341 Grief poems

For Don (1958–2011) My skiff is made of spicewood       my oars are Cassia bract Music flows      from bow to starboard Early Mozart     cool side of  Coltrane   and miles and miles     of   Miles Cheap Californian Merlot       and my young boyfriend • If   I could master      the nine doors of my body And close my heart       to the cries of   suffering Perhaps     I could love you like no other Float my mind      toward the other side of   hate • The shanty towns of   Tijuana       sing for you The slums of   Little Sudan       hold evening prayer One dead brown boy is a tragedy Ten thousand is a statistic So let’s fuck    my love       until the dogs pass • All beautiful boyfriends are transitory They have no souls     they’re shiny brown flesh Tomorrow they’ll turn into      purple festering corpses Fissured     gored    by a myriad flies • Down the Irrawaddy River       you lay yourself   to sleep No sun no moon          no coming no going No causality   no personality No hunger     no thirst • Malarial deltas      typhoidal cays Tsunamis don’t judge     Calamity grieves no one The poor will be submerged     the rich won’t be saved Purge the innocent     sink the depraved • What do I smell        but the perfume of   transience Crushed calyxes         rotting phloems Let’s write     pretty poems        pretty poems      pretty poems Masque stale pogroms    with a sweet whiff of oblivion

To be a bride of my own lamentation I wear a dress not of time’s poisoned quills but feathers of discontent — kingfishers ghosting in cornstalks, my field of frozen flutes. The edge of descent, digression’s highway brings a particulate ash to my mouth, starry metals of the meadow’s cold snap, ravens in the sycamore scorched to black. I follow their echo’s loop and chase. I master the map of never, raft its fragments, mouth the brightness of human’s leftover snow, details of fever-clouds where the convent dissolves in violence. I wear the canyon like a blank eye, lay before the never-returning light my silhouette, fossil of the drowned town’s scroll. • Here, where your ghost is always departing the ebb and flow of terrestrial tides, I follow your echo’s loop and chase, vortex streets of a cylindrical sound infinite in its arrangements of light. The evening veil, a partial reveal — how I appear to myself looking past this fact of being underway. Each day I stow my earthen materials in preparation for the never-end. In the snapshot of my dead friend, hanging in the room where loved ones refuse return: a gradual reduction of color. Running out of time, neck-deep in water, we knew no one was coming to help us in the same way one denies language to come from a picture. I imagine love a revelation, not of mind — the blue gauze of planetary motion — a tone-on-tone painting of a body floating on the sea’s shifting horizons. It is a question of legibility. When I became tired of depicting poetry, I became aware of another kind of plane, the kind good for dwellings and their narrative escape. Here children sit up all night by the flames — the orphan boy from blood-stained pottery who singed his head and burned out both his eyes. That was your life, a prefix for fire. Spider will weave a ladder to your heart, it is said, even though you are sleeping, intoxicated by abandonment, a bitter wind reminiscent of a wave. • In the last days of my marriage to god, I wandered his spiraled library to read in the dark blank imprints of trees. Relentless navigation through the stacks of shell-tempered mortuary offerings, sandstone saws recovered from the caves. I lingered on the stairs of the convent to write these things, to recollect myself. Around midnight the mountains returned. The clouds dispersed into semicolons and I with them, into a new language, its boat temporary, invisible. I knew I would be traveling like this for centuries. This was my first attempt at vanishing. I would return before anyone noticed poems to be found in the forest, not the mind. There’s a canyon between this version of me and the shadow in the corner that is mine. I wear this canyon like a blank eye.

I thought he was over-medicating himself and planning his suicide. I took the pills away from him. He looked defeated. He said as much. I felt sorry for both of us. His expressions held this enormity and a seared-exhausted center. Spatial discomfort started to affect him but didn't take hold till the next day, when he started to lose consciousness and rattled the house yelling about thieves, robbers, drunks, and pill-snatchers.  We didn’t know what was going on: the tumor was rapidly metastasizing its mass through his cerebellum. His body became harder to manage and he sprung through the house with fear tugging violently at his bile duct tube. Aja and I camped in the front rooms. The last night of intimacy, of lucidity—unbeknownst to me—we sat together huddled and I caressed him, cradling his arms, his legs, and his penis. I was sure we had time left for more, but this was the last time he spoke and searched my face and looked at me with a recognition I understood. It’s how we moved out of consciousness. I am haunted by those last days before we succumbed to hospice. I remember how stunning he was resting in bed—that week before, in our library with a cornflower blue-sheeted bed made by Ashby and Spider. In that bed, he had a look of wonder when we put movies on—he excited over Wilson, the ball in Castaway and stared unblinkingly at Tom Hanks. We giggled over this, and appreciated how Andrew put the Eno station on next, and Aja lit and framed this sheeted bed with a twinkling lamp, an illuminant: bulbs he found soothing. We all watched him compose in the air to Philip Glass. I wished that we could have unleashed him to his afterlife then. That's what he would have wanted: a release to his own universe sonant and material, an ethereal ball. An awkward Tom Hanks, a Wilson, and a castaway in a glittering hand-printed sea. This death sequence was the one I wanted for him.

