341 Grief poems

In that aftertime I wasn't writing. I never wrote, I didn't know what the aftertime was for. I felt little, collected nothing. I talked to myself, but it was boring.

A hole torn in the fabric of the world, the web, the whole infernal weave through which life-giving rain is falling but mixing with the tears and with the blood. Dead body-snatchers enter, the mega-corpses, much in the news these days, enter and grind bones, flesh and sinews down to dry tree bark, mixing with tree bark, crawling with the demonic beetles. They’ll tell it later: “No one expected this”: not one—patient, doctors, practitioners of every stripe, no one except the one whose daily work is close to prophecy, who feels it in his nerves or in her muscles—where news travels up fast and lodges in the eyes, all-seeing, all-pervading vision of disaster. And comes in like a mouse, wee small, [wee modest, so wee, wee practical,] mouse with big ears and popping eyes, looking this way and that and not one tittle-tattle fazed by your huge presence. Later drowns in a bucket with a lizard: everything drowns round here getting to water. Not able to get out again. Thus coming quietly, thus probing, [thus stealing in,] squatting thus quietly back of the house: how do the tears well up, well down again, what makes them well, the seeing eyes know not, what routes the change parent-to-orphan? Stop. Orphan-to-parent? Stop. Then back again to tears? Look out beyond the healthy trees preserved in a close circle round the house for privacy, look out the window over hills and dales of this milagro country, see living green, see dying brown—on each and every morning mourn the trees. Criminal imbeciles who run the shows we live in from top to bottom of their slimy theater, have now decreed they will not solve the water. Matter of fact, they will not solve what we are made of—the high percentage water in all of us compounded. They will not solve a single problem by the name of life we give to human business. They will prefer to dip their steel in blood, to let the semen drip from off of their steel into the blood and thus contaminate, infuse with every cancer both body politic and body not so politic, just private, single, individual—but gives to other individuals their mien and color. Ghosts walk the hills and dales between the dying trees. “Remember now,” they say, with stab at tragic countenance, [for when can privacy enter into collective?] “those days, those days you took no notice of, counting them poor, dispersing them among the memories you could not value at their true worth, you could not recognize enough to feel: who knows if these few days, [these very days], were not those ones we lived together here, the only paradise?”

for the eyes of the children, the last to melt, the last to vaporize, for the lingering eyes of the children, staring, the eyes of the children of buchenwald, of viet nam and johannesburg, for the eyes of the children of nagasaki, for the eyes of the children of middle passage, for cherokee eyes, ethiopian eyes, russian eyes, american eyes, for all that remains of the children, their eyes, staring at us, amazed to see the extraordinary evil in ordinary men.

One morn I left him in his bed; A moment after some one said, ‘Your child is dying – he is dead.’ We made him ready for his rest, Flowers in his hair, and on his breast His little hands together prest. We sailed by night across the sea; So, floating from the world were we, Apart from sympathy, we Three. The wild sea moaned, the black clouds spread Moving shadows on its bed, But one of us lay midship dead. I saw his coffin sliding down The yellow sand in yonder town, Where I put on my sorrow’s crown. And we returned; in this drear place Never to see him face to face, I thrust aside the living race. Mothers, who mourn with me today, Oh, understand me, when I say, I cannot weep, I cannot pray; I gaze upon a hidden store, His books, his toys, the clothes he wore, And cry, ‘Once more, to me,once more!’ Then take, from me, this simple verse, That you may know what I rehearse— A grief – your and my Universe!

In memoriam Mary Ann, 1932–1980 The five or six of them, sitting on the rocks Out at Lanesville, near Gloucester; it is like Listening to music. Several of them are teachers, One is a psychologist, one is reading a book, The page glares white in the summer sunlight; Others are just sunning themselves, or just Sitting there looking out over the water; A couple of them seem to be talking together; From this far off you can’t hear what they are saying. The day is hot, the absolute middle of summer. Someone has written an obscenity In huge letters on the rocks above and behind This group of people, and someone else, one of them, Maybe, or maybe a neighbor, the owner of one Of the cottages up behind and back in the woods, Has tried to erase it and only partly done so, So that for years it will say hoarsely fuck To the random winds and to the senseless waves. One of them is sitting with her back turned To me and to the others on the rocks. The purple Loosestrife and the tigerlilies are like the flags Of some celebration; they bloom along the edge Of a small stream that makes its way unseen Down to the rocks and sand. Her shoulders are round, And rather luxuriously heavy, and the whole figure Has a youthful and graceful amplitude of being Whose beauty will last her her whole life long. The voices of some people out in a boat somewhere Are carried in over the water with surprising Force and clarity, though saying I don’t know what: Happiness; unhappiness; something about the conditions Of all such things; work done, not done; the saving Of the self in the intense work of its singleness, Learning to live with it. Their lives have separate ends. Suddenly she turned her head and seems to look Toward me and toward the others on the rocks, So that her body, turned away, is more expressive Than her blank face, a pure reflector of light.

