437 Death poems

Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin; And breastless creatures under ground Leaned backward with a lipless grin. Daffodil bulbs instead of balls Stared from the sockets of the eyes! He knew that thought clings round dead limbs Tightening its lusts and luxuries. Donne, I suppose, was such another Who found no substitute for sense, To seize and clutch and penetrate; Expert beyond experience, He knew the anguish of the marrow The ague of the skeleton; No contact possible to flesh Allayed the fever of the bone. .  .  .  .  .

First snow—I release her into it— I know, released, she won't come back. This is different from letting what, already, we count as lost go. It is nothing like that. Also, it is not like wanting to learn what losing a thing we love feels like. Oh yes: I love her. Released, she seems for a moment as if some part of me that, almost, I wouldn't mind understanding better, is that not love? She seems a part of me, and then she seems entirely like what she is: a white dog, less white suddenly, against the snow, who won't come back. I know that; and, knowing it, I release her. It's as if I release her because I know.

Anna Kyle Brown. Osage. 1896-1921. Fairfax, Oklahoma. Because she died where the ravine falls into water. Because they dragged her down to the creek. In death, she wore her blue broadcloth skirt. Though frost blanketed the grass she cooled her feet in the spring. Because I turned the log with my foot. Her slippers floated downstream into the dam. Because, after the thaw, the hunters discovered her body. Because she lived without our mother. Because she had inherited head rights for oil beneath the land. She was carrying his offspring. The sheriff disguised her death as whiskey poisoning. Because, when he carved her body up, he saw the bullet hole in her skull. Because, when she was murdered, the leg clutchers bloomed. But then froze under the weight of frost. During Xtha-cka Zhi-ga Tze-the, the Killer of the Flowers Moon. I will wade across the river of the blackfish, the otter, the beaver. I will climb the bank where the willow never dies.

I was the Widow McFarlane, Weaver of carpets for all the village. And I pity you still at the loom of life, You who are singing to the shuttle And lovingly watching the work of your hands, If you reach the day of hate, of terrible truth. For the cloth of life is woven, you know, To a pattern hidden under the loom i A pattern you never see! And you weave high-hearted, singing, singing, You guard the threads of love and friendship For noble figures in gold and purple. And long after other eyes can see You have woven a moon-white strip of cloth, You laugh in your strength, for Hope o'erlays it With shapes of love and beauty. The loom stops short! The pattern's out! You're alone in the room! You have woven a shroud! And hate of it lays you in it!

She took such good care of him that he seldom lifted a finger. So only now does he stand by the sink and peel his first potato, with the paring knife she left as legacy.   The potato, he notes, fits the human hand, was made to do so, one of the miracles.   She knew all along.

Living, I had no might To make you hear, Now, in the inmost night, I am so near No whisper, falling light, Divides us, dear. Living, I had no claim On your great hours. Now the thin candle-flame, The closing flowers, Wed summer with my name, — And these are ours. Your shadow on the dust, Strength, and a cry, Delight, despair, mistrust, — All these am I. Dawn, and the far hills thrust To a far sky. Living, I had no skill To stay your tread, Now all that was my will Silence has said. We are one for good and ill Since I am dead.

The rain is plashing on my sill, But all the winds of Heaven are still; And so it falls with that dull sound Which thrills us in the church-yard ground, When the first spadeful drops like lead Upon the coffin of the dead. Beyond my streaming window-pane, I cannot see the neighboring vane, Yet from its old familiar tower The bell comes, muffled, through the shower. What strange and unsuspected link Of feeling touched, has made me think— While with a vacant soul and eye I watch that gray and stony sky— Of nameless graves on battle-plains Washed by a single winter’s rains, Where, some beneath Virginian hills, And some by green Atlantic rills, Some by the waters of the West, A myriad unknown heroes rest. Ah! not the chiefs who, dying, see Their flags in front of victory, Or, at their life-blood’s noble cost Pay for a battle nobly lost, Claim from their monumental beds The bitterest tears a nation sheds. Beneath yon lonely mound—the spot By all save some fond few forgot— Lie the true martyrs of the fight, Which strikes for freedom and for right. Of them, their patriot zeal and pride, The lofty faith that with them died, No grateful page shall farther tell Than that so many bravely fell; And we can only dimly guess What worlds of all this world’s distress, What utter woe, despair, and dearth, Their fate has brought to many a hearth. Just such a sky as this should weep Above them, always, where they sleep; Yet, haply, at this very hour, Their graves are like a lover’s bower; And Nature’s self, with eyes unwet, Oblivious of the crimson debt To which she owes her April grace, Laughs gaily o’er their burial place.

Ye aspiring ones, listen to the story of the unknown Who lies here with no stone to mark the place. As a boy reckless and wanton, Wandering with gun in hand through the forest Near the mansion of Aaron Hatfield, I shot a hawk perched on the top Of a dead tree. He fell with guttural cry At my feet, his wing broken. Then I put him in a cage Where he lived many days cawing angrily at me When I offered him food. Daily I search the realms of Hades For the soul of the hawk, That I may offer him the friendship Of one whom life wounded and caged.

