341 Grief poems

I have come to the borders of sleep, The unfathomable deep Forest where all must lose Their way, however straight, Or winding, soon or late; They cannot choose. Many a road and track That, since the dawn’s first crack, Up to the forest brink, Deceived the travellers, Suddenly now blurs, And in they sink. Here love ends, Despair, ambition ends; All pleasure and all trouble, Although most sweet or bitter, Here ends in sleep that is sweeter Than tasks most noble. There is not any book Or face of dearest look That I would not turn from now To go into the unknown I must enter, and leave, alone, I know not how. The tall forest towers; Its cloudy foliage lowers Ahead, shelf above shelf; Its silence I hear and obey That I may lose my way And myself.

a stabat mater listen mother, he punched the air:   I am not your son dying the day fades and the starlings roost:   a body’s a husk a nest of goodbye his wrist colorless and soft was not a stick of chewing gum how tell?    well a plastic bracelet with his name for one.    & no mint his eyes distinguishable from oysters how?    only when pried open she at times felt the needle going in.    felt her own sides cave.    she rasped she twitched with a palsy:   tectonic plates grumbled under her feet soiled his sheets clogged the yellow BIOHAZARD bin:   later to be burned soot clouds billowed out over the city:   a stole.    a pillbox hat    [smart city] and wouldn’t the taxis stop now.    and wouldn’t a hush smother us all the vascular walls graffitied and scarred.    a clotted rend in the muscle wend through the avenues throttled t-cells.    processional staph & thrush the scourge the spike a stab a shending bile the grace the quenching mother who brought me here, muddler:   open the window.    let birds in

The Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia holds the world’s largest lithium reserves. “As remote and unlikely a place as can be imagined for the world to seek its salvation.”—Matthew Power Once, volcanoes walked & talked like humans. Married. Quarreled & gave birth. When the beautiful Tunupa’s husband ran away & took their only child she mourned: she cried & stormed, her full breasts spilled until she made this sunken bed, a dry & ragged ice-white sea. Tears & milk. Salt. Silver liquor of the spirits, the winter tuber’s pulp. ≈ Buzz Aldrin spied a plain from space: twice Rhode Island-sized, not a glacier but this vast evaporation, a place so flat we use its plane to calibrate the altitude of satellites, measure the retreat of polar ice. A dry lagoon of element. Energy.Winking like a coin in a well. ≈ In bare Salar the tourists bottle sand & salt: mug & pirouette across this lithic sink of drought, empty leagues of sky & light, slight mist of silt. We dream our dreams of clean—or cleaner— means to drive and speak—o Li, atomic number three, be our Miracle element! Prehistoric smelt, simmered & distilled in Altiplano climes, your samite matter known to quiet, after all, the manic brain, the urge to suicide; proven to dispel the voice that whispers fire from the gods is never free— Lithium chloride & plain table salt under ancient ocean crust; fossils & algae; a bird so bright & blackly drowned, pickled in the salt brine pool: the desert is generous. The desert is a pot boiled dry. This road will turn to dirt and then to salt, to the workers in jumpsuits, veiled & covered from the brutal sun; but we’re not here, not here— what matters are the distant cities: Chongquing, Phoenix, Quebec, Lagos, far & star-chalked: splitting at the seams. Now ≈ the shrouded workers wait for sunset. The desert is patient. They see the bed plowed under: slapdash trenches in the legend, in the hasty furrows raked. With eyes narrowed from the endless light. See Litio. Wages in the veins laid open; see paid the lush reduction of her ditches’ spill. This new abyss to feed our traffic.

That sparrow on the iron railing, not worth a farthing, purchases a realm its shrill cries measure, trading dying for being. It's up to no good, out to overturn a kingdom just by swooping into the right kitchen, or upsetting somebody's aim. For my pleasure, I'll call it Good News, or Little Egypt. For my delight, I'll think of it as needle and thread. Or a breathing remnant restored to a living cloth. Or scissors trimming lament to allow for everything I don't know. For my happiness, I'll call it Pocket Dictionary Full of Words in Another Language. For my gladness, Feathered Interval, The Deciding Gram, Geronimo. For nothing, Monument to the Nano.

A drowned drayman was hoisted on to the slab. Someone had jammed a lavender aster between his teeth. As I made the incision up from the chest with a long knife under the skin to cut out tongue and gums, I must have nudged it because it slipped into the brain lying adjacent. I packed it into the thoracic cavity with the excelsior when he was sewn up. Drink your fill in your vase! Rest easy, little aster!

Other than that, all was still — a quiet so quiet that, as if silence were a kind of spell, and words the way to break it, they began speaking. They spoke of many things: sunset as a raft leaving the water in braids behind it; detachment, the soul, obedience; swans rowing at nightfall across a sky filled with snow; what did they wish they could see, that they used to see; to mean no harm, or to not especially, just now, be looking for it; what would they wish not to see, could they stop seeing; courage mattering so much less than not spooking easily — maybe all nerve is; the search-and-rescue map wildflowers make of a field in summer; deserving it, versus asking for it, versus having asked, and been softly turned from. They said it would hurt, and it does.

Somebody’s baby was buried to-day— The empty white hearse from the grave rumbled back, And the morning somehow seemed less smiling and gay As I paused on the walk while it crossed on its way, And a shadow seemed drawn o’er the sun’s golden track. Somebody’s baby was laid out to rest, White as a snowdrop, and fair to behold, And the soft little hands were crossed over the breast, And those hands and the lips and the eyelids were pressed With kisses as hot as the eyelids were cold. Somebody saw it go out of her sight, Under the coffin lid—out through the door; Somebody finds only darkness and blight All through the glory of summer-sun light; Somebody’s baby will waken no more. Somebody’s sorrow is making me weep: I know not her name, but I echo her cry, For the dearly bought baby she longed so to keep, The baby that rode to its long-lasting sleep In the little white hearse that went rumbling by. I know not her name, but her sorrow I know; While I paused on the crossing I lived it once more, And back to my heart surged that river of woe That but in the breast of a mother can flow; For the little white hearse has been, too, at my door.

My mother was married by the water. She wore a gray coat and a winter rose. She said her vows beside a cold seam of the Irish coast. She said her vows near the shore where the emigrants set down their consonantal n: on after n oo n, on the e n d of everything, at the start of ever. Yellow vestments took in light. A chalice hid underneath its veil. Her hands were full of calla and cold-weather lilies. The mail packet dropped anchor. A black-headed gull swerved across the harbor. Icy promises rose beside a crosshatch of ocean and horizon. I am waiting for the words of the service. I am waiting for keep thee only and all my earthly. All I hear is an afternoon’s worth of never.

Long neglect has worn away Half the sweet enchanting smile; Time has turned the bloom to gray; Mold and damp the face defile. But that lock of silky hair, Still beneath the picture twined, Tells what once those features were, Paints their image on the mind. Fair the hand that traced that line, “Dearest, ever deem me true”; Swiftly flew the fingers fine When the pen that motto drew.

Look for me under the hood of that old Chevrolet settled in weeds at the end of the pasture. I'm the radiator that spent its years bolted in front of an engine shoving me forward into the wind. Whatever was in me in those days has mostly leaked away, but my cap's still screwed on tight and I know the names of all these tattered moths and broken grasshoppers the rest of you've forgotten.