343 Grief poems

Tell the truth of experience they say they also say you must let go learn to let go let your children go and they go and you stay letting them go because you are obedient and respect everyone’s freedom to go and you stay and you want to tell the truth because you are yours truly its obedient servant but you can’t because you’re feeling what you’re not supposed to feel you have let them go and go and you can’t say what you feel because they might read this poem and feel guilty and some post-modern hack will back them up and make you feel guilty and stop feeling which is post-modern and what you’re meant to feel so you don’t write a poem you line up words in prose inside a journal trapped like a scorpion in a locked drawer to be opened by your children let go after lived life and all the time a great wave bursting howls and rears and you have to let go or you’re gone you’re gone gasping you let go till the next wave towers crumbles shreds you to lace— When you wake your spine is twisted like a sea-bird inspecting the sky, stripped by lightning.

The story keeps on coming back, a man my father knew, that grazier across the river up north a mile or two, a story that my father spun to last me all my life of how a man should not behave when burying a wife. All through the funeral he’d wept . . . the priest there going on about St Peter and the gates through which his wife had gone. His sobbing at the grave, Dad found, was harder still to bear. Then men in suits, the women in the best they had to wear knew deeper down it couldn’t pass, no matter who had died. Extravagance like this was always better kept inside. At last the man who sent his beasts to die on Tuesday gave one final, high unseemly cry and leapt into the grave. ‘Mate,’ he yelled. ‘Don’t go. Don’t go!’ And scrabbled at the wood. A friend reached in to fish him out as any Christian would. The women in their hats stood back. Two men jumped in the trench and skidding on the polished lid contrived at last to wrench him out and lead him to his car. The clergyman intoned ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ They heard the broken moans coming from a side window. He hammered at the wheel. ‘Mate,’ he yelled. ‘Don’t leave me mate.’ Not knowing what to feel, the mourners now were drifting off towards their dusty cars. My father always finished here as if he’d gone too far. But I could hear the slamming doors, the hearse without much chrome and dual decisions made to miss the wake and head straight home. ‘Mate, oh mate!’ the man had cried, releasing all their fears. The sound of boots on coffin wood survives them down the years.

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.