341 Grief poems

I cannot hold such emptiness —the only meaning, the meaning we make & the way time tugs the body down, the body named bone, named brain, the color of dust & tremor, the soft meat & the bag it lives in. We beg from the body; it shivers & spits—we settle for desire, in- commensurate sorrow, for a life like too much water, shallow & wide, for enough salt to make a little sea.

Seventeen suns rising in seventeen bedroom windows. Thirty-four eyes blooming open with the light of one more morning. Seventeen reflections in the bathroom mirror. Seventeen backpacks or briefcases stuffed with textbooks or lesson plans. Seventeen good mornings at kitchen breakfasts and seventeen goodbyes at front doors. Seventeen drives through palm-lined streets and miles of crammed highways to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School at 5901 Pine Island Road. The first bell ringing-in one last school day on February fourteenth, 2018. Seventeen echoes of footsteps down hallways for five class periods: algebra, poetry, biology, art, history. Seventeen hands writing on whiteboards or taking notes at their desks until the first gunshot at 2:21pm. One AR-15 rifle in the hands of a nineteen year old mind turning hate for himself into hate for others, into one-hundred fifty bullets fired in six minutes through building number twelve. Seventeen dead carried down hallways they walked, past cases of trophies they won, flyers for clubs they belonged to, lockers they won’t open again. Seventeen Valentine’s Day dates broken and cards unopened. Seventeen bodies to identify, dozens of photo albums to page through and remember their lives. Seventeen caskets and burial garments to choose for them. Seventeen funerals to attend in twelve days. Seventeen graves dug and headstones placed—all marked with the same date of death. Seventeen names: Alyssa. Helena. Scott. Martin—seventeen absentees forever—Nicholas. Aaron. Jamie. Luke—seventeen closets to clear out—Christopher. Cara. Gina. Joaquin—seventeen empty beds—Alaina. Meadow. Alex. Carmen. Peter—seventeen reasons to rebel with the hope these will be the last seventeen to be taken by one of three-hundred-ninety-three-million guns in America.

After the death of my father, I locked myself in my room, bored and animal-like. The travel clock, the Johnnie Walker bottle, the parrot tulips—everything possessed his face, chaste and obscure. Snow and rain battered the air white, insane, slathery. Nothing poured out of me except sensibility, dilated. It was as if I were sub-born—preverbal, truculent, pure—with hard ivory arms reaching out into a dark and crowded space, illuminated like a perforated silver box or a little room in which glowing cigarettes came and went, like souls losing magnitude, but none with the battered hand I knew.

I spent the winter my father died down in the basement, under the calm surface of the floorboards, hundreds of little plastic parts spread out like debris on the table. And for months while the snow fell and my father sat in the big chair by the Philco, dying, I worked my way up deck by deck, story by story, from steerage to first class, until at last it was done, stacks, deck chairs, all the delicate rigging. And there it loomed, a blazing city of the dead. Then painted the gaping hole at the waterline and placed my father at the railings, my mother in a lifeboat pulling away from the wreckage.

1. brett returns my mother to the wilderness I slipped them into my friend’s palm — the tiny crucifix, and dove, from off my mother’s pendant watch — and I asked her to walk them up through the brush toward timberline, and find a place to hurl them, for safekeeping. Now, she writes, “I walked up the canyon at dusk, warm, with a touch of fall blowing down the canyon, came to an outcrop, above a steep drop — far below, a seasonal creek, green willows. I stood on a boulder and held out my hand. I wished your mother all the love in the world, and I sent the talismans flying off the cliff. They were so small, and the wind was blowing, so I never saw or heard them land.” My mother is where I cannot find her, she is gone beyond recall, she lies in her sterling shapes light as the most weightless bone in the body, her stirrup bone, which was ground up and sown into the sea. I do not know what a soul is, I think of it as the smallest, the core, civil right. And she is wild now with it, she touches and is touched by no one knows — down, or droppings of a common nighthawk, root of bird’s foot fern, antenna of Hairstreak or Echo Azure, or stepped on by the huge translucent Jerusalem cricket. There was something deeply right about the physical elements — atoms, and cells, and marrow — of my mother’s body, when I was young, and now her delicate insignias receive the direct touch of the sun, and scatter it, unseen, all over her home. 2. cross and dove I had not wanted them, and I hadn’t known what to do with them, the minuscule symbols of my mother’s religion, I looked for a crack in the stone floor of the cathedral but could not find one. Then I thought of the wilderness near Desolation, and asked my friend to carry them up to a peak of granite, and let the wind take them. Since then, it has been as if my mother’s spirit matter has been returned into the great bank of matter, as her marrow had been sifted down into the ocean. It doesn’t matter, now, if I ever wanted to disassemble my mother. The sixteenth-of-an-inch- across cross, and the silver line drawing of a dove are cached, somewhere, that is nowhere to be found. Now I think of the nature of metal, and how long the soul-dolls of her trust will last in their spider-egg-sac of roots, needles, quartz, feathers, dust, snow, shed claw. Her belief she would have an eternal life was absolute, I think. It would not be good to think of my mother without her God — like a hermit howling in the moonscape of a desert. Once, when she was old — like an exquisite child playing a crone in the school play — we talked about heaven. She wasn’t sure exactly how, but she knew her father would be there, and her elder brother, and her second husband — maybe it was a heaven for four, the three men and her. It was so easy to make my mother happy in her last years, to tell her that I could just see her, as a kitten, in God’s lap, being petted. Her eyes sparkled with more beams than any other eyes I have seen. I have sent the tokens of her everlasting being into the high altitude. They will shine long after I can sing her — sing what I perceived through the distorted prisms of my vision. I don’t know if I saw my mother or did not see her. Day and night, her charms will gleam in the brush or stream, will reflect the mountain light in little pieces of unreadable language.

I hunted heaven for him. No dice. Too uppity, it was. Not enough music, or dark dirt. I begged the earth empty of him. Death believes in us whether we believe or not. For a long while I watch the sound of a boy bouncing a ball down the block take its time to reach me. Father, find me when you want. I’ll wait.

For Ann Forsythe Irwin Bourgois Remembering Ann Whose beauty began At the crown of her head And ran to the deep underneath Of her feet— Never aware of her own élan. Now, half mad with pain, She crawls through her rooms, Calling for doctors, Falling, Forgetting, Consumed, Trepanned. Ever since the world began— Star fall Nightfall Bomb fall Downfall... Read the scan: Every woman and every man, Once a flowered Palestine, Falls blindly toward the Nakba— Bald catastrophe, Prescription— According to the Plan.

Under the roof is the empty room papered in requiem blue. Partiers crowd the burned kitchen, gold fixtures hook to cheap lath. What is it they can tell you about absence how it abates, takes names Becomes a wall with windows faced on a formal garden, content To accept the thin rain. The syllable forgives the words that need it, a sentence Badly written, epigraphs scrawled thoughtlessly in books. Book where the hero confronts a dark riddle, book where the suitors stand at the gate and are stumped. What force brought them forward stooping at the lintel, up the chipped steps To the blue door in the unbuilt tower, half-built, the new stone.

The day I learned my wife was dying I told myself if anyone said, Well, she had a good life, I’d punch him in the nose. How much life represents a good life? Maybe a hundred years, which would give us nearly forty more to visit Oslo and take the train to Vladivostok, learn German to read Thomas Mann in the original. Even more baseball games, more days at the beach and the baking of more walnut cakes for family birthdays. How much time is enough time? How much is needed for all these unspent kisses, those slow walks along cobbled streets?

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.