341 Grief poems

My son and I walk away from his sister’s day-old grave. Our backs to the sun, the forward pitch of our shadows tells us the time. By sweetest accident he inclines his shadow, touching mine.

Methought I saw my late espoused saint Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave, Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave, Rescu'd from death by force, though pale and faint. Mine, as whom wash'd from spot of child-bed taint Purification in the old Law did save, And such as yet once more I trust to have Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint, Came vested all in white, pure as her mind; Her face was veil'd, yet to my fancied sight Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin'd So clear as in no face with more delight. But Oh! as to embrace me she inclin'd, I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night.

Grief dies like joy; the tears upon my cheek Will disappear like dew. Dear God! I know Thy kindly Providence hath made it so, And thank thee for the law. I am too weak To make a friend of Sorrow, or to wear, With that dark angel ever by my side (Though to thy heaven there be no better guide), A front of manly calm. Yet, for I hear How woe hath cleansed, how grief can deify, So weak a thing it seems that grief should die, And love and friendship with it, I could pray, That if it might not gloom upon my brow, Nor weigh upon my arm as it doth now, No grief of mine should ever pass away.

It's the other ones, who soon enough return to being happy after the funeral, that are nearest to their own deaths—in their gaiety and everyday distraction, they're so open and unguarded . . . anything could enter them; could claim them. It's the ones who weep incessantly that are saved for now, the ones who have taken a little of it into their systems: this is how inoculation works. And sorrow is difficult, a job: it requires time to complete. And the tears?—the salt of the folk saying, that gets sprinkled over the tail feathers and keeps a bird from flying; keeps it stationed in this world.

The dead were still singing Turn the lights down low Beneath Yellow Bridge where years before, clowning And ass out, Stick jumped with nothing but the State Championship trophy in his righteous clutch. The water Was supposed to be deepest there, and for three seasons Straight MVPs: Charlie "Fly" Kennison, Long Timmy Long, And Rocket Jefferson, those are the names I knew, jumped Free. But Stick's ankle broke. I fished him out, crumpled And bawling like the day he was born, like an object of Baptism, and a life of bad luck followed in the shape of Floods and fractured lightning, and then, numb, tooth- Less, and changed, the dead refused burial, striking out, 2 By 2, 4 by 4, from the morgue house to raise trouble at The bridge. I started hearing birds everywhere after that.

We can't remember her name, but we remember where we buried her. In a blanket the color of a sky that refuses birds. The illiterate owls interrogate us from the trees, and we answer, We don't know. Maybe we named her Dolores, for our grandmother, meaning sadness, meaning the mild kisses of a priest. Maybe we called her Ruth, after the missionary who gave us a rifle and counterfeit wine. We blindfolded our sister and tied her hands because she groped the fence looking for the rabid fox we nailed to a post. Katydids sang with insistent summer urge and the cavalier moon grew more slender. In the coyote hour, we offered benedictions for a child we may have named Aja, meaning unborn, meaning the stillness that entered us, which is the stillness inside the burnt piano, which is also the woman we untie, who is the mother of stillness.

On the morning she became a young widow, my grandmother, startled by a sudden shadow, looked up from her work to see a hawk turn her prized rooster into a cloud of feathers. That same moment, halfway around the world in a Minnesota mine, her husband died, buried under a ton of rockfall. She told me this story sixty years ago. I don’t know if it’s true but it ought to be. She was a hard old woman, and though she knelt on Sundays when the acolyte’s silver bell announced the moment of Christ’s miracle, it was the darker mysteries she lived by: shiver-cry of an owl, black dog by the roadside, a tapping at the door and nobody there. The moral of the story was plain enough: miracles become a burden and require a priest to explain them. With signs, you only need to keep your wits about you and place your trust in a shadow world that lets you know hard luck and grief are coming your way. And for that —so the story goes—any day will do.

We didn’t like each other, but Lynn’s mother had died, and my father had died. Lynn’s father didn’t know how to talk to her, my mother didn’t know how to talk to me, and Lynn and I didn’t know how to talk either. A secret game drew us close: we took turns being the prisoner, who stood, hands held behind her back, while the captor, using an imaginary bow, shot arrow after arrow after arrow into the prisoner’s heart.

I am watching the movie Twelve Angry Men because there is a character in it who reminds me of him. He is the one who wants to go to the baseball game instead of decide on a man’s life, he is the weak one, the one afraid to reveal what he really feels, the one for whom everything is a joke. He is not Henry Fonda, the tight-lipped moral one. The man is despicable, his weaknesses obvious to all, as obvious as Henry Fonda’s goodness. I watch the movie again and again, loving the black and white of it, soothed by the sound of my father’s voice, the careless pronunciation, the easy shrugging of the shoulders at every crucial question. I sink lower into the dark arms of the sofa. Strange how comfortable the familiar is, how we can even prefer it, however terrifying.

We set great wreaths of brightness on the graves of the passionate who required tribute of hot July flowers— for you, O brittle-hearted, we bring offering remembering how your wrists were thin and your delicate bones not yet braced for conquering. The sharp cries of ghost-boys are keen above the meadows, and little girls continue graceful and wondering. Flickering evening on the lakes recalls those young heirs whose developing years have sunk to earth, their strength not tested, their praise unsung. Weave grasses for their childhood—who will never see love or disaster or take sides against decay balancing the choices of maturity. Silent and coffined in silence while we pass loud in defiance of death, the helpless lie. October 1935