343 Grief poems

LISTEN TO THE RADIO PLAY JOE, a doctoral candidate in literature RACHEL, his fiancée POET/CRITIC SCENE 1 POET: Again like a rebellious nation my heart Stands and cries: forward, to the battle! To the battle? Now? What's a battle to an old man Like me. O barricades of washed-up words, Stanzas filling books with my heart's murmurs, My love is lined with lies and sweetened With the sweetest white sugar. My thoughts are rusty, My feelings but smoky furniture And scraps of youthful rage gone by. All this, piled on the barricades. But whither my flag, my withering flag? Spring is in my heart again and winter in my eyes, Fall in my arms and frost in my toes. O desire, O vain rebellion, What more . . . [The voice fades into the background.] JOE:   This is the end. This is the end. [We hear knocks at the door.] This is the end. This is the end. [RACHEL enters as JOE continues grumbling.] RACHEL: Joe, Joe, what's with you? JOE:   This is the end. [We hear him furiously tearing newspaper.] The end! The end! The end! The end! RACHEL: [Anxiously.] What's wrong with you? The end of what? What happened? Good God. I have never . . . JOE: [Apathetically.] This is the end. Read the newspaper. RACHEL: Which newspaper? Where? JOE: There, that ball, that ball of paper. [RACHEL opens it.] Well read it! RACHEL: One moment. You've torn and crumpled it . . . hold on . . . this is a   serious act of archaeological reconstruction. JOE: Come on, read it out loud! RACHEL: . . . and frost in my toes. O desire, O vain rebellion, What more do I ask? O dark desperation In a tenebrous valley like a ship of ghosts. But behold! What is that light on the horizon, Yonder as if from a distant cave? My legs fail me, yet my heart Soaks up hope like a big sponge in the bathtub. [She laughs.] A big sponge in the bathtub! JOE: Go on. Go on. RACHEL: [A little hurt.] Fine, fine, stop rushing me . . . one moment, one moment . . . it's hard to make out . . . OK: Three maidens sit in that cave weaving my fate. Spin-spin on the spindle, no not on the spindle, no. They crouch over books by lamplight. The students. How studious! Till dawn breaks they study and maybe read my poems of yore. JOE: Go on! RACHEL: Slowly I'll sneak through the rustling summer grass And watch, struck with awe. There is a window Ancient, arched, and there she sits with her hand stroking The hair of her . . . head. O, my studious one, I begged to see you, only to see, not to touch, Not to sit in your room, only to know your name, To call your name, O your name, your name and your name and your name. I'll peep stealthily . . . Enough, I can't read anymore. JOE: Do you know what this means? RACHEL: I know. JOE:   The end of my glorious dissertation. The end of the literature department's rising star. I'll remain a teaching assistant forever. I might as well go back to the army. RACHEL: I won't let you, I love you. JOE:   So what? I'll sit and start writing on a new subject. Come to me in four years when I'm done . . . RACHEL: You're out of your mind. JOE:   . . . only to discover, like Sisyphus, that it was all for naught. [Despairingly.] What an idiot! And just yesterday I wrote the final chapter! [Sarcastically.] Here, look, the dissertation that will revolutionize the appreciation of D.G. Castleman's poetry. RACHEL: [Sweetly.] And I drew the letters on the cover: "D.G. Castleman's Poetry and its Interpretation." JOE:   The long silence of D.G. Castleman . . . [Slight pause, then with anger.

I would drive to your grave but your grave is the crash the froth foam pebbles small rocks the sand smoothed soothed each rising each leaving tide you lie in the ocean the water in the waves your home the stern the back the wake of a boat those curled white lines of leaving I would visit your grave but your grave is a single blue afternoon of passing isles the green and granite shores I would come to your grave but your grave is the fire oh mother it is cold tonight and I have no heart for this burning for the fine sift of ash which is all that comes back all that comes after I would visit your house but your things are missing are missing your touch as your eyes failed I brought you lights and I would see again that brightness I would drive to your grave but I am your grave your marker oh mother I am your stone

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.