341 Grief poems

Museum of the Diaspora, Tel Aviv The roasting alive of rabbis in the ardor of the Crusades went unremarked in Europe from the Holy Roman Empire to 1918,

I passed through, I should have paused, there were a hundred doors. One opened. In there, someone whose name is not yet known to me lived out his middle years in simple terms, two chairs, one place laid for early breakfast, one plate with dry toast and butter softening. There his mind raced through writings he had memorized long ago while he tried to get hold of himself. Once in his youth he had studied with love in the corners of old paintings matrices of fields and towns, passages intricate and particular, wheat, columns, figures and ground, classically proportioned in lines that were meant to meet, eventually, at vanishing point. They continued, nevertheless; they troubled the eye. He collected sets of books printed in the nineteenth century, unyielding pages, memoirs of the poets, engravings of rurified private subjects in times of public sector unhappiness, frescoes of human oddity in gatefold printing. Why does it continue to chasten me, he says to no one. It does. It is a painful mistaking, this setting something down, saying aloud, “it is nothing yet” when he’d meant, not anything— but then nothing peered through the keyhole, nothing took possession. Snow on the roofs, snow in traces on the ground, passersby with wet trouser-cuffs looking to the pavement as the hill rises, light gathering in the river and gradually spreading.

At bedtime, my grandson’s breath rasps in and out of fragile lungs. Holding the nebulizer mask over his nose and mouth, I rock him on my lap and hum a lullaby to comfort him. The nebulizer hisses as steroids stream into his struggling chest, and suddenly he also starts to hum, his infant voice rising and falling on the same few notes—some hymn he must have learned while in the womb or carried here from where he was before— a kind of plainsong, holy and hypnotic in the dark.

Sisyphus had a bad back. Why? Well, I get up in the morning And my wife wants me to carry A big blue bag of garbage To my son now Sleeping in a studio in NY. Five flights he will not carry. Oh I say I’m not supposed to carry More than five pounds of garbage And she crosses the border with it There was a dead body like little Pedro rolled down the Hill by Buñuel and not the long kiss Of L’age d’or but the dog and dog-dream In Los Olvidados. How do you abandon dirt? The blue bag also rolls down by itself, full of Pedro Something little Pedro always wanted to do It’s a cold day. Man is garbage. Sisyphus has a bad back.

All along the valley, stream that flashest white, Deepening thy voice with the deepening of the night, All along the valley, where thy waters flow, I walk'd with one I loved two and thirty years ago. All along the valley, while I walk'd to-day, The two and thirty years were a mist that rolls away; For all along the valley, down thy rocky bed, Thy living voice to me was as the voice of the dead, And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree, The voice of the dead was a living voice to me.

The night the world was going to end when we heard those explosions not far away and the loudspeakers telling us about the vast fires on the backwater consuming undisclosed remnants and warning us over and over to stay indoors and make no signals you stood at the open window the light of one candle back in the room we put on high boots to be ready for wherever we might have to go and we got out the oysters and sat at the small table feeding them to each other first with the fork then from our mouths to each other until there were none and we stood up and started to dance without music slowly we danced around and around in circles and after a while we hummed when the world was about to end all those years all those nights ago

As far as clocks—and it is time to think of them— I have one on my kitchen shelf and it is flat, with a machine-made flair, a perfect machine from 1948, at the latest, and made of shining plastic with the numbers sharp and clear and slightly magnified in that heartbreaking post-war style, the cord too short, though what does it matter, since the mechanism is broken and it sits unplugged alongside a cheap ceramic rooster, his head insanely small and yet his tiny brain alert for he is the one who will crow and not that broken buzzing relic, though time is different now and dawn is different too, you were up all night and it is dark when he crows and you are waiting to see what direction you should face and if you were born in time or was it wasted and what the day looks like and is the rooster loyal.

Shall I say how it is in your clothes? A month after your death I wear your blue jacket. The dog at the center of my life recognizes you’ve come to visit, he’s ecstatic. In the left pocket, a hole. In the right, a parking ticket delivered up last August on Bay State Road. In my heart, a scatter like milkweed, a flinging from the pods of the soul. My skin presses your old outline. It is hot and dry inside. I think of the last day of your life, old friend, how I would unwind it, paste it together in a different collage, back from the death car idling in the garage, back up the stairs, your praying hands unlaced, reassembling the bits of bread and tuna fish into a ceremony of sandwich, running the home movie backward to a space we could be easy in, a kitchen place with vodka and ice, our words like living meat. Dear friend, you have excited crowds with your example. They swell like wine bags, straining at your seams. I will be years gathering up our words, fishing out letters, snapshots, stains, leaning my ribs against this durable cloth to put on the dumb blue blazer of your death.

The story goes from in a rainfall to sister walking a field browned autumn. And when she arrives winter has come, so the old man rises from his chair, picks up matches, pipes and tools, and walks out to begin again. The sculptures grow by the day, birds in ice, recognizable eagles, a bear who began as a man in a moment of dance. He does this in ice, all winter carving at dawn, carving at dusk. And sister after walking a field browned autumn, arrives, watches from the east window, waits, goes out to him in spring, taps him on the shoulder and points to the pools of water he's standing over.

All you have to lose is one connection and the mind uncouples all the way back. It seems to have been a train. There seems to have been a track. The things that you unpack from the abandoned cars cannot sustain life: a crate of tractor axles, for example, a dozen dozen clasp knives, a hundred bolts of satin— perhaps you specialized more than you imagined.