341 Grief poems

Roofers scrape the scaly lid of an auto shop beside the house where I live. Where I live shirtless men tear at the black scabs of a roof's old flesh, toss scraps into the back of a truck parked in the lot next to a house where I live. Where I live a tarp rattles at night, plastic rustles, and trash is kicked along pavement by wind. Roofers curse and shell the tire shop's peeling lid beside the house where I live. Where I live a tarp shakes all night; cans land on pavement, tossed from windows of cars that blur by where I live. Where I live windows are ladled red with light your sun leaves me with. Repairs are made to roofs which will never cover me. As I read the road between us, tire tracks unscroll their tawdry calligraphy. Any day now you shall arrive, roar into my eye with your mountainside. Where I live when I live where landscape cannot survive you.

The unsigned architecture of loneliness is becoming taller, finding a way farther above the horizontal flowering of the Cold War, the peonies and star asters of wild partisanship. I have a shambling gait and lonely hysteria, but no Terror. I am free to shamble past the vacant lot of my son’s conception, to shamble past the bar where I conceived adultery as a Terror that would be endless, flowering in great waves through air striated like chenille. I walk for a long time and try to conjure elsewhere in its early isolation. I cannot. It is all redestinated by the future like the loose balloons a janitor recovers at 6 am from cold light fixtures. The Cold War is ending. Buildings are taller and have no names. 1. The romance of every ideology torments the romance of another. How beautifully, in the beginning, in the gale and embrace of isolation, boys capered over a shambles and swore oaths. The scent of urine in the hall at home was righteousness. The beautiful nude obscured by dust in a paperweight was righteousness. Neglectful townships coming into steep flower just as boys were flowering needed the correction of righteousness, the horizontal slag of government by children. Only the insane allegiances endure. The mad counterparts are lovers passion cannot explain nor circumstances restrict to the dead zones of irony. A counterpart of end of the Cold War is adultery. A counterpart of loving a divided Berlin unto death is fatherhood, the doting maintenance of sons in vacant lots continuing the wars of rubble for righteousness’ sake and for the sake of nudes obscured by dust and vulgarity. Romance torments romance. The most beautiful moment of the twentieth century galed and embraced the acrid smoky air as the Red Army entered Berlin as Hitler shriveled in the gasoline fire as Red Army flags opened above Berlin safeguarding the ruins of a changeless future. Townships blackened even as they flowered. Loose balloons cluttered the low sky and sun. I walked for a long time and tried to conjure the form of kindness. It was a domestic animal confused in the tall grass. Boys set fire to the grass. History that opens flags opened the fire, and Berlin, divided from Berlin, began to love its children past all reason. 2. My son reads sermons of pain and writes on walls. He starves the ground he walks on, preparing a dead city to be worthy of its new flags, to shine as exploded windows shine, raining down for hours after the wrecking crews have gone. I have a lover now who hates children. The hatred floats inside of her, a weightless sexual pavilion of perfect form and perfect emptiness. I thought by making love to her I would conceive nothing but Terror, outrage upon outrage, a violence that would last my whole life and free my son. I was ignorant as a balloon. Across the luminous expressway, I see the shapes of charred tenements castellated, fading into the more tender shapes of night. It may be the last night in history. Tomorrow pulls down the Berlin Wall, pulls down my honor, and I return to my lover’s bed to float in a white condom, no longer my son’s father. Tomorrow describes everything in detail. It explains nothing. It does not teach my boy that tenements are better than the future, better that peace, more likely to produce brothers than are the glassy hands of mornings without end or walls denuded of their wire. In the dead zone of irony before dawn, only the cats cry, like martyrs in the flame. 3. Gates everywhere. The Brandenburg. The Great Gate of Kiev beneath which children stride onto an invisible crescendo disappearing into gasoline fires, emerging as the new shapes of righteousness in slow vans through the Brandenburg Gate. Oaths are secret because none suspects that they are kept. They thrust themselves towards us unashamedly, like the insane homeless, and we do not see them. In our loneliness, we see a chance for love in betrayal, not death. In our loneliness, we see the happy triumph of glassy hands in free elections, not the denuding of Berlin or wanderings of children in vans reduced by fire to black transparencies in the morning shade. When Joan of Arc surrendered to the flames she cried out “Jesus, Jesus.” Some years later, a failed magician who had loved her cried out “Joan, Joan” as the flames mocked him with a sortilege too easy to be unreal or profitable. I walk for a long time and try to conjure the form of loneliness without Cold War. It is ash upon ash, a chiaroscuro aloft and on the ground, completely still. Oaths are secret because none suspects the desperation of every object, the child in every atom of the misused world thrust towards us, crying out whatever sacred name it witnessed put to death on the ascending music of a wall. Our buildings are tall and have no names. The parks grow glassy hands instead of flowers. 4. Afterwards, the calm is piteous but insubstantial as a smell of burn that does not rise in smoke or dies with the fire. Imagine walking out of a house at sunrise and having to invent air, invent light from nothing but untriggered memory. All things beloved are recalled to pain. Air recollected from the wrists of girls braceleted for Confirmation, crossed. Light recollected from between the cars of night trains in a deep river valley where islands in the river glowed like swans. Air recollected form a ditch in flower. Light recollected from the sex of flowers in bare rooms, the grainy light of blondes. Air recollected from religion. Light recollected form the incensed clutch of bodies before sunrise in the oaths of a great and ignorant lost cause. Imagine walking out of a house at sunrise having spent the night in bed with a stranger. Aloft and on the ground the calm unfurls like flags without device or slogan. The inconsequence of the day ahead stirs airless atmospheres in darkness visible as daylight but without shade. Without Cold War, without the arbitrary demarcation of cause from cause, of light and air from the unsexed improvisations of memory, I cannot see to walk or breathe to breathe. Sex becomes applause. Sex becomes television, and the bastard avant garde of lonely architecture breaks ground at the unwired heart of a city that marks the capital of nothing now. 5. A scratchy, recorded call to prayer crosses the alley from one new building into mine. The consolations of history are furtive, then fugitive, then forgotten like a bar of music that might have been obscene or sacred once, in another city, in the days before today. My son is well. He works the public ground and needs no Antigone. My lover sits beside him at dinner, sharing a joke, unmapping the tall future and its unbiased children, reinventing the sexual pavilion to accommodate plague wards. Romance forgives romance. The early isolation of this gorgeous century disappears into good works. The future is best. To put a final stop to the grotesque unmercy of martyrdom and to the ruinous armies of mad boys whose government is rape, whose justice is a wall, revoke all partisanship, adjourn the Terror. The future is best. It unobscures the dusty nudes. It protects the river islands and their glowing swans. But when I need to die, who will light the fire? What names shall I cry out and what music burn to a black transparency in my heart? The unborn have been revoked. They will not be kind.

