341 Grief poems

Sonnet VII I would I might forget that I am I, And break the heavy chain that binds me fast, Whose links about myself my deeds have cast. What in the body’s tomb doth buried lie Is boundless; ’tis the spirit of the sky, Lord of the future, guardian of the past, And soon must forth, to know his own at last. In his large life to live, I fain would die. Happy the dumb beast, hungering for food, But calling not his suffering his own; Blessèd the angel, gazing on all good, But knowing not he sits upon a throne; Wretched the mortal, pondering his mood, And doomed to know his aching heart alone.

The father died and then the mother died. And you were so addicted to not feeling them, you told no one about the clamp inside— around the vena cava. Dam against the blood's trash— But I've got you now. Trussed at the waist in a wooden chair, odor of spice and oranges, clove-pierced, incandescent stores to light our lab's decor— Here. I saved this just for you. Beetle-cleaned and sharp at the tip, the finger that shook in your set face from the hand that smoothed your hair— Make a fist. Wrap the tube round your fleshy arm, pull the black rubber tight— will we finally see the sludge of their accumulated mouths, ah, you've said, how they poisoned me... Pierce in with your mother's finger-bone, taste the slow up-well— Sweet. Sweet. Surge ambrosial and clear— A honey, an ichor. From those who waited long in your veins.

Within this narrow cell that I call "me", I was imprisoned ere the worlds began, And all the worlds must run, as first they ran, In silver star-dust, ere I shall be free. I beat my hands against the walls and find It is my breast I beat, O bond and blind!

Sei allem Abschied voran: half a line from Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus as my motto, I rehearsed my elegiac art (“be in advance of all parting”) and won, I thought, with each song deeper, until I stood before the keeper in whom I’ve come to recognize myself.

Do not hang your head or clench your fists when even your friend, after hearing the story, says,My mother would never put up with that. Fight the urge to rattle off statistics: that, more often, a woman who chooses to leave is then murdered. The hundredth time your father says,But she hated violence, why would she marry a guy like that?—

You can shuffle and scuffle and scold, You can rattle the knockers and knobs, Or batter the doorsteps with buckets of gold Till the Deputy-Governor sobs. You can sneak up a suitable plank In a frantic endeavor to see— But what do they do in the Commonwealth Bank When the Big Door bangs at Three? Listen in the cellars, listen in the vaults, Can’t you hear the tellers turning somersaults? Can’t you hear the spectres of inspectors and directors Dancing with the phantoms in a Dead Man’s Waltz? Some are ghosts of nabobs, poverty and stray bobs, Midas and his mistress, Mammon and his wife; Other ones are sentries, guarding double entries, Long-forgotten, double-dealing, troubled double-life. Down among the pass-books, money lent and spent, Down among the forests of the Four Per Cent., Where the ledgers meet and moulder, and the overdrafts grow older, And the phantoms shrug a shoulder when you ask ’em for the rent. They are bogies of Grandfather’s cheques, They are spectres of buried accounts, They are crinoline sweethearts with pearls on their necks, Demanding enormous amounts. They are payment for suppers and flowers, For diamonds to banish a tear, For sweet, pretty ladies in opulent hours . . . And tombstones . . . and bailiffs . . . and beer . . . Down in the bowels of the bank, the ledgers lie rank upon rank, The debts of the ages come out of their pages, The bones of old loans creak and clank— Oh, if you could peep through the door To day at a Quarter Past Four, You’d find all the ghosts at their usual posts, And you wouldn’t sign cheques any more!

In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; I hear my echo in the echoing wood— A lord of nature weeping to a tree. I live between the heron and the wren, Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den. What’s madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall. That place among the rocks—is it a cave, Or winding path? The edge is what I have. A steady storm of correspondences! A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon, And in broad day the midnight come again! A man goes far to find out what he is— Death of the self in a long, tearless night, All natural shapes blazing unnatural light. Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I? A fallen man, I climb out of my fear. The mind enters itself, and God the mind, And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

The image that haunts me is not beautiful. I do not think it will open into a field of wildflowers; I doubt that it will take wing suddenly, startling us into admiration. It is one of those brutish facts of life, the awkward nakedness of the memory when it takes off its clothes and crawls between the top and bottom sheet. Or rather, It is my mother’s memory that I carry, pressed into my own: how at her grandfather’s funeral, his daughter—my mother’s mother— stood at an open door and cried, and then The blood ran down her legs, gushing from the womb where thirteen children had nestled, and now, at once horrified and at ease with her body’s impropriety, they gathered all around. This was the grandmother who lost three of those thirteen, who hung a million baskets of wash, who peeled a million potatoes, and splattered her arms with the grease of constant cooking. This was my grandmother who kept chickens, who left her voice in the throats of all my aunts, and was struck down in the cellar, legs twisted beneath the fall and half her face stiffened. Helpless until they found her, the jar of canned fruit smashed on the cement. And then at her funeral, I saw my mother’s tears, gliding ahead of me in a black limousine, a procession not beautiful but haunting.

can walk without a frame, he whose exions last and saw into limbs livid still the sum, comic, dome-hosting wall shop captivating everything in a proleptic sale while sand-horse negotiates his clop versus some floor one erected in ardor prostrate again and happy penultimate slough-opening as the news that distracts from spectral sass, downing darkling you weren’t personal last Saturday as ponies cyclical laced the public grasses compulsorily before our bower got scanned despite a standup’s lawnly heath and harebells having become grammar’s shortage on the stage hussing up to a cardboard cloud passed limb from limb without its flame [ardoring][clopsome][sass]

You don’t get everything back. Is today morning or night? The radio voice says the composer is changing the place home is. When they try to put a tube down her throat, the woman beside me sobs. Nurses probe a vein as she thrashes, call the Hmong translator. Once a boy told me, in Laos he sat in a tree all night.Father pay me dollar for every man I’m shooting. When there’s water to cross, the fish, caught, get needled through gill slits. Down the dark hall, machines bleat at each bed. Eyes open and shut: flashes, detachment, vitreous gel. Her son, seven years old, comes after school, peels oranges, watches football, changing the place home is.