 3. Bob, the Circus Seal, Drowns Himself in His Tank in Galveston, 1911 By then his teeth had rotted out, and he often turned to his owner with his mouth open as if about to speak, a ruined smell jetting from inside. He had already attempted it, three days before, but his owner dove in and pulled him up onto the slimy planks. His circus show days were long gone. Sure, some afternoons a kid might walk by and see the scabby painting on the side of the building: the hoop, the pedestal, the ghost of a man in a top hat, the striped ball now like a clot of pus streaked with blood, hovering over the sleek, dark head. 4. Natalie Wood Drowns under Mysterious Circumstances near Santa Catalina Island, 1981 Let me tell you: death is a long silk glove dropped to the floor. It doesn’t remember the heft of the arm, the fingers dancing. That limb is gone, and nothing will hold its shape again. You twirl your pastel skirt. You watch two cars race toward the cliff, and there is nothing you can do. So many lives you’ve entered like a room: swooned, held the prop pistol to your own face, sang for the back row. But was it your voice? What was that name you were born into? Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko? What happened to her? Was she the one taken, her family butchered, living another life among the enemy people? Was it the morning? when she stopped scanning the horizon for rescuers that she turned into you? 5. Hippasus of Metapontum Is Drowned at Sea for the Heresy of Discovering Irrational Numbers, ca. 500 BCE His fellow Pythagoreans had already built a shrine to his memory and placed it where he passed by every day, but he did not take the hint. It was on the ship that they seized him. God was an integer, firm as an unripe apricot. But weren’t there streets in the city that wound forever into the minute darkness? Weren’t there dreams where he met himself again and again, without ever seeming to wake? The sea is incommensurable. Each lungful of air kept dividing itself, even as the boat became a decimal point on the far horizon. 6. Bennie Wint, 20 Years after Faking His Drowning Death, is Discovered Alive, 2009 In the first years after I disappeared, I read every report of drowning: children, mostly boys, mostly in their bathtubs, mostly accidents. Old men whose lungs filled with fluid while they sat in their armchairs. Fishermen. Swimmers. Immigrants crowded onto rafts. Some men, their throats seize up, and they die without ever swallowing a drop, as if they never left the shore. Some nights I dreamed what never happened: I held my drowning in my palm like a giant pearl. Some days, standing behind the cash register of my new life, I felt my lungs flatten out like a pair of discarded socks. Did I ever think of the woman I left on the shore as I kicked out past the last of the breakers? I won’t say. Here it was: I might have drowned trying to pretend to. I had to swim so far out, then mark a different beach and swim back a different man, without knowing if his strength was enough to carry me to shore.

Who will stay behind, and what? A wind. Blindness from the blind man disappearing. A token of the sea: a strand of foam. A cloud stuck in a tree. Who will stay behind, and what? A single sound as genesis regrasses its creation. Like the violin rose that honors just itself. Seven grasses of that grass do understand. More than all the stars hence and northward, that star will stay that sinks into a tear. Forever in its jug, a drop of  wine remains. What will be left here? God. Not enough for you? Translated from the Yiddish

When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me; Plant thou no roses at my head, Nor shady cypress tree: Be the green grass above me With showers and dewdrops wet; And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget. I shall not see the shadows, I shall not feel the rain; I shall not hear the nightingale Sing on, as if in pain: And dreaming through the twilight That doth not rise nor set, Haply I may remember, And haply may forget.