341 Grief poems

Coleman Hawkins doing that thing with his sax: high and lonely as a kestrel twirls on thermals, sorting files of sound with a singular finger,now alighting in pools of light, hovering then fixed like whirring wings of the insect glazed in serous amber but dreaming of oxygen: Sound leading a mind into that sobriety of thought which poises the heart. Sound like that, holding and giving out never. Sound quickened with desire. Sound the benefit of nature in taut bolts of time, rich polychrome threads, count: Two-sixty. Sound blots out the violence of affliction bringing it home lonely but good, letting it bend:We had much more reason being winged ones to recollect than forget.

Nocturnal (Horizon Line), 2010, by Teresita Fernández I’d come to help settle your mother’s affairs. On the last night, we ate where she worked all her life.Now that she’s gone, you said,I’ll never come back. Looking out over the dark, you saw a light in the distance, a boat crossing the bay, and told the story of the fisherman cursed to float adrift forever. You hadn’t thought of it since you were a child, and held your hand across the table to show me how it trembled. I didn’t understand until, alone, years later, wandering the city where I was born, I stood before a black wall, polished to shimmer, and it looked to me like the sea at night, hard and endless.

On the death of my sister Cecilia—the last of five members of the family, who died successively. Our family tree is in the sear And yellow leaf of life; Branch after branch, year after year, Yields to death’s pruning knife. First, youngest born, as if ’twere meet, The sacrifice should be, “The last of earth,” the first to meet Th’ unknown eternity. ’Twas God who gave, ’twas He who took, His voice let us obey, So that in his eternal book, Our names shine bright as day.

Maybe all losses before this one are practice: maybe all grief that comes after her death seems tame. I wish I knew how to make dying simple, wish our mother’s last week were not constructed of clear plastic tubing, IVs, oxygen hiss, cough medicine, morphine patches, radiation tattoos, the useless burn on her chest. I’m still the incurable optimist, she whispers, you’re still the eternal pessimist. My sister sleeps on a sofa; our brother, exhausted, rolls up in a blanket on the hard floor. Curled in a rented white bed, our mother’s body races to catch up with her driven, nomadic soul. Those nights alone, foster care, empty beer bottles taught us she was always already vanishing.

’T was merry Christmas when he came, Our little boy beneath the sod; And brighter burned the Christmas flame, And merrier sped the Christmas game, Because within the house there lay A shape as tiny as a fay— The Christmas gift of God! In wreaths and garlands on the walls The holly hung its ruby balls, The mistletoe its pearls; And a Christmas tree’s fantastic fruits Woke laughter like a choir of flutes From happy boys and girls. For the mirth, which else had swelled as shrill As a school let loose to its errant will, Was softened by the thought, That in a dim hushed room above A mother’s pains in a mother’s love Were only just forgot. The jest, the tale, the toast, the glee, All took a sober tone; We spoke of the babe upstairs, as we Held festival for him alone. When the bells rang in the Christmas morn, It scarcely seemed a sin to say That they rang because that babe was born, Not less than for the sacred day. Ah! Christ forgive us for the crime Which drowned the memories of the time In a merely mortal bliss! We owned the error when the mirth Of another Christmas lit the hearth Of every home but this. When, in that lonely burial-ground, With every Christmas sight and sound Removed or shunned, we kept A mournful Christmas by the mound Where little Willie slept! Ah, hapless mother! darling wife! I might say nothing more, And the dull cold world would hold The story of that precious life As amply told! Shall we, shall you and I, before That world’s unsympathetic eyes Lay other relics from our store Of tender memories? What could it know of the joy and love That throbbed and smiled and wept above An unresponsive thing? And who could share the ecstatic thrill With which we watched the upturned bill Of our bird at its living spring? Shall we tell how in the time gone by, Beneath all changes of the sky, And in an ordinary home Amid the city’s din, Life was to us a crystal dome, Our babe the flame therein? Ah! this were jargon on the mart; And though some gentle friend, And many and many a suffering heart, Would weep and comprehend, Yet even these might fail to see What we saw daily in the child— Not the mere creature undefiled, But the winged cherub soon to be. That wandering hand which seemed to reach At angel finger-tips, And that murmur like a mystic speech Upon the rosy lips, That something in the serious face Holier than even its infant grace, And that rapt gaze on empty space, Which made us, half believing, say, “Ah, little wide-eyed seer! who knows But that for you this chamber glows With stately shapes and solemn shows?” Which touched us, too, with vague alarms, Lest in the circle of our arms We held a being less akin To his parents in a world of sin Than to beings not of clay: How could we speak in human phrase, Of such scarce earthly traits and ways, What would not seem A doting dream, In the creed of these sordid days? No! let us keep Deep, deep, In sorrowing heart and aching brain, This story hidden with the pain, Which since that blue October night When Willie vanished from our sight, Must haunt us even in our sleep. In the gloom of the chamber where he died, And by that grave which, through our care, From Yule to Yule of every year, Is made like spring to bloom; And where, at times, we catch the sigh As of an angel floating nigh, Who longs but has not power to tell That in that violet-shrouded cell Lies nothing better than the shell Which he had cast aside— By that sweet grave, in that dark room, We may weave at will for each other’s ear, Of that life, and that love, and that early doom, The tale which is shadowed here: To us alone it will always be As fresh as our own misery; But enough, alas! for the world is said, In the brief “Here lieth” of the dead!

