341 Grief poems

Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron's struggle cease. But one such death remain'd to come; The last poetic voice is dumb— We stand to-day by Wordsworth's tomb. When Byron's eyes were shut in death, We bow'd our head and held our breath. He taught us little; but our soul Had felt him like the thunder's roll. With shivering heart the strife we saw Of passion with eternal law; And yet with reverential awe We watch'd the fount of fiery life Which served for that Titanic strife. When Goethe's death was told, we said: Sunk, then, is Europe's sagest head. Physician of the iron age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear; And struck his finger on the place, And said: Thou ailest here, and here! He look'd on Europe's dying hour Of fitful dream and feverish power; His eye plunged down the weltering strife, The turmoil of expiring life— He said: The end is everywhere, Art still has truth, take refuge there! And he was happy, if to know Causes of things, and far below His feet to see the lurid flow Of terror, and insane distress, And headlong fate, be happiness. And Wordsworth!—Ah, pale ghosts, rejoice! For never has such soothing voice Been to your shadowy world convey'd, Since erst, at morn, some wandering shade Heard the clear song of Orpheus come Through Hades, and the mournful gloom. Wordsworth has gone from us—and ye, Ah, may ye feel his voice as we! He too upon a wintry clime Had fallen—on this iron time Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears. He found us when the age had bound Our souls in its benumbing round; He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears. He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth, Smiles broke from us and we had ease; The hills were round us, and the breeze Went o'er the sun-lit fields again; Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. Our youth return'd; for there was shed On spirits that had long been dead, Spirits dried up and closely furl'd, The freshness of the early world. Ah! since dark days still bring to light Man's prudence and man's fiery might, Time may restore us in his course Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force; But where will Europe's latter hour Again find Wordsworth's healing power? Others will teach us how to dare, And against fear our breast to steel; Others will strengthen us to bear— But who, ah! who, will make us feel? The cloud of mortal destiny, Others will front it fearlessly— But who, like him, will put it by? Keep fresh the grass upon his grave, O Rotha, with thy living wave! Sing him thy best! for few or none Hears thy voice right, now he is gone.

I sat all morning in the college sick bay Counting bells knelling classes to a close. At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home. In the porch I met my father crying— He had always taken funerals in his stride— And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow. The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram When I came in, and I was embarrassed By old men standing up to shake my hand And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'. Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest, Away at school, as my mother held my hand In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs. At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses. Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him For the first time in six weeks. Paler now, Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple, He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot. No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear. A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

Some species can crack pavement with their shoots to get their share of sun some species lay a purple froth of eggs and leave it there to sprinkle tidepools with tadpole confetti some species though you stomp them in the carpet have already stashed away the families that will inherit every floor at midnight But others don’t go forth and multiply as boldly male and female peeling the bamboo their keepers watching in despair or those endangered species numbered individually and mapped from perch to oblivious perch For weeks the world it seemed was plagued with babies forests dwindling into cradles rows of women hissing for an obstetrician babies no one could feed babies received by accident like misdirected mail from God so many babies people hired women to hold them babies babies everywhere but not a one to name When we got home the local news showed us a mother with quintuplets she was suckling them in shifts a mountain of sheets universally admired a goddess of fertility her smile could persuade the skies to rain Her litter slept ointment-eyed in pink wool caps while Dad ran his hand through his hair thinking maybe of money as he stood surveying his crowded living room his wealth of heartbeats Pizza and pop that night and there unasked inside the bottlecap was Sorry—Try Again you set it down and did not speak of it the moon flanked by her brood of stars that night a chaste distracted kiss goodnight that night your body quiet having spilled its secret your palms flat on your belly holding holding Forgive me if I had no words that night but I was wondering in the silence still begetting silence whether to console you if I consoled you it would make the loss your loss and so we laid beside ourselves a while because I had no words until our bodies folded shut our bodies closed around hope like a book preserving petals a book we did not open till the morning when we found hope dry and brittle but intact

God and Mother went the same way. *       *       * What's a person to us but a contortion of pressure ridges palpable long after she is gone? *       *       * A thin old man in blue jeans, back arched, grimaces at the freezer compartment. *       *       * Lying in the tub, I'm telling them— the missing persons— that a discrepancy is a pea and I am a Princess.