Someone said you were dead it’s not that I didn’t care You were not bacterial You were not frozen water in winter You were not a hairbrush broken by hair You were a treasure of gold in the world-toilet For you appraised the world of grains And flung the earth to the earth The good wine is mixed with the bad wine, come to the wine jar’s lips and let’s unmix it Poor people only have one soul but you and I have two let’s go on vacation to Mexico or Rome Everybody returns home How should old people associate with young people? Shut up—Be like a compass. The King has erased your name from the book of speech

The alternative to flying is cowardice, And what is said against it excuses, excuses; Its want was always heavy in those men’s bodies Who foresaw it in some detail; and failing that, The rest were shown through its skyey heats and eases In sleep, awoke uncertain whether their waking cry Had been falling fear only, or love and falling fear. When the sudden way was shown, its possibility In terms of the familiar at last shown, (How absurdly simple the principle after all!) Any tyrant should have sensed it was controversial: Instrument of freedom; rights, not Wrights; Danger should never be given out publicly. The men could easily have been disposed of, They and their fragile vehicle. Then the sky Would perhaps have darkened, earth shaken, nothing more. In practice the martyrdom has been quiet, statistical, A fair price. This is what airmen believe. The transition to battle was smooth from here. Who resents one bond resents another, And who has unshouldered earth-restraining hand Is not likely to hear out more reasonable tyrannies. The woods where he died were dark even at sunup, Oak and long-needle pine that had come together Earlier, and waited for the event at the field’s edge. At sunset when the sky behind was gay One had seen the lugubrious shapes of the trees, Bronze and terrible, but had never known the reason, Never thought they were waiting for someone in particular. They took him at night, when they were at their darkest. How they at last convinced him is not known: The crafty engine would not fall for their softness, (Oh, where were you then, six hundred cunning horses?) In the end it had torn hungrily through the brush To lie alone in the desired clearing. Nor the wings; (And you, with your wide silver margin of safety?) They were for the field, surely, where they so often Had eased their load to ground. No, the invitation Must have been sent to the aviator in person: Perhaps a sly suggestion of carelessness, A whispered invitation perhaps to death. He was not badly disfigured compared to some, But even a little stream of blood where death is Will whimper across a forest floor, Run through that whole forest shouting. Him now unpersoned, warm, and quite informal, Dead as alive, raise softly sober interns; Lift gently, God, this wholly airborne one. Leads out all his life to this violent wood. Note that he had not fought one public battle, Met any fascist with his skill, but died As it were in bed, the waste conspicuous; This is a costly wreck and costly to happen on: Praise and humility sound through its siren shrieks, And dedication follows in car. The morning came up foolish with pink clouds To say that God counts ours a cunning time, Our losses part of an old secret, somehow no loss.

Lord’s lost Him His mockingbird, His fancy warbler; Satan sweet-talked her, four bullets hushed her. Who would have thought she’d end that way? Four bullets hushed her. And the world a-clang with evil. Who’s going to make old hardened sinner men tremble now and the righteous rock? Oh who and oh who will sing Jesus down to help with struggling and doing without and being colored all through blue Monday? Till way next Sunday? All those angels in their cretonne clouds and finery the true believer saw when she rared back her head and sang, all those angels are surely weeping. Who would have thought she’d end that way? Four holes in her heart. The gold works wrecked. But she looks so natural in her big bronze coffin among the Broken Hearts and Gates-Ajar, it’s as if any moment she’d lift her head from its pillow of chill gardenias and turn this quiet into shouting Sunday and make folks forget what she did on Monday. Oh, Satan sweet-talked her, and four bullets hushed her. Lord’s lost Him His diva, His fancy warbler’s gone. Who would have thought, who would have thought she’d end that way?

When my grandmother died I thought, “She can’t die again.” Everything in her life happened once and forever: her bed on our roof, the battle of good and evil in her tales, her black clothes, her mourning for her daughter who “was killed by headaches,” the rosary beads and her murmur, “Forgive us our sins,” her empty vase from the Ottoman time, her braid, each hair a history — First were the Sumerians, their dreams inscribed in clay tablets. They drew palms, so dates ripen before their sorrows. They drew an eye to chase evil away from their city. They drew circles and prayed for them: a drop of water a sun a moon a wheel spinning faster than Earth. They begged: “Oh gods, don’t die and leave us alone.” Over the Tower of Babel, light is exile, blurred, its codes crumbs of songs leftover for the birds. More naked emperors passed by the Tigris and more ships . . . The river full of crowns helmets books dead fish, and on the Euphrates, corpse-lilies floating. Every minute a new hole in the body of the ship. The clouds descended on us war by war, picked up our years, our hanging gardens, and flew away like storks. We said there isn’t any worse to come. Then the barbarians came to the mother of two springs. They broke my grandmother’s grave: my clay tablet. They smashed the winged bulls whose eyes were sunflowers widely open watching the fragments of our first dreams for a lifetime. My hand on the map as if on an old scar.

Forgiving the living is hard enough, shrugging away all the wounds delivered with kisses and curses, the thousand and one petty slights that bled me to an albino shade, that shadow me even in dreams. But the dead are altogether another matter, not easily to be enlightened and quite beyond regretting anything (as far as we can tell) and most likely indifferent to our common currency of tears. And so it is that pissing on your grave doesn't please me as much as it ought to. Now that you have passed beyond all blaming and shaming, what can I do but rise and proclaim sincere admiration when my turn comes around to speak?