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts, We died in your valleys and died on your plains. We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes, Both sides of the river, we died just the same. "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportees)," Woody Guthrie I after the immigration raid Beneath one apple tree the fruit lies flung like the beads from a rosary with a broken string. Another tree stands amused over the strangeness of a shoe that pretends to be an apple in its redness, though it'll never be an apple with that lace stem and a pit where a core should be. The tree at the end of the row will weep over the pillage all week. Around its trunk, debris: straw hats, handkerchief, a basket going hungry for what's out of reach. Somewhere in the orchard a screech goes weaker by the hour. A radio without paws, it cannot claw its chords to end its suffering. But silence comes, eventually, and the apple trees will rest, gathering the shadows to their roots as the flame inside each apple falls asleep. All the while, finches perch among the branches—patient vultures waiting for the fruit to rot. For a wasp, intoxicated by the sugars, this is the perfect place to nest. The colony will thrive inside decay: the apples softening until their wrinkled skins begin to sink, the seeds poking through like teeth. The trees will sway without the wind because the ground will boil with larvae. A bird will feast until it chokes and ants will march into the belly through the beak. II after the ride by bus A strand of hair pretends to be a crack and sticks to glass. A piece of thread sits on a seat, pretends to be a tear. The bus makes believe no one cried into their hands and smeared that grief onto its walls. The walls will keep the fingerprints a secret until the sheen of oils glows by moon. Rows of ghosts come forth to sing. Until that keening rocks the bus to rest, the fumes intoxicate the solitary button—single witness to the shuffling of feet and a final act of fury: the yanking of a wetback's shirt. The button popped right off the flannel, marched in the procession and then scurried to the side. The lesson: if wounded, stay behind to die. The bus breathes out the shapes turned silhouettes turned scent of salt and sweat. The steering wheel unspools, every window shaking loose the wetness of its glare. And now a riddle squats over the parking lot: What creature stands its ground after evisceration? Roadkill. Clouds close in to consume the afterbirth. III after the detention in the county jail A mausoleum also keeps these gems: precipitation that hardens into diamonds on the cobweb stems, streams of urine that shimmer like streaks of gold. Lights coax out the coat of polish on the floor and what's solid softens into water stripped of ripples. Stilled and empty, a river that has shoved its pebbles down its throat. The cell holds out three drops of blood and will barter them for company, hungry for the smell of men again. Janitor, border guard or detainee, it's all the same musk of armpit, garlic breath, oils that bubble up from crack to tailbone, scent of semen from the foreskin, fungus from the toes. Without takers, the keyhole constricts in the cold. IV after the deportation plane falls from the sky A red-tailed hawk breaks through the smoke and doesn't drop the way the bodies did when the plane began to dive and spat pieces of its cargo out the door. No grace, the twitching of such a great machine. No beauty to its blackening inside the pristine canvas of majestic blue—a streak of rage made by a torch and not a paintbrush. The hawk lands on the canyon and snaps its neck in quick response to the vulgar cracking on the boulders, to the shrill of metal puncturing the canyon, to the burst of flames that traps a nest of mice within the lair turned furnace, burning shriek, and hair. Stunned host of sparrows scatters. Fume of feathers, pollution in the air. Poison in the lungs of all that breathes. A darkness rises. The blue absorbs it the way it dissipates a swarm after the crisis of a shattered hive. Heaven shows its mercy also, swallowing the groan that spilled out of the hill. No signs of tragedy by dusk except a star splayed over rock, the reek of fumes—a disemboweled god. V after the clean-up along Los Gatos Canyon What strange flowers grow in the shadow. Without petals and with crooked twigs for stems. The butterflies that pollinated them were bits of carbon glowing at the edge. The solitary lone wolf spider doesn't dare to bite the scorched caul on the canyon. It packs its fangs for brighter lands. The footprints drawn in black do not match the footprints in the orchard though they also bear the weight of the unwanted. The chain gang called upon to gather the debris sang the Prison Blues all afternoon: Inmate, deportee, in your last attempt to flee every bone splits into three. VI after the communal burial Twenty-eight equals one deportation bus equals one cell in the detention center, one plane-load of deportees, one plunge into the canyon, one body in the coffin although one was a woman—sister not alone anymore among the chaperone of angels with wings of stone. Manuel Merino, Julio Barrón, Severo, Elías, Manuel Calderón, Francisco, Santiago, Jaime, Martín, Lupe, Guadalupe, Tomás, Juan Ruiz, Alberto, Ramón, Apolonio, Ramón, Luis, Román, Luis, Salvador, Ignacio Navarro, Jesús, Bernabé, Rosalío Portillo, María, y José. Y un Deportado No Identificado. No papers necessary to cross the cemetery. The sun floods the paths between tombs and everything pushes out into light. No shame to be a cherub without a nose. The wreath will not hide its decay. Cement displays its injuries with no regrets. This is the place to forget about labor and hardship and pain. No house left to build, no kitchen to clean, no chair on a porch, no children to feed. No longing left except a wish that will never come true: Paint us back into the blank sky's blue. Don't forget us like we've forgotten all of you.

“The wind doth blow today, my love, And a few small drops of rain; I never had but one true-love, In cold grave she was lain. “I’ll do as much for my true-love As any young man may; I’ll sit and mourn all at her grave For a twelvemonth and a day.” The twelvemonth and a day being up, The dead began to speak: “Oh who sits weeping on my grave, And will not let me sleep?” “’T is I, my love, sits on your grave, And will not let you sleep; For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips, And that is all I seek.” “You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips, But my breath smells earthy strong; If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips, Your time will not be long. “’T is down in yonder garden green, Love, where we used to walk, The finest flower that e’re was seen Is withered to a stalk. “The stalk is withered dry, my love, So will our hearts decay; So make yourself content, my love, Till God calls you away.”