341 Grief poems

Old as I am This candle I light For you today May be the last one Of your afterlife With me, your son— With me you die twice.

This is where you leave me. Filling of old salt and ponderous, what’s left of your voice in the air. Blue honeycreeper thrashed out to a ragged wind, whole months spent crawling this white beach raked like a thumb, shucking, swallowing the sea’s benediction, pearled oxides. Out here I am the body invented naked, woman emerging from cold seas, herself the raw eel-froth met beneath her tangles, who must believe with all her puckering holes. What wounds the Poinciana slits forth, what must turn red eventually. The talon-mouths undressing. The cling-cling bird scratching its one message; the arm you broke reset and broke again. Caribbean. Sky a wound I am licking, until I am drawn new as a lamb, helpless in the chicken wire of my sex. I let every stranger in. Watch men change faces with the run-down sun, count fires in the loom-holes of their pickups, lines of rot, studying their scarred window-plagues, nightshade my own throat closed tight against a hard hand. Then all comes mute in my glittering eye. All is knocked back, slick hem-suck of the dark surf, ceramic tiles approaching, the blur of a beard. The white tusk of his ocean goring me. This world unforgiving in its boundaries. The day’s owl and its omen slipping a bright hook into my cheek —

Though he, that ever kind and true, Kept stoutly step by step with you, Your whole long, gusty lifetime through, Be gone a while before, Be now a moment gone before, Yet, doubt not, soon the seasons shall restore Your friend to you. He has but turned the corner — still He pushes on with right good will, Through mire and marsh, by heugh and hill, That self-same arduous way — That self-same upland, hopeful way, That you and he through many a doubtful day Attempted still. He is not dead, this friend — not dead, But in the path we mortals tread Got some few, trifling steps ahead And nearer to the end; So that you too, once past the bend, Shall meet again, as face to face, this friend You fancy dead. Push gaily on, strong heart! The while You travel forward mile by mile, He loiters with a backward smile Till you can overtake, And strains his eyes to search his wake, Or whistling, as he sees you through the brake, Waits on a stile.

After a funeral, they were covered with black cloth, some draped with shawls like a scalloped valance. Leftover sewing scraps, wool, linen, synthetic, anything to shroud the odd-shaped mirrors, though sometimes a corner was exposed like a woman whose ankle peeks forbidden from under a long skirt. A mourner must shun vanity during shiva, focusing inward but as a child I wondered if this were to avoid ghosts, for don't the dead take their time leaving? I'm of a generation where grandparents disappeared, great aunts with European accents, rarely an explanation provided to us children. My mother died too young. With a baby in arms I couldn't bear to fling that dark cloth over the glass. After all she had come back from the dead so often, even the doctors could not explain it. Each time I looked in a mirror my mother gazed back. I could never tell if she were trying to tell me something or to take the baby with her.

The letter said you died on your tractor crossing Shoal Creek. There were no pictures to help the memories fading like mists off the bottoms that last day on the farm when I watched you milk the cows, their sweet breath filling the dark barn as the rain that wasn’t expected sluiced through the rain gutters. I waited for you to speak the loud familiar words about the weather, the failed crops— I would have talked then, too loud, stroking the Holstein moving against her stanchion— but there was only the rain on the tin roof, and the steady swish-swish of milk into the bright bucket as I walked past you, so close we could have touched.

In life you had a temper. Your sarcasm was a whetted knife. Sometimes you shuddered with fear but you made yourself act no matter how few stood with you. Open the door for Eliyahu that he may come in. Now you return to us in rough times, out of smoke and dust that swirls blinding us. You come in vision, you come in lightning on blackness. Open the door for Eliyahu that he may come in. In every generation you return speaking what few want to hear words that burn us, that cut us loose so we rise and go again over the sharp rocks upward. Open the door for Eliyahu that he may come in. You come as a wild man, as a homeless sidewalk orator, you come as a woman taking the bima, you come in prayer and song, you come in a fierce rant. Open the door for Eliyahu that she may come in. Prophecy is not a gift, but sometimes a curse, Jonah refusing. It is dangerous to be right, to be righteous. To stand against the wall of might. Open the door for Eliyahu that he may come in. There are moments for each of us when you summon, when you call the whirlwind, when you shake us like a rattle: then we too must become you and rise. Open the door for Eliyahu that we may come in.