I. Separation Precedes Meeting The cat so close to the fire I smell scorched breath. Parents, silent, behind me, a feeling of trees that might fall. Or dogs. A poem, like trying to remember, is a movement of the whole body. You follow the fog into more fog. Maybe the door ahead divides the facts from natural affection. How can I know. I meet too many in every mirror. 2. When I was little, was I I? My sister? A wolf chained, smothered in green virtues? Slower time of memory. Once I’ve got something I lie down on it with my whole body. Goethe quotations, warm sand, a smell of hay, long afternoons. But it would take a road would turn, with space, in on itself, would turn occasion into offer. 3. For days I hold a tiny landscape between thumb and index: sand, heather, shimmer of blue between pines. No smell: matchbook. Sand as schematic as Falling into memory, down, with my blood, to the accretions in the arteries, to be read with the whole body, in the chambers of the heart. The light: of the match, struck, at last. 4. Concentration: a frown of the whole body. I can’t remember. Too many pasts recede in all directions. Slow movement into Distant boots. Black beetles at night. A smell of sweat. The restaurant, yes. You’ve no idea how much my father used to eat. Place thick with smoke. Cards. Beer foaming over on the table. And always some guy said I ought to get married, put a pillow behind my eyes and, with a knowing sigh, spat in my lap. 5. The present. As difficult as the past, once a place curves into Hips swinging elsewhere. Castles in sand. Or Spain. Space of another language. Sleep is a body of water. You follow your lips into its softness. Far down the head finds its level 6. Tropisms Inward, always. Night curls the clover leaf around its sleep. Tightly. The bodies of the just roll, all night, through subterranean caves which turn in on themselves. Long tunnel of forgetting. Need of blur. The air, large, curves its whole body. Big hammering waves flatten my muscles. Inward, the distances: male and female fields, rigorously equal. 7. The drunk fell toward me in the street. I hope he wasn’t disappointed. Skinned his sleep. November. And a smell of snow. Quite normal, says the landlord, the master of rubbish, smaller and smaller in my curved mirror. I have un- controllable good luck: my sleep always turns dense and visible. There are many witches in Germany. Their songs descend in steady half-tones through you. 8. You’ll die, Novalis says, you’ll die following endless rows of sheep into your even breath. Precarious, like Mozart, a living kind of air, keeps the dream spinning around itself, its missing core. Image after image of pleasure of the whole body deepens my sleep: fins. 9. Introducing Decimals A dream, like trying to remember, breaks open words for other, hidden meanings. The grass pales by degrees, twigs quaver glassily, ice flowers the window. Intimate equations more complicated than the coordinates of past and Germany. The cat can’t lift its paw, its leg longer and longer with effort. A crying fit is cancelled. An aria jelled in the larynx. Nothing moves in the cotton coma: only Descartes pinches himself an every fraction must be solved.

All he undertook goes under, under the undergrowth he rose from fly-boy, lovely in his day. All his clothes — spruce suit & tie — are underclothes against ungrounded gray. All his studies understudy an unstudied play. Under the under of what I remember we are both twenty and except with each other underemployed.

