341 Grief poems

My husband's out-of-town so I set Our house on fire. Champagne And eggs, asparagus for breakfast. Water for lunch. I eat dinner early In the late afternoon while the wind Disorganizes leaves, leaving me To clean them up. I think that the Imagination's guided by logic— A hand that's used to translating Images of rain to snow. Error-filled, The night destroys the details of Poems—the pearls worn by Beethoven In secret, the rocks H.D. mistook For seaweed as she walked In exaltation toward the beach. Is it Possible to sing the imagination Into being? And is it possible for us To valorize autumn by cloaking in Difficult language the paths of stars? Geraniums, they make entr'actes Out of air as I walk past them. Always these goddamn leaves And acorns shat on our house by The goddamn oak. One of us will fail The other, will plagiarize language From the other, that's certain. Acorns are beautiful only to those Who've never had to clean them up.

I hate how this unsummoned sigh-sound, sob-sound, not sound really, feeling, sigh-feeling, sob-feeling, keeps rising in me, rasping in me, not in its old disguise as nostalgia, sweet crazed call of the blackbird; not as remembrance, grief for so many gone, nor either that other tangle of recall, regret for unredeemed wrongs, errors, omissions, petrified roots too deep to ever excise; a mingling rather, a melding, inextricable mesh of delight in astonishing being, of being in being, with a fear of and fear for I can barely think what, not non-existence, of self, loved ones, love; not even war, fuck war, sighing for war, sobbing for war, for no war, peace, surcease; more than all that, some ground-sound, ground-note, sown in us now, that swells in us, all of us, echo of love we had, have, for world, for our world, on which we seem finally mere swarm, mere deluge, mere matter self-altered to tumult, to noise, cacophonous blitz of destruction, despoilment, din from which every emotion henceforth emerges, and into which falters, slides, sinks, and subsides: sigh-sound of lament, of remorse; sob-sound of rue, of, still, always, ever sadder and sadder sad joy.

No unclaimed, cremated mothers this year Nor collateral white skin No mothers folding clothes to a corporate park preamble No sons singing under the bright lights of a lumber yard Quantum reaganomics and the tap steps of turning on a friend New York trophy parts among the limbs of decent people Being an enraged artist is like entering a room and not knowing what to get high off of My formative symbols/My upbringing flying to an agent’s ears I might as well be an activist Called my girlfriend and described All the bottles segregationists had thrown at me that day Described recent blues sites and soothing prosecutions I feared for my poetry You have to make art every once in a while While in the company of sell-outs Accountant books in deified bulk Or while waiting for a girl under a modern chandelier Or in your last lobby as a wanderer The prison foot-races the museum My instrument ends I mean, what is a calendar to the slave? Also, what is a crystal prism? “He bought this bullet, bought its flight, then bought two more”

I looked brightness in the eye. The iron, the tang of metal & rust. I held a penny on my tongue. The taste shocked me, its brown-gold sweet. I roamed the field angry & burned asking bitter questions of a gun. Dance is a body’s refusal to die. But, oh, your gone hair. The flame & orange flare. Our forms, our least known selves — barrel, sugar, & stench. Your pleas, looped in writing, the stutter of a body’s broken grammar.

If but some vengeful god would call to me From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing, Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!” Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die, Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited; Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I Had willed and meted me the tears I shed. But not so.   How arrives it joy lies slain, And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? —Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . . These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

Both of us had been close to Joel, and at Joel’s death my friend had gone to the wake and the memorial service and more recently he had visited Joel’s grave, there at the back of the grassy cemetery among the trees, “a quiet, gentle place,” he said, “befitting Joel.” And I said, “What’s the point of going to look at graves?” I went into one of my celebrated tirades. “People go to look at the grave of Keats or Hart Crane, they go traveling just to do it, what a waste of time. What do they find there? Hell, I wouldn’t go look at the grave of Shakespeare if it was just down the street. I wouldn’t look at—” And I stopped. I was about to say the grave of God until I realized I’m looking at it all the time....

All day we packed boxes. We read birth and death certificates. The yellowed telegrams that announced our births, the cards of congratulations and condolences, the deeds and debts, love letters, valentines with a heart ripped out, the obituaries. We opened the divorce decree, a terrible document of division and subtraction. We leafed through scrapbooks: corsages, matchbooks, programs to the ballet, racetrack, theatre—joy and frivolity parceled in one volume— painstakingly arranged, preserved and pasted with crusted glue. We sat in the room in which the beloved had departed. We remembered her yellow hair and her mind free of paradox. We sat together side by side on the empty floor and did not speak. There were no words between us other than the essence of the words from the correspondences, our inheritance—plain speak, bereft of poetry.

In memoriam Liam Rector The little boy crying out Weenie Weenie in self-panicking delight, waving his little cock under the banner of the sun, seemed pure Blake, all anarchy and energy, an innocence unfrightened of itself that shook the lake's waters and unsettled the strained composures and appointed certainties of whatever Absolute Speaker had been ranting in my brain: Peace Through Strength Justice Must Be Ours— so many demon faces in the glass city. Each pubic triangle seemed, under the bathing suits, to grow electrical and crackle with a sexual shock that made me turn my face away: and who should be there but you, my dear Lord of Misrule, blowing smoke in all our faces, the clean bullet hole in your forehead above your self-ironic smile: Don't let the monkeys stop typing

My brother was on his way to a dental appointment when the second plane hit four stories below the office where he worked. He’s never said anything about the guy who took football bets, how he liked to watch his secretary walk, the friends he ate lunch with, all the funerals. Maybe, shamed by his luck, he keeps quiet, afraid someone might guess how good he feels, breathing.

Uncle Johnny died after rigid years of cutting hair in his shop downtown. Toward the end he cut it badly, breathing a whisky scent into the tonic, talc and glossy male curls piling up on the tiled floor. He died shrivelled, a man who seldom spoke, still with that nickname, Johnny, last taciturn hint of a youth who may have been angry, a lover of women, filled and lightened by vast ocean, the sky over America. He spent his time at home, silent, or sometimes in bars, or on the corner by King’s Newsstand with others like himself on sun-baked cement, spitting single words, standing in dark slacks, short-sleeved shirts and suspenders. The tall and narrow-waisted new world had by that time completely rejected suspenders. And after the funeral Mary, his wife, was crying and said to me, "Why is it that the men always die sooner? Do they just give up?" We stood there in the church of our fathers, who explained their own deaths, all death, by an ancient crime. How foolish it would have been to tell you, Mary, something about dioxyribonucleic acid, adaptation of the sexes, effects of the hormones, or social factors, things you’d listen to blankly. Better to say that what we find in ourselves, whatever weakness, we ourselves have put there. Both of us knew enough about men’s weakness. Your question didn’t need an answer: I simply shrugged and silently, without real hope, asked to be absolved from the fault of men: Powers of earth, give me the male strength that we desire, kindly strength, which protects. Don’t make my wife a nurse, helplessly to watch me dying drunk and before her. And do not punish me for pride because I’ve asked to be so strong: to be the last.