341 Grief poems

A dreadful darkness closes in On my bewildered mind; O let me suffer and not sin, Be tortured yet resigned. Through all this world of whelming mist Still let me look to Thee, And give me courage to resist The Tempter till he flee. Weary I am — O give me strength And leave me not to faint; Say Thou wilt comfort me at legnth And pity my complaint. I've begged to serve Thee heart and soul, To sacrifice to Thee No niggard portion, but the whole Of my identity. I hoped amid the brave and strong My portioned task might lie, To toil amid the labouring throng With purpose pure and high. But Thou hast fixed another part, And Thou hast fixed it well; I said so with my bleeding heart When first the anguish fell. For Thou hast taken my delight, And hope of life away, And bid me watch the painful night And wait the weary day. The hope and delight were Thine; I bless Thee for their loan; I gave Thee while I deemed them mine Too little thanks, I own. Shall I with joy Thy blessings share And not endure their loss? Or hope the martyr's crown to wear And cast away the cross? These weary hours will not be lost, These days of passive misery, These nights of darkness anguish tost If I can fix my heart on Thee. Weak and weary though I lie, Crushed with sorrow, worn with pain, Still I may lift to Heaven mine eye, And strive and labour not in vain, That inward strife against the sins That ever wait on suffering; To watch and strike where first begins Each ill that would corruption bring, That secret labour to sustain With humble patience every blow, To gather fortitude from pain, And hope and holiness from woe. Thus let me serve Thee from my heart, Whatever be my written fate, Whether thus early to depart Or yet a while to wait. If Thou shouldst bring me back to life More humbled I should be; More wise, more strengthened for the strife, More apt to lean on Thee. Should Death be standing at the gate Thus should I keep my vow; But, Lord, whate'er my future fate So let me serve Thee now.

Born of the sun, we traveled a short while toward the sun. Where there were seasons and sky. Where there were monuments. Like a single engine plane in a July haze. Or our nights that pile up like shoes in a guest room. I would talk about the weather when I’m in the right weather but when. At the Stanhope Hotel, just hours before, they were people. The Navy divers found them lying under one hundred and sixteen feet of waves. Or a small body of water meeting a new, larger body. Healthy body. Nobody. We just couldn’t decide. Spatial disorientation occurs when you don’t refer to your 
instruments and begin to believe the whatever inside you. When I punished the Austrian roses by forgetting about them I knew that they couldn’t keep beauty and they couldn’t keep time. The day of his father’s funeral: November 25, 1963, was also his third birthday. Then — sometimes: the urge for new windows. A color other than black for the best days. In fourteen seconds plummeting at a rate beyond the safe maximum. The safe maximum at the office, bedroom, or bar. On the way there, somewhere between floors, no velocity could recover us. And again. Sometimes the right music, sometimes lucky to be in good light. Once a week I go into a room and pretend to have similar interests. Every day I wake up and brush to the left. We’re the good people, the bad people, and the people we aren’t. Socialite, journalist, lawyer. Americans. These Americans. They always button their coats when they see luck. Dear Johnny boy, thanks for asking me to be your mother but I’m afraid I could never do her justice. My eyebrows aren’t thick enough, for one.

No changes of support—only Patches of gray, here where sunlight fell. The house seems heavier Now that they have gone away. In fact it emptied in record time. When the flat table used to result A match recedes, slowly, into the night. The academy of the future is Opening its doors and willing The fruitless sunlight streams into domes, The chairs piled high with books and papers. The sedate one is this month’s skittish one Confirming the property that, A timeless value, has changed hands. And you could have a new automobile Ping pong set and garage, but the thief Stole everything like a miracle. In his book there was a picture of treason only And in the garden, cries and colors.

Has anyone described the smell of wishbones drying on the kitchen sill or the smell of glass, or the bucket of water lifted from the well we go to when death takes the last thirst from someone we love? After my mother died, sometimes I'd take the one piece of her clothing I'd kept to bed and bury my face in her flowered blouse to smell her last skin, but even from the first it was futile. What I got was the smell of goneness, the smell of screen doors where moths have spent their wing powder beating failingly to reach the light. My massage therapist said she felt grief in my body like hard empty boxes. I felt like I was always handling dough, never wanting the kneading to be done, never wanting to bake the bread that meant the end of something having to do with a mother and daughter in a kitchen. My mother has been gone for years, and I begin to see, in the spots on the backs of my hands, in the shelf my cheekbones make for my cheeks, in the way I hold my mouth against gravity's pull, that I carry her with me, my skin, her skin, her last skin.