(...after my Mother’s death) Here not long enough after the hospital happened I find her closet lying empty and stop my play And go in and crane up at three blackwire hangers Which quiver, airy, released. They appear to enjoy Their new distance, cognizance born of the absence Of anything else. The closet has been cleaned out Full-flush as surgeries where the hangers could be Amiable scalpels though they just as well would be Themselves, in basements, glovelessly scraping uteri But, here, pure, transfigured heavenward, they’re Birds, whose wingspans expand by excluding me. Their Range is enlarged by loss. They’d leave buzzards Measly as moths: and the hatshelf is even higher!— As the sky over a prairie, an undotted desert where Nothing can swoop sudden, crumple in secret. I’ve fled At ambush, tag, age: six, must I face this, can I have my hide-and-seek hole back now please, the Clothes, the thicket of shoes, where is it? Only The hangers are at home here. Come heir to this Rare element, fluent, their skeletal grace sings Of the ease with which they let go the dress, slip, Housecoat or blouse, so absolvingly. Free, they fly Trim, triangular, augurs leapt ahead from some geometric God who soars stripped (of flesh, it is said): catnip To a brat placated by model airplane kits kids My size lack motorskills for, I wind up glue-scabbed, Pawing goo-goo fingernails, glaze skins fun to peer in as Frost-i-glass doors ... But the closet has no windows, Opaque or sheer: I must shut my eyes, shrink within To peep into this wall. Soliciting sleep I’ll dream Mother spilled and cold, unpillowed, the operating- Table cracked to goad delivery: its stirrups slack, Its forceps closed: by it I’ll see mobs of obstetrical Personnel kneel proud, congratulatory, cooing And oohing and hold the dead infant up to the dead Woman’s face as if for approval, the prompted Beholding, tears, a zoomshot kiss. White-masked Doctors and nurses patting each other on the back, Which is how in the Old West a hangman, if He was good, could gauge the heft of his intended ... Awake, the hangers are sharper, knife-’n’-slice, I jump Helplessly to catch them to twist them clear, Mis-shape them whole, sail them across the small air Space of the closet. I shall find room enough here By excluding myself; by excluding myself, I’ll grow.

Even two years later, she still gets correspondence addressed to him. Correspondence. This like that. Mostly about his hobby. Coin collector brochures. Announcements of collector swap meets. His pastime. A way to spend an afternoon back when an afternoon needed spending. Before all the silence flooded the house. He had old currency. Nickels worth ten dollars. And heavy, the bags. Musical, too. She needs to sort through them all. That's what she should do, realize its value. But what she is thinking of is spending it, buying gum and soft drinks, maybe a chocolate bar. Just get face value for mint-condition rarities. Get them back into circulation. Circulation. The afterlife where someone else could get them as change and be joyful at the luck of finding his life's pleasure.

I shall never get you put together entirely, Pieced, glued, and properly jointed. Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles Proceed from your great lips. It’s worse than a barnyard. Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser. Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of lysol I crawl like an ant in mourning Over the weedy acres of your brow To mend the immense skull plates and clear The bald, white tumuli of your eyes. A blue sky out of the Oresteia Arches above us. O father, all by yourself You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum. I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress. Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered In their old anarchy to the horizon-line. It would take more than a lightning-stroke To create such a ruin. Nights, I squat in the cornucopia Of your left ear, out of the wind, Counting the red stars and those of plum-color. The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue. My hours are married to shadow. No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel On the blank stones of the landing.

She kept its bones in a glass case next to the recliner in the living room, and sometimes thought she heard him mewing, like a faint background music; but if she stopped to listen, it disappeared. Likewise with a nuzzling around her calves, she’d reach absent-mindedly to scratch him, but her fingers found nothing but air. One day, in the corner of her eye, slinking by the sofa, there was a shadow. She glanced over, expecting it to vanish. But this time it remained. She looked at it full on. She watched it move. Low and angular, not quite as catlike as one might suppose, but still, it was him. She walked to the door, just like in the old days, and opened it, and met a whoosh of winter air. She waited. The bones in the glass case rattled. Then the cat-shadow darted at her, through her legs, and slipped outside. It mingled with the shadows of bare branches, and leapt at the shadow of a bird. She looked at the tree, but there was no bird. Then he blended into the shadow of a bush. She stood in the threshold, her hands on the door, the sharp breeze ruffling the faded flowers of her house dress, and she could feel her own bones rattling in her body, her own shadow trying to slip out.