A black sun rises in the West of me & will never set. God of my fathers, sleep like the one sleeping next to me; inert & tenderly coiled. I am so grateful to yóu, that breathes as the dead breathe in their shallow land — barely, below the range of my hearing. That draws in the thin streams of black air & shifts & puts a white arm around me. I want to know, Né, what it is like in the kingdom of the dead where you are. Is the one I fear there with her train of silver hair? Have you seen John, the temples of his glasses duct-taped to the hinge? I know it is not still there; I know everything is in furious motion beneath the black sun & the sky white as chalk — the torrent of silver hair whipped about her face that woke in the moonlight on the last morning, lucid & fluent, & turned toward my father & said, “I love you,” walking backward on the white road into the white sky toward the white city, black sun clearing the horizon & a wind lifting in the torn leaves like the wind in the wood above Lady’s Walk where I trespassed in spring, singing, Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, the bluebells hissing like cats & the canopy a violent array, violently outside me in flickering Islamic greens / Spanish grays, the topside / bellyside of milled leaves, the harebells biting their bitter tongues, & raising its head in panic, a juvenile fallow deer stippled with thick white spots. Then someone shouted, “Oy, stay there, you fúck,” Oyé, Whale, & my launces in his side, & I went down the hill with the sweetgrass pulling at me & the spit in my mouth. Né, I cannot sleep. Ever since I lost my little children. I look for their shapes on the ceiling, in the dark, & they are not there. Né, never, no, no, never, never, never, never. There is nothing, Né. Neither the night nor the white city like Conholt in its great estate. Not the hart, nor the furious wood. O, John, John. I came downstairs still drunk to find you asleep with your head on the hoover, & the hoover still running; half-shaved, the tape on your glasses, your mouth open & the tattered Crombie. Then years later when Oli called & you were, O John.Y am alpha and oo, the firste and the laste, bigynnyng and ende. O, John, John. No white city as a wijf ourned to hir hosebonde, no voice in the wind, in the (clouds) crying Lo! Y make alle thingis newe. I make all things new. Como una novia adornada para su esposo. Como tu cuerpo en la noche, Né; like this body that pregnancies have raged over & I have loved with my mouth moost feithful and trewe. i And let him that is athirst come. ii And let him that heareth say, Come. iii And let the dawn thunder up in the street while you are sleeping with the first cars sauntering by & the dustmen & women whistling. Lord, I will stand before yóu when yóu wish in death’s little house & yóu will eat my pronoun. • In that other life that will be ours where there is neither marriage nor children, I may kneel beside you, Mouse, & not know you — our eyes like a golem’s, empty of their own will, but full of hís, the dead Lord at the center of hís dead city. In the days when my glory is stripped from me, & yours from you, & all are made equal — no aesthetic splendor, no charm, no subversive, faithless glances to- ward those I have loved & have loved me; no property, no desire, no variation, no sparrowhawk thrusting through birches in the snow toward the wood, for hé never stepped in a wood, nor saw a harebell easing its frail metaled head, its light pinks & papery blues, through the first tranche of snow in November, nor the gray cere of the plunderer beneath her blue helmet, her single attention, wings volute in air, head w/ beak narrowly ajar in concentration & hunger breaking the line of the fence at the old house in Broadway; in the snow; in the snow that has flattened everything, the bells ringing out, the clouds heaped above the Blackdowns dragging themselves from the earth, headlights on the ridge in the wind groping toward them, the hills featureless, snuffed, white, black, dull, shining w/ no light. No drinking in the afternoon, no dope, no flaring temper. No bed to sleep it off, Mouse, while you draw catkins & piggies & pussybears with gorgeous happy frowns in the cold. No sleep, no flesh to rest in, for there is only day in the white irradiate city where the lamb lights hís terrible mercy in to worldis of worldis, forever & ever & hís government will never fail, for no glory is allowed but hís glory, no bone gouvernance but hís bone gouvernance, no prison camp but hís prison camp, hís plantations, hís will & techne, hís punishment beatings, hís censorship, hís textual criticism, hís forgiveness, hís rehabilitation, O ferdful men, & vnbileueful & cursid & manquelleris. Mouse, on that day, will you turn toward me & will I see in the insubstantial glass of your eyes the memory of these days; myself, father, authority, half chocolate & half steel, still carrying you at six up the hill & down the hill, still playing the Ticklepuss & Crocopotamus, the horn of plenty, salver, lessener of cries, bringer of swallows & dragonflies, the Emperor & Downy Emerald hovering over still waters in the valei of teeris, wolves in the mist in the hills above Antequera where the rocks bared themselves like teeth & you were asleep on my chest with fine alabaster eyelids & eyelashes plashed with droplets of dew? Where I said, “Shhhhhh, close your eyes & imagine that you’re a water reed, Mouse,” & I blew on you & that was the wind & then my hand was a snail wandering over your eyelids & the nape of your neck & last of all it rained & that was my fingers going pitter-pat upon the pinnacles of your head. The days fade through our slow parting; your mother grows ambivalent. Little accident, in the stillness of the earth there is no life; the harebell reaches its root into death & the waters flow down until the rock is dry. I wanted more than I was given, & found in betrayal a churning courage. Torchlight in the garden where we make our choice. The will that flickers. My loss. Our bliss. Mouse, on the last day, remember this. • Lying with you, Né, in the sun, in the (clouds) half-listening to the Senegalese preacher two mornings after the riots when they ran Mame Mbaye down to the gutter & wishing you would go buy your mutes & play again, here, in silence, — for them & for me & yourself & the polis— Bach’s Suiten für Violoncello No. 1. To watch in dumb show the formal motions that reify language & music — the flesh; your shoulder & forearm & wrist & lightly-draped fingers one continuous dependent assemblage flowing south to the river at Arganzuela & the chuckling magpies. There is an authority in you, when you play, that is different from the authority of the whap|whap of rotor blades overhead; control that is liberation, a concentration that is neither at one point nor diffuse, like the globes of light hovering over the lampposts in your myopia last night; wandering across the river, the madrileños also entonados swaying like palm fronds in the wind; then the dark, & our one body with its artifacts of pregnancy & loss. An authority that is different from the authority of the Lord in hís dead city, hís kingdom that has no contiguity with ours, no conformitá, the streets empty of opposition & neither wind nor rain; nor thunder, nor tears. Now a thin sun is dwelling in the wind. I wd like to reach out to you in its cold light & pull the shape of your body into mine; put my tongue against your eyes so I can taste what it is you see through them; the restaurant opening, the crisp cloths. Even the polis with their holsters & war clubs looking on carefully & asexually like angels come to lie with the daughters of men. A kestrel on a lamppost strips the bascinet from a cricket with slow, considerate motions: lovely rare flame. Have they buried Mame Mbaye? They are erasing a name from the wall & the quarter is pacified. Clouds rise above Guadarrama, Somosierra, above the meseta like kites. The picoletos shift from foot to foot in long black boots. Bells bleat — lambs; Alsatians on leashes. The bougainvillea — glad to bring us at last the first trace of its colors — flaunts a breathless restraint. •

