341 Grief poems

Fat bed, lick the black cat in my mouth each morning. Unfasten all the bones that make a head, and let me rest: unknown among the oboe-throated geese gone south to drop their down and sleep beside the out-

Sometimes I wish that I were dead As dead can be, but then again At times when I've been nicely fed On caviar or guinea hen And I am wearing something new And reassuring, I decide It might be better to eschew My tendency to cyanide.

“Is my team ploughing, That I was used to drive And hear the harness jingle When I was man alive?” Ay, the horses trample, The harness jingles now; No change though you lie under The land you used to plough. “Is football playing Along the river shore, With lads to chase the leather, Now I stand up no more?” Ay the ball is flying, The lads play heart and soul; The goal stands up, the keeper Stands up to keep the goal. “Is my girl happy, That I thought hard to leave, And has she tired of weeping As she lies down at eve?” Ay, she lies down lightly, She lies not down to weep: Your girl is well contented. Be still, my lad, and sleep. “Is my friend hearty, Now I am thin and pine, And has he found to sleep in A better bed than mine?” Yes, lad, I lie easy, I lie as lads would choose; I cheer a dead man’s sweetheart, Never ask me whose.

If you had a lot of money (by some coincidence you’re at the Nassau Inn in Princeton getting a whiff of class) and you just noticed two days ago that your face has fallen, but you don’t believe it, so every time you look in the glass it’s still hanging there where it wasn’t. Would you take the money you needed for a new roof on your old house (the house you’re paying for over and over in property taxes) because it’s been leaking for years and you’re tired of emptying buckets and spraying for mold, would you take that money and get your face lifted? Face-lift. They cut a slit under your ears and pull up the slack and they tack it with plastic. Then they pull up the outer skin and trim it because it’s too long and fasten that. (Your skin pulls loose from the fat like chicken skin.) Because once you were almost as beautiful as Jane Wyman ... your friends all said that. Of course at the time she was married to Ronnie and you were involved with the ASU— a McCarthy suspect. Forget about your neck. They can’t do that yet. A face-lift lasts five years. So you could go on being a member of new-speak and re-entry— with the unsung benefits of radiation and by then your roof would have rotted anyway. Or been recycled by some corporate kid. But think how you’d rather be stripped and streaked and while you’re about it get some implants of baby teeth buds that they’ve taken from dead babies’ gums and frozen for this sort of thing. You could still die young.

We have the body of a woman, an arch over the ground, but there is no danger. Her hair falls, spine bowed, but no one is with her. The desert, yes, with its cacti, bursage, sidewinders. She is not in danger. If we notice, there are the tracks of animals moving east toward the sunrise. And the light is about to touch a woman's body without possession. Here, there are no girl's bones in the earth, marked with violence. A cholla blooms, just two feet away. It blooms. There is a man, like her father, who wakes to a note saying I have gone, for a day, to the desert

It’s going to hurt You know this So you drink tea in the morning instead of an entire carafe of coffee Like a vampire, your skin cells burn on their first sip of the sun The ringing taste of green tea or whatever the fuck kind of tea this is Describe to me in detail this so-called purification ritual I can’t I’ve never done it before My cells are exploding into a wasting lament This is the last time you will ever write yourself through this On the other side of this swamp of dark water, a plane will crash The lone survivor will speak on the radio as you drive down Highway 27 In the middle of Florida in the middle of the night after you step off the plane you see the swamps morph into the mountains of your childhood They raise their heads like giants The Sierras stare; do not go there “Brave soul,” says the radio “Beauty,” says the radio “It had to be like this,” says the radio “Difficult,” says the radio “Now you’re 44 years old?” says the radio “That’s right. 44 years old,” says the radio Continue to drive through hornets and testicular small towns Some flags raised Some flags down The god of the underworld has let you go from his hand into the empire Floridian He says you have a pure heart so pure he cannot destroy it Some people look pure but they are not He says he cannot see you destroy yourself so he has let you go and he will protect you with his anger and melancholy It will hurt You know this All the substances have got to go Substances don’t flow from your body They leave with the violence of an exorcism Spicer says once a ghost leaves your body it never returns “Horrendous,” your sister texts “I’ve been vomiting all night,” she texts “Maybe it will be a Christmas baby,” you say Something with no substance surrounds you

