341 Grief poems

I'm an inexperienced mourner I don't even know how to begin to cry out like that old man wailing in the next hospital room— oi vay, oi vay—his two sounds beating against the wall. He makes me squirm but I get his message better than my own. How can I free myself like him? How can I know my place as he does, know how little I am? How can I mourn, the cheep of a trapped bird crying out violent sorrow? Old man, teach me. Help me reach the bowels of my cry and bring it up, coarse, rasping. Teach me to be disgusting. Help me to exile myself from all the populations of eyes and ears. Teach me to live in that country where no one else is, where I can bash to pieces my good breeding, my priests and pillars —no illusions, the self wiped out, unable to see or hear or understand. Old man—lying in your shit— you've let the angel of death from your mouth. One minute of your unforgiving protest is like true song: reckless, fatal singing, song that is not victorious, not even consoling, merely a sound you have to make.

Leave him now quiet by the way To rest apart. I know what draws him to the dust alway And churns him in the builder’s lime: He has the fright of time. I heard it knocking in his breast A minute since; His human eyes did wince, He stubborned like the massive slaughter beast And as a thing o’erwhelmed with sound Stood bolted to the ground. Leave him, for rest alone can cure— If cure there be— This waif upon the sea. He is of those who slanted the great door And listened—wretched little lad— To what they said.

I do not know where either of us can turn Just at first, waking from the sleep of each other. I do not know how we can bear The river struck by the gold plummet of the moon, Or many trees shaken together in the darkness. We shall wish not to be alone And that love were not dispersed and set free— Though you defeat me, And I be heavy upon you. But like earth heaped over the heart Is love grown perfect. Like a shell over the beat of life Is love perfect to the last. So let it be the same Whether we turn to the dark or to the kiss of another; Let us know this for leavetaking, That I may not be heavy upon you, That you may blind me no more.

Let us go hence, my songs; she will not hear. Let us go hence together without fear; Keep silence now, for singing-time is over, And over all old things and all things dear. She loves not you nor me as all we love her. Yea, though we sang as angels in her ear, She would not hear. Let us rise up and part; she will not know. Let us go seaward as the great winds go, Full of blown sand and foam; what help is here? There is no help, for all these things are so, And all the world is bitter as a tear. And how these things are, though ye strove to show, She would not know. Let us go home and hence; she will not weep. We gave love many dreams and days to keep, Flowers without scent, and fruits that would not grow, Saying 'If thou wilt, thrust in thy sickle and reap.' All is reaped now; no grass is left to mow; And we that sowed, though all we fell on sleep, She would not weep. Let us go hence and rest; she will not love. She shall not hear us if we sing hereof, Nor see love's ways, how sore they are and steep. Come hence, let be, lie still; it is enough. Love is a barren sea, bitter and deep; And though she saw all heaven in flower above, She would not love. Let us give up, go down; she will not care. Though all the stars made gold of all the air, And the sea moving saw before it move One moon-flower making all the foam-flowers fair; Though all those waves went over us, and drove Deep down the stifling lips and drowning hair, She would not care. Let us go hence, go hence; she will not see. Sing all once more together; surely she, She too, remembering days and words that were, Will turn a little toward us, sighing; but we, We are hence, we are gone, as though we had not been there. Nay, and though all men seeing had pity on me, She would not see.

Wahiawa is still a red dirt town where the sticky smell of pineapples being lopped off in the low-lying fields rises to mix with the minty leaves of eucalyptus in the bordering gulch. We lived there near the edge where the orchids grew huge as lanterns overnight and the passion fruits rotted on the vines before they could be picked. We grew there in the steady rain that fell like a gray curtain through which my mother peered: patches of depression. She kept the children under cover. We built houses within houses, stripping our parents’ bed of pillows and sheets, erecting walls out of The National Geographic which my father had subscribed to for years. We feasted on those pictures of the world, while the mud oozed past the windows knocking over the drab green leaves of palm fronds as we ate our spinach. The mildew grew in rings around the sink where centipedes came swimming up the pipes on multiple feet and the mold grew around our small fingers making everything slippery to touch. We were squeamish and pale. I remember one night my sister screamed. All the lights blinked on in the house. In the sudden brightness, we rushed to her room and found her crumpled in the far corner of the bed, her nightgown twisted in a strange shape; her eyes were as huge as mine, staring into the eyes of the bat that clung to the screen. Its rodent fingers finally letting go as my father jabbed its furry body with the end of a broom.

November 2015 1 Open up for close out    soul-clothes    every- thing has to go    closing down time    call them all saints    souls    my own gone ones:  Andy    Marcia    Mary Alice Mary Anne     cloud of all    carried out 2 outside my window: locust, cloth of gold     on the ground: its yellow tabs   linden hearts   sweetgum stars like cut-outs from the same ... paper-napkin ghosts in a tree near the house where a year ago my friend — rust-colored chrysanthemums   rust-colored door 3 door to door the angel no the Lord passed or did not pass — the angel opened the prison door     doors to pass through, out or in:  our millions, more than any — in the other story the Lord said:to put a difference between 4 between one and another a gun:  at one end it’s a good gun because at the other’s a cell phone pill bottle toy gun nothing a Trayvon    Tamir    Dontre    Michael Laquan    Eric    Rekia    John:    call them out and the others, black and many 5 many thousand gone    no more auction block