I can’t leave my hurting skull Or the rose apple opening inside me. I’ll count the weeks, months, Unfurling each numbered day in my hair. Frost ribbons inside my brain, Canals push up my leg. I’m moving on To what the world needs me to know. I am the angel trapped inside the bullet. I am the exit wound trapped inside the angel. Am I the scarecrow Perched at the end of the human trail. I’ll palm cotton between my prayers Until the universe has passed, Waving down jellyfish To volcano hours. What force propels a bullet From its chamber. Is it sourced by water Trickling in a karst cave, Or is it an angel’s gasp as she flees. I can’t answer it all, But my mask grows taller every year.

One conversation, one only, remaining: It will be that give-and-take With Larry Littlebird — Oral listener — All about eagles, their shoulders, Ospreys, their plummet, And frogs, their singing Scratched by rain’s soft claws. But any of these exchanges will do: Charlie saying, If you can hum It you can play it, if you can play at all. And if not, sing with closed lips to yourself. Low continuous sound, your refrigerator. You must not be lonely. Harold says someone pointed out Being begins with a hum: It seems what you are, You’re happy hearing it, I’m happy for you, For each other, happy. Hear it in your colloquial throat, The syllable meaning human. Or, if not any of these intercourses, then Jenny and Chloe, who with a shake And a nod and a wave of an arm Toward the East say, We are going And we’ll go on your behalf And we’ll carry signs and shout The last best protest. Cerise and fuchsia Sisters, ears pointing out. Or my street signs: Calaveras (our skull’s tacit mouth) and Eisenhower — War, a theft from those who hunger And are not fed. Not a way of life at all. Crossed words on a corner pole. Movers pack me up, extract me From that conversation. I’ve heard a few words — they stay with me, An earned ear — and yet Too brief for brooding. Ghost Of my father, who never said much But Smell the roses for the camera; Or when I ask,Can I retire? He quickly says,Don’t hesitate! Any of these exchanges will do, “Now is the perfect time.” Not “For what?” but stopping it open. “April Fool,” said my favorite Eleanor, And then she died. “Good night,” her son Tipped his hat at me, From the top of the stairs, and then he tumbled. “I love you,” I contributed. And then I buttoned up.

