341 Grief poems

General Petraeus, when the death-count of American troops in Iraq was close to 3,800 , said ‘The truth is you never do get used to losses. There is a kind of bad news vessel with holes, and sometimes it drains, then it fills up, then it empties again’— leaving, in this particular case, the residue of a long story involving one soldier who, in the course of his street patrol, tweaked the antenna on the TV in a bar hoping for baseball, but found instead the snowy picture of men in a circle talking, all apparently angry and perhaps Jihadists. They turned out to be reciting poetry. ‘My life’, said the interpreter, ‘is like a bag of flour thrown through wind into empty thorn bushes’. Then ‘No, no’, he said, correcting himself. ‘Like dust in the wind. Like a hopeless man.’

the time i dropped your almost body down down to meet the waters under the city and run one with the sewage to the sea what did i know about waters rushing back what did i know about drowning or being drowned you would have been born into winter in the year of the disconnected gas and no car       we would have made the thin walk over genesee hill into the canada wind to watch you slip like ice into strangers’ hands you would have fallen naked as snow into winter if you were here i could tell you these and some other things if i am ever less than a mountain for your definite brothers and sisters let the rivers pour over my head let the sea take me for a spiller of seas        let black men call me stranger always        for your never named sake

A range of clouds banked up behind the peak Of that apocryphal Blue mountain, with a wide, oblique Burst of late sun Projecting at the east’s receding wall A film of what the day so far has done: A wind that tries to scrape The breaking waves up as they run Across the bay And shatter at the foot of Fluted Cape In tern and gannet-printed veils of spray; And trees the wind has caught, Which seem too self-contained to sway When they are blown, And only move as a pleasing afterthought. No one. No human presence has been known, Surely, to venture here. It takes one blackbird to disown That vagary And, whistling just a few feet from his ear, To call him back again and make him be The subject in this scene, The one who is required to see. Another day, No blackbird with its song will intervene. The spray will hang its veils and the trees sway.

I’m alone until I’m asleep, and there you are: naked, you take my hand:Shhhh! We tiptoe through a black-blue meadow. To the pond behind the farmhouse. (The farmer sleeps in the blind window.) No cicadas even, maybe just maybe Venus — & this is before Wednesday, everything’s alright, we tiptoe ‘round the house as around a painful subject — & we’re at the pond! And now it’s time. To use vague holy-man speech, like: I am another face in your hand, the face of your eye — wing-surrogates, the word bones— it’s time for afternoon, them white-blank architectures. No, veil. Nothing’s glistening. Christmas, Christmas. It’s time for you to forgive me: I was forced to eat valises that wouldn’t close by themselves — that was just a dream, good morning: regurgitate the stars and the soot

not straight, but in waves It seems every advance in the process deepens the subject’s relations to inner objects, happiness in regaining them after feeling adrift and lost, an increased trust because they appear good and helpful after all, as in the child step by step, building his relations to external objects, gaining not only from things pleasant, but from ways in which the child overcomes frustrations . . . Mrs. A, for instance: finally walking down familiar streets with a friend: an attempt at old bonds. Yet moments into the stroll the number of bustling people is too much, the buildings strange, the sunlight artificial, bleak . . . so that she has to retreat indoors into a restaurant for a chair, but even there the walls are buckling, the diners and waiters blurred— indifferent to what she carries inside, her home suddenly the only tolerable place— pictures of her boy, his drawings, in each and every room.

In my sleep: Fell at his feet         wanted to eat him right up would have         but even better he talked to me. Did I ask you to? Were those words my blood-sucking too? Now I will have a body again move differently, easier         back to the plan a little house         a woman and a man crossed against yours my soul will show glow through my breastbone: Back down into the kitchen yours Here         I will save you others have failed, even died, but I will save you         you save me         devour me away up Woke up: I can cry but I can't wake up today again         don't answer the door then did         couldn't look at you talk couldn't place the bed in the room, or where the room was when I closed my eyes This is the same old knife         my knife I know it as well as I know my own mouth It will be lying there on the desk if I open my eyes I will know the room very well there will be the little thrown-out globe of blood we left and every molecule of every object here will swell with life. And someone will be at the door.

Where is the grave of Sir Arthur O'Kellyn? Where may the grave of that good man be?— By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn, Under the twigs of a young birch tree! The oak that in summer was sweet to hear, And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year, And whistled and roared in the winter alone, Is gone,—and the birch in its stead is grown.— The Knight's bones are dust, And his good sword rust;— His soul is with the saints, I trust.

It was overcast. No hour at all was indicated by the gnomon. With difficulty I made out the slogan,Time and tide wait for no man. I had been waiting for you, Daphne, underneath the dripping laurels, near The sundial glade where first we met. I felt like Hamlet on the parapets of Elsinore, Alerted to the ectoplasmic moment, when Luna rends her shroud of cloud And sails into a starry archipelago. Then your revenant appeared and spake aloud: I am not who you think I am. For what we used to be is gone. The moment’s over, Whatever years you thought we spent together. You don’t know the story. And moreover, You mistook the drinking-fountain for a sundial. I put my lips to its whatever, And with difficulty I made out the slogan,Drink from me and you shall live forever.

in memory of Ted Berrigan Lose a brother? Lose a pa? At the sound of the tone it will be exactly sayonara. Meet me in the lobby of Casa Purgatoria when it's Turkish bath hour.  We will sweat  out  whatever  the  fuck it is that's unclean and inside us, at least inside me.  Round and brown and getting cool. Vestigal  feeling in the monkey I cut off myself.  Having  stood beside the  catafalque  to  nominte  him for  heroism I did not expect a nom- ination  for  tragedy  to be so rapidly forthcoming. You saw as well as I  did  how  the  hot  afternoon  was  grateful  to  him for bequeathing himself  to  its  mysterious  finitude.  Dry  and  bright and breezy and the hours were honey.  The shadow of a fully leafed-out tree over our white  knuckles.  I  would  have  liked  to  have been holding beads to show how humble  and elated I felt.  I talked of farce as if it were life. Life itself seemed  more than ever  high hips in a  form-fitting sheath. I  can  be  restfully  subdued  by  the  sight  of  long  undulant  fingers, please  let  me  show you  my entire body!  Every time  you see me re- call  my  neck  sinews,  my  piano-string  forearm  tendons,  my pneu- matic  sexual flesh,  and  my mild and erotic  eyeballs—forget the shy- ness  about me  that  you can't understand.  You can easily read in my eyes  how  voluntary  my  fantasies are,  and how flattering they are to you. Body. B-o-d-y.  Ah, the bruises.  Later for laying flowers, says the body.  O  body,  O  tough  stuff,  O  body  capable of sleep.  I break  the shaft  of  my  spear  over  my  knee  and kiss a patch of concrete.  Then from  hands  and  knees  I rise  to my full height.

Were there a tear To spare, where better To be sure the gesture Would linger than here In its own little bottle Blown from a hot bubble To mirror a tear. And were there more Than one could bear, So much the better In the hereafter for The begetter, a little Vessel to stopper Sorrow beyond measure. And were there a tear Too few, far better to hire A weeper, for where But in a tearful little Jigger does it figure No one need settle for Less than a fair share.