I Left the house shattered, it hurt so bad, so many years as a man, compromise, in spite of partial success in intellectual tussle he was never anyone of Olympian allure. He walked slowly through the dreamscape of the late autumn day, barely distinguishable from early spring, with young willows and a patch of waste ground where blue jays screamed. Dreamy exposure to phenomena that to nature in its administration of various cycles—young and old alike— are inseparably part of a single order—: so he drank his gin and accepted a dish of sausage soup, free on Thursdays with a beverage and so found the Olympian balance of sorrow and pleasure. II

New houses relax on the fields. Garage doors open soundlessly to admit the monster. Tires stretched over forty pounds of air pressure float across gravel. The boy closes the last storm door on the last evening paper and runs to the car where his mother waits. She does not answer him; the door slam freezes her dreams. It is January. A dog chained to a barn door keeps barking. Somebody’s angry, scared to let him go. On the other side of a forest past these fields, wolves sniff the hard snow of the tundra. I lay beside the only tree for warmth, there where the pack might find me. The house takes care of us now. Look at the meat browning under the light. The refrigerator switches on; ice crashes into the tray. Here are locks in case someone wants to do us harm. Remember how the police had to pound and pound to wake us that night a white Cadillac leapt from the icy road into the arms of our maple! It hung there, empty, doors flung wide— it was a great white petal of a car, breathing under the gas-lights, opening and opening.

(In Lenox Hill Hospital, after surgery, my mother said the sirens sounded like the elephants of Mihiragula when his men drove them off cliffs in the Pir Panjal Range.) The Hun so loved the cry, one falling elephant’s, he wished to hear it again. At dawn, my mother heard, in her hospital-dream of elephants, sirens wail through Manhattan like elephants forced off Pir Panjal’s rock cliffs in Kashmir: the soldiers, so ruled, had rushed the elephant, The greatest of all footprints is the elephant’s, said the Buddha. But not lifted from the universe, those prints vanished forever into the universe, though nomads still break news of those elephants as if it were just yesterday the air spread the dye (“War’s annals will fade into night / Ere their story die”), the punishing khaki whereby the world sees us die out, mourning you, O massacred elephants! Months later, in Amherst, she dreamt: She was, with dia- monds, being stoned to death. I prayed: If she must die, let it only be some dream. But there were times, Mother, while you slept, that I prayed, "Saints, let her die." Not, I swear by you, that I wished you to die but to save you as you were, young, in song in Kashmir, and I, one festival, crowned Krishna by you, Kashmir listening to my flute. You never let gods die. Thus I swear, here and now, not to forgive the universe that would let me get used to a universe without you. She, she alone, was the universe as she earned, like a galaxy, her right not to die, defying the Merciful of the Universe, Master of Disease, “in the circle of her traverse” of drug-bound time. And where was the god of elephants, plump with Fate, when tusk to tusk, the universe, dyed green, became ivory? Then let the universe, like Paradise, be considered a tomb. Mother, they asked me,So how’s the writing? I answered My mother is my poem. What did they expect? For no verse sufficed except the promise, fading, of Kashmir and the cries that reached you from the cliffs of Kashmir (across fifteen centuries) in the hospital.Kashmir, she’s dying! How her breathing drowns out the universe as she sleeps in Amherst. Windows open on Kashmir: There, the fragile wood-shrines—so far away—of Kashmir! O Destroyer, let her return there, if just to die. Save the right she gave its earth to cover her, Kashmir has no rights. When the windows close on Kashmir, I see the blizzard-fall of ghost-elephants. I hold back—she couldn’t bear it—one elephant’s story: his return (in a country far from Kashmir) to the jungle where each year, on the day his mother died, he touches with his trunk the bones of his mother. "As you sit here by me, you’re just like my mother," she tells me. I imagine her: a bride in Kashmir, she’s watching, at the Regal, her first film with Father. If only I could gather you in my arms, Mother, I’d save you—now my daughter—from God. The universe opens its ledger. I write: How helpless was God’s mother! Each page is turned to enter grief’s accounts. Mother, I see a hand.Tell me it’s not God’s. Let it die. I see it. It’s filling with diamonds. Please let it die. Are you somewhere alive, somewhere alive, Mother? Do you hear what I once held back: in one elephant’s cry, by his mother’s bones, the cries of those elephants that stunned the abyss? Ivory blots out the elephants. I enter this:The Beloved leaves one behind to die. For compared to my grief for you, what are those of Kashmir, and what (I close the ledger) are the griefs of the universe when I remember you—beyond all accounting—O my mother?

He hardly spoke any words only two — or you could call it one the last thing he said was bye-bye flight-feathers veined and hairlike with interlocking barbules of  sound the bye-bye trapped a breath of air the two linked words drifted out on a calm lake that lay there with a single purpose — to receive final words and allow them to drift on its surface out and further out on the lake of  thought and composure encircled by mountains the simple phrase soared upwards to the highest peak where it would be planted like a flag would eventually be enshrined each identical word carefully balanced either side of the invisible join — like baby talk he put equal emphasis on each word his face was pinched and his bird beak very prominent there have never been two joined words with so much space around them pack up all my cares and woes light the light I’ll arrive late tonight blackbird     bye bye bye