The day was cloudy. No one could come to a decision; a light wind was blowing. ‘Not a north-easter, the sirocco,’ someone said. A few slender cypresses nailed to the slope, and, beyond, the sea grey with shining pools. The soldiers presented arms as it began to drizzle. ‘Not a north-easter, the sirocco,’ was the only decision heard. And yet we knew that by the following dawn nothing would be left to us, neither the woman drinking sleep at our side nor the memory that we were once men, nothing at all by the following dawn. ‘This wind reminds me of spring,’ said my friend as she walked beside me gazing into the distance, ‘the spring that came suddenly in the winter by the closed-in sea. So unexpected. So many years have gone. How are we going to die?’ A funeral march meandered through the thin rain. How does a man die? Strange no one’s thought about it. And for those who thought about it, it was like a recollection from old chronicles from the time of the Crusades or the battle of Salamis. Yet death is something that happens: how does a man die? Yet each of us earns his death, his own death, which belongs to no one else and this game is life. The light was fading from the clouded day, no one decided anything. The following dawn nothing would be left to us, everything surrendered, even our hands, and our women slaves at the springheads and our children in the quarries. My friend, walking beside me, was singing a disjointed song: ‘In spring, in summer, slaves . . .’ One recalled old teachers who’d left us orphans. A couple passed, talking: ‘I’m sick of the dusk, let’s go home, let’s go home and turn on the light.’ Athens, Feb. ’39

We visit by phone as the morphine haze retreats, late afternoon, most days. Our mingled past is set against the pin- hole lights of cars cruising the blacked-out streets: we four in the college smoker popping No-Doz, honors students carrying heavy course loads tipped sideways by sex, one by one discarding our virginities on the altar of inverse pride, ironing our blouses with Peter Pan collars to wear on dates with those 90-day Wonders, ensigns in training for the Second World War in the Business School across the Charles River. We called ourselves the Unholy Four. Whenever any three of us met on campus we huddled to bray Austria! Russia! Prussia! in unison. It came out sounding like Horseshit! Post graduation one year, look at us: my new husband atop your even newer one's car singing the bawdy verses of "Roll Me Over" in a drunken tenor while the scandalized uncles and aunties —it wasn't enough that you'd wed a Chinese— wrung their hands. You drove off trailing Just Married in two languages. Now BJ is gone, and Hettie. You have, they say, only days. It is my plan to go with you as far as the border. I've been that far— Did I come back from there morally improved? Somehow better equipped to support you this side of the douane and wave, your two cats curled like commas beside you as the barrier lifts and you drive on through?

Out of a motionless infernal shudder and clang of steel on steel as wagons moved toward the eternal, a sudden silence: I was healed. The stormcloud of my sickness fled on a breath. A flickering of eyes, and I saw my mother by my bed and gazed at her without surprise. Free! Helpless, yes, to move the hands clasped on my chest—but I had no desire to move. The rustling sounds (like cypress trees, like streams that flow across vast prairies seeking seas that don’t exist) were thin, insistent: I followed after those vain sighs, ever the same, ever more distant.

Beside a humble stone, a tree Floats in the cemetery’s air, Not planted in memoriam there, But growing wild, uncultured, free. A bird comes perching there to sing, Winter and summer, proffering Its faithful song—sad, bittersweet. That tree, that bird are you and I: You, memory; absence, me, that tide And time record. Ah, by your side To live again, undying! Aye, To live again! But ma petite, Now nothingness, cold, owns my flesh. . . Will your love keep my memory fresh?

Lean and sane in the last hour of a long fast or fiercer discipline he could touch dust into a sudden surge of limbs and speak leaves in the night air above him, inhabit quiet so wholly he heard roots inch into the unfeeling earth, rings increasing inside of that tree. Without moving, hardly breathing, he could call out of the long darkness walls around him, a house whose each room he knew, its hoard of silences, solitudes, doors opening onto the wide fields through which he moved, breathing deeply, unbewildered by the dead with their hands of wind, their faces of cloud. Stilled and gifted in the last hour before the first light, in the dark place of his own making, he could feel rocks relax alive beside him, gather from a moon-raveled river the pearl curves and blue fluency of a girl his hands once knew. He could let her go. He let it all go, desire and grief and raw need going out of him moment by moment into the mild immaculate night, love by love into a last passion of pure attention, nerves, readiness... Light carved out of the darkness a muscled trunk, each clenched limb and the difficult tips of a plain mesquite taking shape over the hard ground where they found him, his eyes wide and his whole body hungering upward, as if he could hear and bear the bird singing unseen deep in those leaves.

‘O Jesus Christ! I’m hit,’ he said; and died. Whether he vainly cursed or prayed indeed, The Bullets chirped—In vain, vain, vain! Machine-guns chuckled—Tut-tut! Tut-tut! And the Big Gun guffawed. Another sighed,—‘O Mother,—mother,—Dad!’ Then smiled at nothing, childlike, being dead. And the lofty Shrapnel-cloud Leisurely gestured,—Fool! And the splinters spat, and tittered. ‘My Love!’ one moaned. Love-languid seemed his mood, Till slowly lowered, his whole face kissed the mud. And the Bayonets’ long teeth grinned; Rabbles of Shells hooted and groaned; And the Gas hissed.