The day of my mother’s funeral I spend clearing out her overgrown flower beds, down on my knees in the leaf rot, nut shells, tiny grains of sandlot sand spilling from the runoff gullies. The hot work was to see not feel what had to be done, not to go on asking, not to wonder anymore. Full from scraps I’d found at the back of the refrigerator, her mongrel dog lay curled on a stone and watched me work. It was Sunday. The telephone rang, then stopped, then rang again. By the end of the day, I’d done what I could. I swept the walk, put away the tools, switched on the indoor safety lamps, and then (it hardly matters what I think I felt) I closed the gate on a house where no one lived anymore.

the day after you sighed your last breath out we let your butterflies go your painted ladies four of them born from paper wombs into a cheesecloth cage now proudly decked out in orange and white trimmed in black we let them go with stiffened fingers they would not leave one drifted in hovering half-hearted circles another rested softly on your daughter's wet shoulder a third held close to the budding milkweed you saved from the scythe years ago the last one content to say perched in its velvet cape on my sunlit finger we could not speak so still the afternoon and when time began once again to flow they knew it was for them (the opening of our hands) another ragged breath was drawn as they pumped and sputtered (a single voice) and took to the clouding sky

When people ask how, I say a fire took them. And then they look at me like I'm the most pitiful thing in the world. So sometimes I just shrug and say They just died, that's all. A fire took their bodies. That's all. I can still feel their voices and hugs and laughing. Sometimes. Sometimes I can hear my daddy calling my name. Lonnie sometimes. And sometimes Locomotion come on over here a minute. I want to show you something.

I collect them now, it seems. Like sea-shells or old thimbles. One for Father. One for Mother. Two for my sweet brothers. Odd how little they require of me. Unlike the ones they were sent in memory of. No sudden shrilling of the phone. No harried midnight flights. Only a little water now and then. Scant food and light. See how I’ve brought them all together here in this shaded space beyond the stairs. Even when they thirst, they summon me with nothing more than a soft, indifferent furl- ing of their leaves.

November. One pear sways on the tree past leaves, past reason. In the nursing home, my friend has fallen. Chased, he said, from the freckled woods by angry Thoreau, Coleridge, and Beaumarchais. Delusion too, it seems, can be well read. He is courteous, well-spoken even in dread. The old fineness in him hangs on for dear life. “My mind now? A small ship under the wake of a large. They force you to walk on your heels here, the angles matter. Four or five degrees, and you’re lost.” Life is dear to him yet, though he believes it his own fault he grieves, his own fault his old friends have turned against him like crows against an injured of their kind. There is no kindness here, no flint of mercy. Descend, descend, some voice must urge, inside the pear stem. The argument goes on, he cannot outrun it. Dawnlight to dawnlight, I look: it is still there.