343 Grief poems

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine; Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine; Make not your rosary of yew-berries, Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl A partner in your sorrow's mysteries; For shade to shade will come too drowsily, And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul. But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hill in an April shroud; Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, Or on the wealth of globed peonies; Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips: Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine; His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

The work has been going forward with the greatest difficulty, chiefly because I cannot concentrate. I have no feeling about whether what I am writing is good or bad, and the whole business is totally without excitement and pleasure for me. And I am sure I know the reason. It’s that I can’t stand leaving unresolved my situation with Pat. I hear from her fairly frequently, asking when I plan to come back, and she knows that I am supposed to appear at the poetry reading in the middle of January. It is not mainly loneliness I feel, though I feel it; but I have been lonely before. It is quite frankly the feeling that nothing is really settled between us, and that in the mean time I worry about how things are going to work out. This has made my work more difficult than it has ever been before. – From a letter to his parents dated November 9, 1955, Rome. Hardly enough for me that the pail of water Alive with the wrinkling light Brings clearness home and whiter Than mind conceives the walls mature to white, Or that the washed tomatoes whose name is given To love fulfill their bowl And the Roman sea is woven Together by threading fish and made most whole. I delight in each of these, delight moreover In the dark skill of those hands Closer to wise than clever Of our blind Italian landlady who stands Her shoes fouled with the lustful blood of rabbit Lightly dispatched and dressed Fixing it to the gibbet Of the clothesline where the laundry sails to rest. These textures solicit of us our instant homage But are disparate senseless things Unless a reigning image Bring them to purpose as your presence brings The world in offering, like a chaplet worn In Aphrodite’s name, The furious unicorn Come to the virgin’s lap tethered and tame. And thus it is as you stand in this morning’s shadows Where ancient chamber pots Are grown to little meadows Of mint and parsley; surely it’s love unknots The winds for Ulysses and recalls to man A summer without cease; Sprung from the same dishpan Onion and lily work their primal peace.

Before I go let me thank the man who mugs you, taking your last paycheck, thank the boss who steals your tips, thank the women who may break you. I thank the pens that run out on you midsentence, the flame that singes your hair, the ticket you can't use because it's torn. Let me thank the stars that remind you the eyes that were stars are now holes. Let me thank the lake that drowns you, the sun that makes your face old. And thank the street your car dies in. And thank the brother you find unconcious with bloody arms, thank the needle that assists in doing him in—so much a part of you. No thanks to the skin forgetting the hands it welcomed, your hands refusing to recall what they happened upon. How blessed is the body you move in—how gone.

As though undreaming the mountain from the sea or tweezering hands from a watch, a quick-fix change of regimes: a democracy lost to a monarchy, an empty sudden village, and elsewhere the wedding party lining up like a lost tribe of refugees. As though a reverse whisper of vows into a pageant of elegant ears when the heat in the O cooled its "till death do us" and the storm inside seething below the flowers, gowns, and cake, its own Institution.

A peacock on an olive branch looks beyond the grove to the road, beyond the road to the sea, blank-lit, where a sailboat anchors to a cove. As it is morning, below deck a man is pouring water into a cup, listening to the radio-talk of the ships: barges dead in the calms awaiting port call, pleasure boats whose lights hours ago went out, fishermen setting their nets for mullet, as summer tavernas hang octopus to dry on their lines, whisper smoke into wood ovens, sweep the terraces clear of night, putting the music out with morning light, and for the breath of an hour it is possible to consider the waters of this sea wine-dark, to remember that there was no word for blue among the ancients, but there was the whirring sound before the oars of the great triremes sang out of the seam of world, through pine-sieved winds silvered by salt flats until they were light enough to pass for breath from the heavens, troubled enough to fell ships and darken thought — then as now the clouds pass, roosters sleep in their huts, the sea flattens under glass air, but there is nothing to hold us there: not the quiet of marble nor the luff of sail, fields of thyme, a vineyard at harvest, and the sea filled with the bones of those in flight from wars east and south, our wars, their remains scavenged on the seafloor and in its caves, belongings now a flotsam washed to the rocks. Stand here and look into the distant haze, there where the holy mountain with its thousand monks wraps itself in shawls of rain, then look to the west, where the rubber boats tipped into the tough waves. Rest your eyes there, remembering the words of Anacreon, himself a refugee of war, who appears in the writings of Herodotus: I love and do not love, I am mad and I am not mad. Like you he thought himself not better, nor worse than anyone else.