It's not that I'm opposed to poison in my lips or pig in my soap— it's not that I'm opposed. It's not that I'm opposed to plastic bottles that won't decompose to malodorous phosphorus flows— it's not that I'm opposed to what you propose— surgery on your imperfect nose favelas blasted with hoses— it's not that I'm opposed to opposing the opposite of anonymous neighbors, the nosy stargazers who discover new celebrity planets about to crash into your car. It's not that I'm opposed that we drive when it's not very far to walk or bike not opposed you're opposed to the subway the stink of the general— train 4, 5, or 6–not opposed to the sex on Craigslist to your pets' special tricks to the organized slaughter of cows by the tenderest machines— not opposed to your dreams to their screams to our hopes not opposed to the hordes with their ropes knives and bombs set in desolate streets slums and thrumming towns not opposed to your proms and baptisms to ongoing Christian schisms most unopposed to fierce Muslims Jews Baha'is and Hindus posed in poses temples now oppose the Kama Sutra too ooh-la-la for the petit-bourgeois members of the BJP —not opposed to a big GDP to a loud ATV not opposed to anything I can see hear or touch to "enough or too much"— It's not that I'm opposed to whatever I should propose opposing, knowing knowing is thinning in the species' extra inning on a world slow spinning on an axis slightly tilting into folly so is it folly to suppose you could oppose proposing something to oppose

It's such a shock, I almost screech, When I find a worm inside my peach! But then, what really makes me blue, Is to find a worm who's bit in two!

Something expired. At the turning, A spirit was gone. That which was Turned to sepia: high collars, punting, Waxed mustaches, parasols. From bridges, children stared in the river And felt themselves, also, halved. Old manners were patently over. New manners had not yet arrived. The old, without waiting to speak Their parting lines in the act, Learned to exit the way of pipe-smoke. Uttered nothing. Utter tact. Steamy ghosts rose from horses' Maws as they champed at their bits. The ladies reached for their purses. The gentlemen tipped their hats.

It was when they determined that I had been born dead That my life became easier to understand. For a long time, I wondered why rooms felt colder when I entered them, Why nothing I said seemed to stick in anyone’s ear, Frankly, why I never had any money. I wondered Why the cities I walked through drifted into cloud Even as I admired their architecture, as I pointed out The cornerstones marked “1820,” “1950.” The only songs I ever loved were filled with scratch, dispatches from A time when dead ones like me were a dime a dozen. I spent my life in hotels: some looked like mansions, Some more like trailer parks, or pathways toward A future I tried to point to, but how could I point, With nothing but a hand no hand ever matched, With fingers that melted into words that no one read. I rehearsed names that others taught me: Caravaggio, Robert Brandom, Judith, Amber, Emmanuelle Cat. I got hungry the way only the dead get hungry, The hunger that launches a thousand dirty wars, But I never took part in the wars, because no one lets A dead man into their covert discussions. So I drifted from loft to cellar, ageless like a ghost, And America became my compass, and Europe became The way that dead folks talk, in short, who cares, There’s nothing to say because nobody listens, There’s no radio for the dead and the pillows seem Like sand. Let me explain: when you’re alive, As I understand it, pillows cushion the head, the way A lover might soothe the heart. The way it works for me, In contrast, is everything is sand. Beds are sand, The women I profess to love are sand, the sound of music In the darkest night is sand, and whatever I have to say Is sand. This is not, for example, a political poem, Because the dead have no politics. They might have A hunger, but nothing you’ve ever known Could begin to assuage it.