Learning To Mourn

I'm an inexperienced mourner I don't even know how to begin to cry out like that old man wailing in the next hospital room— oi vay, oi vay—his two sounds beating against the wall. He makes me squirm but I get his message better than my own. How can I free myself like him? How can I know my place as he does, know how little I am? How can I mourn, the cheep of a trapped bird crying out violent sorrow? Old man, teach me. Help me reach the bowels of my cry and bring it up, coarse, rasping. Teach me to be disgusting. Help me to exile myself from all the populations of eyes and ears. Teach me to live in that country where no one else is, where I can bash to pieces my good breeding, my priests and pillars —no illusions, the self wiped out, unable to see or hear or understand. Old man—lying in your shit— you've let the angel of death from your mouth. One minute of your unforgiving protest is like true song: reckless, fatal singing, song that is not victorious, not even consoling, merely a sound you have to make.