I The telephone keeps talking to itself: Garbage in the streets, a butterfly, A rubber raft abandoned, floating out to sea, And late last night nearby, a conflagration— If you knew half the secrets I can tell, The accidents, the threats, the promises, All anonymous, and the voices That, like a demoniac, I have: An unwilling rhyme, a cry for help, An order for a pound of stewing beef And someone begging someone to come back— All of these proceed from my black mouth, All and more are locked in my black heart, Information, long distances, wrong numbers. II The clock at first was fast and now has stopped That holds all of our lifetimes in its hands. III “We sleep and wake watched over by machines. Are these intelligent objects our servants merely? Are they our closet masters, maybe? Will we be accomplices and equals one day?” Tool-and-Die Makers’ Manual Newly revised, 1964 IV The gun, the peppermill, the gramophone, The bee, the salamander and the swan— To be explicit, what have they in common? The corkscrew, the stethoscope, the laundromat, The lyre bird, the python and the wombat, How do these differ from the domestic cat? Is it a question of theirs and ours or this and that? What reconciles the wireless and the whale? Did he who made the lamb invent the wheel? And what was wisdom doing all the while? A catastrophe and a category will Swallow sardines and supermarkets whole. V But you or rather thou, to be archaic, Always demanding, never dull but sometimes sick, Intimate machinery, my body! Whose only raison d’etre is to be: Your pleasures and your pains are your own business; Don’t ask me for a taste or a caress, Who, when I weep, weep tear of glass, Round and brittle. Your appetites embarrass Me. Mine tire you. Old Thing, The moral is, the moral is, Keep going, And perhaps we shall meet again at the Resurrection— The wonder is, what then I shall put on?

Feel it — but remember, millennia have felt it — the sea and the beasts and the mindless stars wrestle it down today as ever

Monsignor, I believed Jesus followed me With his eyes, and when I slept, An angel peeled an orange And waited for me to wake up. This was 1962. I was ten, small as the flame Of a struck match, my lungs fiery From hard, wintery play. When I returned home, Legs hurting, I placed my hands on the windowsill And looked out—clouds dirty as towels And geese I have yet to see again Darkening the western sky. Monsignor, a machine Had painted on the eyes of my toy soldier, Little dots off-center, Almost on his cheeks. Such a cheap toy, I drowned him over and over in my bath, Drowned him until the painted-on eyes flaked off. Then a leg fell off—surge of dirty water Sunk him to the bottom. I now at this age place hands on the windowsill, My eyes nearly on my cheeks, My belly with its rising tide. There is no angel with an orange at the edge Of my bed. There is no soldier Of God. Only a pane between the inside And the outside, between this living And this dying. Monsignor, Saintly man of this child's wonderment, When will I see the geese again?

I can’t undress from the pressure of leaves, the lobed edges leaning toward the window like an unwanted male gaze on the backside, (they wish to bless and bless and hush). What if I want to go devil instead? Bow down to the madness that makes me. Drone of the neighbor’s mowing, a red mailbox flag erected, a dog bark from three houses over, and this is what a day is. Beetle on the wainscoting, dead branch breaking, but not breaking, stones from the sea next to stones from the river, unanswered messages like ghosts in the throat, a siren whining high toward town repeating that the emergency is not here, repeating that this loud silence is only where you live.

Women’s tears are but water; The tears of men are blood. He sits alone in the firelight And on either side drifts by Sleep, like a torrent whirling, Profound, wrinkled and dumb. Circuitously, stealthily, Dawn occupies the city; As if the seasons knew of his grief Spring has suddenly changed into snow Disaster and sorrow Have made him their pet; He cannot escape their accursed embraces. For all his dodgings Memory will lacerate him. What good does it do to wander Nights hours through city streets? Only that in poor places He can be with common men And receive their unspoken Instinctive sympathy. What has life done for him? He stands alone in the darkness Like a sentry never relieved, Looking over a barren space, Awaiting the tardy finish.

The faster I travel the slower the world dies Inside the head of a flower The sun’s a swinging pendulum —all Radiance is progress Of a pre-existent stillness Stone, inspired To fluency curves thought toward the drinking of Its shadow grail: grille: grid The lines recursive to impalement one point alone sings cumulative, crowding negativity My apparitions distorted by star-tides Fail to approximate zero Where sensation’s tip Crumbles to ash Another Radio-profile turns, edged with dark cries objects unfounded of medieval prophecy The heavens too grow cold