for Larry Levis So it is here, then, after so long, and after all— as the light turns in the leaves in the old golden way of fall, as the small beasts dig to the place at the roots where survival waits, cowardly crouching in the dark, as the branches begin to stretch into winter, freed of their cheerful burden of green, then it comes home, the flea-ridden bitch of desolation, a thin dog with its ribs exposed like a lesson in mathematics, in subtraction; it comes home, to find its bowl empty—then the numberless things for which to be grateful dissolve like the steam from a fire just doused with water on a day of overcast grays, lined by a cold slanting rain— it is October, that season when Death goes public, costumed, when the talking heads on the TV screen float up smiling at the terrible news, their skin alight with the same strange glow fish give off when they have been dead a week or more, as the gas company adds odor for warning that the lines may be leaking, the sweet smell of disaster hanging, invisible, in the air, a moment before you strike the match— it is then, brother, that I think of you, of your Caravaggio, of the head of Goliath swung by its hair, wearing the artist’s own weary expression, exhausted of everything but its desire for that beautiful David he used to be; and I think of all the boys walking the streets each carrying the severed head of the man he will become—and the way I bear it is to think of you, grinning, riding high in the cart leaving the scene, a pair of huge horses hauling the wagon, a fine mist rising from their damp shoulders, unconcerned with what hangs, nailed to the museum walls—luckily the fall of Icarus has nothing to do with them, nor the ruined Goliath who fell like a forest, nor the wretched Salomes with their blood-splattered platters, nor the huge stone griffins sobbing at the gates to Valhalla as the litters are carried past ... the dark eyes of the horses are opaque with wisdom, their hoofs strike the pavements with such a musical decision, the derisive curl of their lips is so like the mysterious smile on the angel at Chartres, on Kuan Yin, on the dolphin, as they pull the cart safe through the blizzards of Main Street, the snow slowly swallowing the signs though the crossing light beckons— a soft glowing green like some spectral Eden in the blank white swirl of the storm. The stallion neighs once, sends a warm cloud of breath into the snow-filled air, and the mare isn’t scared yet—at least she’s still pulling. There’s a barn out there somewhere, as they plow through the light’s yellow aura of caution, its warm glow foretelling what hides in the storm: a stall full of gold, where the soul— that magician—can wallow and winter in straw.

Words without much use now. Unable to remake the thing. And I thought what should I think— followed by: spring light looks like feathers. (Birds seemed conveniently decorous.) What then does this leave I asked & was surprised to know so quickly—that my understanding of what the light & birds could not be made to mean would not detract from them as they were. Bound by feathers (a thought, I will admit, born of artifice alone) they bore themselves aloft. What could I counter with? I, who held my heart in offering as much for show as for a fear so deep I found I couldn't name it.

To the one who sets a second place at the table anyway. To the one at the back of the empty bus. To the ones who name each piece of stained glass projected on a white wall. To anyone convinced that a monologue is a conversation with the past. To the one who loses with the deck he marked. To those who are destined to inherit the meek. To us.

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart só heavy, if he had a hundred years & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time Henry could not make good. Starts again always in Henry’s ears the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime. And there is another thing he has in mind like a grave Sienese face a thousand years would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly, with open eyes, he attends, blind. All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears; thinking. But never did Henry, as he thought he did, end anyone and hacks her body up and hide the pieces, where they may be found. He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing. Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. Nobody is ever missing.