A Tick-Where-Appropriate Template It begins with unspecified “you” and “we” raising fists of defiance to the void, the morning we opened the obituary, a pun on “decompose” you’d have enjoyed. These crocodile tears shed in rhyme, in an age too commercial to care, recall how we met the first time and the feisty old trooper you were, you were, what a feisty old trooper you were: the snook you cocked at convention; writing only when the muse was near your solitary published collection, Parnassus — A Calling Not a Career , we reviewed and/or said we admired: its allusions to myth, its classical power we found “inspiring” if not “inspired” and “important” as a euphemism for “dour,” for “dour,” important to find euphemisms for “dour”; your committee work; your taste in shoes; your alcoholism and/or love for jazz; your appetite for social issues that none of the young crowd has; your impatience with those smart alecks who expect to have and eat their cake, and some daringly inverted syntax the occasional end-rhyme to make, to make, occasionally an end-rhyme you’d make; your insistence upon a thing called “craft” (perhaps you meant margarine); how establishment critics originally laughed at your pamphlets from the Slovene; how you very nearly popped your clogs as we fought to get your name cleared; you were our stag set upon by dogs, indestructible in duffel coat and/or beard, your beard, the indescribable duffel coat and/or beard; your years of silence and/or second wife whose whereabouts remain uncertain; a paean to your flowering late in life in some council flat in Suburbiton and your dab hand with a hoover seasoned with the odd gratuitous clue (much as we champion your oeuvre) that we’re better writers than you, than you, we’re better writers than you; the valedictions when last we met— “Shut the door, comrades, adieu”— however innocuous when said, now seem prophetic: you knew ; your despair and/or your courage; a warning for our planet and times culminating with a rhetorical flourish that pans out along these lines, these lines, that pads out along these lines: Something something something world , something something something grope . Something something something unfurled , something something something hope . Something something something dark , something something something night . Something something something lark , something something something light .

And what did the Armenians say? An Umayyad monk spins wheat and wool above us Time is a scarecrow • That’s what the Armenians said

To have known him, to have loved him After loneness long; And then to be estranged in life, And neither in the wrong; And now for death to set his seal— Ease me, a little ease, my song! By wintry hills his hermit-mound The sheeted snow-drifts drape, And houseless there the snow-bird flits Beneath the fir-trees’ crape: Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine That hid the shyest grape.

I was so worried the hickory I recognized had died from salt burn in the last hurricane I may have passed by vervain and apple haw like they didn’t matter, but this spring it put out seven shoots from its base. Still, the oldest trick is the moon missing, then the “new” moon appears, though we know it’s the old one, and we pretend to be taken in like the mother or baby behind the bath towel. Really it’s the moon winking, being the stone that holds stones and now footprints. And when I tell Frances, I see she is a moon motionless in the doorway, skin reflecting a lamp, a face that awakens on paper.

You were never a man in the television sense of the word. I was never a wild Slinky in the sex-club sense of a toy. You were never a tobacco store in the Modernist sense of a trope. I was never a snowdrop in the candy store sense of a treat. You were never Day-glo in the fashionista sense of a scarf. I was never withyouallthetime in the username sense of a self. You were never a strumpet in the toothache sense of an insult. I was never a tooting horn in the childhood sense of a game. You were never a hole-in-my-heart in the country singer sense of a vista. I was never a paper doll in the pyromaniac sense of a pal. You were never a parenthesis in the phony secret sense of a sign. I was never red lipstick in the pulp novel sense of a threat. You were never a word in the mystic sense of an obstacle. I was never a shaking castanet in the midnight sense of a song.

The tortures of lumbago consumed Aunt Madge, And Leah Vest, once resigned from schoolmarming, Could not be convinced to leave the house, And Mrs. Mary Hogan, after birthing her fifth son, Lay bedfast for the last fifty-two years of her life, Reporting shooting pains that would begin High in her back and shear downward to the feet, As though, she said, she had been glazed in lightning; And also, men, broken on bridges and mills, Shell-shocked veterans, religious alcoholics— Leldon Kilpatrick, Johnson Suggs, Whitey Carlyle: They came and sat there too, leafing through Yellowing Pageants and Progressive Farmers; And, one by one, all entered in and talked While the good doctor gargled a dark chaff In his pipe and took down symptoms, Annotating them on his hidden chart— Numbness, neuralgia, the knotted lymph, The clammy palms—and then he’d scratch His temple’s meaningful patch of white And scrawl out his unfailing barbiturate prescription To be filled by his pharmacist brother-in-law Until half the county had gathered as in a lap— The quantum ache, the mutiny in every house. How much pain, how many diseases Consigned to the mythological, the dropped Ovaries, the torn-up nerves, what women Said, what men wanted to believe? Part of it Laughable, I know. Still I want someone To see, now that they lie safe in graves Beyond the vacant stores, that someone Listened and, hearing the wrong at the heart, Named it something that sounded real, whatever They lived through and died of. I remember Mrs. Lyle who called it a thorn in the flesh, And Mr. Appleton, who had no roof in his mouth.