During the weeks when we all believed my mother was likely to die she began to plan her funeral and she wanted us, her children, to consider the music we would play there. We remembered the soundtrack of my mother’s life: the years when she swept the floors to the tunes of an eight track cassette called Feelings, the Christmas when she bought a Bing Crosby album about a Bright Hawaiian Christmas Day. She got Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring stuck in the tape deck of her car and for months each errand was accompanied by some kind of dramatic movement. After my brother was born, there was a period during which she wore a muumuu and devoted herself to King Sunny Ade and his African beats. She ironed and wept to Evita, painted to Italian opera. Then, older and heavier, she refused to fasten her seatbelt and there was the music of an automated bell going off every few minutes, which annoyed the rest of us but did not seem to matter to my mother who ignored its relentless disapproval, its insistence that someone was unsafe.

They grow in number all the time The cat, the Mother, the Father The grandparents, aunts, and uncles Those I knew well and hardly at all My best friend from when I was ten The guy who sat with me in the back Of the class where the tall kids lived Bill the Shoemaker from Lyndale Avenue The Irish poet with rounded handwriting They live in The Land of Echo, The Land Of Reverb, and I hear them between The notes of the birds, the plash of the wave On the smooth rocks. They show up When I think of them, as if they always Are waiting for me to remember I drive by their empty houses I put on their old sweaters and caps I wear their wristwatches and spend Their money. So now I'm in six places At once—if not eighteen or twenty So many places to be thinking of them Strange how quiet they are with their presence So humble in the low song they sing Not expecting that anyone will listen

My dearest dust, could not thy hasty day Afford thy drowzy patience leave to stay One hower longer: so that we might either Sate up, or gone to bedd together? But since thy finisht labor hath possest Thy weary limbs with early rest, Enjoy it sweetly: and thy widdowe bride Shall soone repose her by thy slumbring side. Whose business, now, is only to prepare My nightly dress, and call to prayre: Mine eyes wax heavy and ye day growes old. The dew falls thick, my beloved growes cold. Draw, draw ye closed curtaynes: and make room: My dear, my dearest dust; I come, I come.

She opened her mouth and a moose came out, a donkey, and an ox—out of her mouth, years of animal grief. I lead her to the bed. She held my hand and followed. She said,Chết rồi, and like that, the cord was cut, the thread snapped, and the cable that tied my mother to her mother broke. And now her eyes red as a market fish. And now, she dropped like laundry on the bed. The furniture moved toward her, the kitchen knives and spoons, the vibrating spoons—they dragged the tablecloth, the corner tilting in, her mouth a sinkhole. She wanted all of it: the house and the car too, and the flowers she planted, narcissus and hoa mai, which cracked open each spring—the sky, she brought it low until the air was hot and wet and broke into a rain— the torrents like iron ropes you could climb up, only I couldn’t. I was drowning in it. I was swirled in. I leapt into her mouth, her throat, her gut, and stayed inside with the remnants of my former life. I ate the food she ate and drank the milk she drank. I grew until I crowded the furnishings. I edged out her organs, her swollen heart. I grew up and out so large that I became a woman, wearing my mother’s skin.

A basket of apples brown in our kitchen, their warm scent is the scent of ripening, and my sister, entering the room quietly, takes a seat at the table, takes up the task of peeling slowly away the blemished skins, even half-rotten ones are salvaged carefully. She makes sure to carve out the mealy flesh. For this, I am grateful. I explain,this elegy would love to save everything. She smiles at me, and before long, the empty bowl she uses fills, domed with thin slices she brushes into the mouth of a steaming pot on the stove. What can I do? I ask finally.Nothing, she says,let me finish this one thing alone.