343 Grief poems

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.

Pat Dugan……..my grandfather……..throat cancer……..1947. Ed Berrigan……..my dad……..heart attack……..1958. Dickie Budlong……..my best friend Brucie’s big brother, when we were five to eight……..killed in Korea, 1953. Red O’Sullivan……..hockey star & cross-country runner who sat at my lunch table in High School……car crash…...1954. Jimmy “Wah” Tiernan……..my friend, in High School, Football & Hockey All-State……car crash….1959. Cisco Houston……..died of cancer……..1961. Freddy Herko, dancer….jumped out of a Greenwich Village window in 1963. Anne Kepler….my girl….killed by smoke-poisoning while playing the flute at the Yonkers Children’s Hospital during a fire set by a 16 year old arsonist….1965. Frank……Frank O’Hara……hit by a car on Fire Island, 1966. Woody Guthrie……dead of Huntington’s Chorea in 1968. Neal……Neal Cassady……died of exposure, sleeping all night in the rain by the RR tracks of Mexico….1969. Franny Winston……just a girl….totalled her car on the Detroit-Ann Arbor Freeway, returning from the dentist….Sept. 1969. Jack……Jack Kerouac……died of drink & angry sickness….in 1969. My friends whose deaths have slowed my heart stay with me now.

Was it like lifting a veil And was the grass treacherous, the green grass Did you think of your own mother Was it like a virus Did the software flicker And was this the beginning Was it like that Was there gas station food and was it a long trip And is there sun there or drones or punishment or growth Was it a blackout And did you still create me And what was I like on the first day of my life Were we two from the start And was our time an entrance or an ending Did we stand in the heated room Did we look at the painting Did the snow appear cold Were our feet red with it, with the wet snow And then what were our names Did you love me or did I misunderstand Is it terrible Do you intend to come back Do you hear the world’s keening Will you stay the night

No more lines on the luminescence of   light, of   whatever variation. No more elegies of youth or age, no polyglottal ventriloquism. No more songs of raw emotion, forever overcooked. No more the wisdom of   banality, which should stay overlooked. No more verbs of embroidery. No more unintentional phallacy. No more metaphor, no more simile. Let the thing be, concretely. No more politics put politically: let the thing be concretely. No more conditional set conditionally — let the thing be already. No more children pimped out to prove some pouting mortality. No more death without dying —immediately. No more poet-subject speaking into the poem-mirror, watching the mouth move, fixing the thinning hair. No more superiority of the interiority of that unnatural trinity —you,me,we— our teeth touch only our tongues. No more Gobstoppers: an epic isn’t an epic for its fingerprints. No more reversals of grammar if as emphasis. No more nature less natural; no more impiety on bended knee. No more jeu de mot, no more mot juste. No more retinal poetry.

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring. Comforter, where, where is your comforting? Mary, mother of us, where is your relief? My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing — Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling- ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief."' O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

A not admitting of the wound Until it grew so wide That all my Life had entered it And there were troughs beside - A closing of the simple lid that opened to the sun Until the tender Carpenter Perpetual nail it down -

I love the way the black ants use their dead. They carry them off like warriors on their steel backs. They spend hours struggling, lifting, dragging (it is not grisly as it would be for us, to carry them back to be eaten), so that every part will be of service. I think of my husband at his father’s grave— the grass had closed over the headstone, and the name had disappeared. He took out his pocket knife and cut the grass away, he swept it with his handkerchief to make it clear. “Is this the way we’ll be forgotten?” And he bent down over the grave and wept.

In sympathy with Gaspara Stampa By woman so touched, so pressed, detachment being thought achievable at all is boggling in itself. Its being thought achievable by love—but love for only all (not someone’s single) sentience— appears the precept of too cold a form of flame. How much of a hand in things relinquishes the hold of things-at-hand? What kiss might such a mind reclaim? A swirl of dust in Buddhist schools, perhaps. A view of several solar systems from above. Not love. The thought appeals as it appals: Slow learners, we must spurn the selving sensualities, to feel for feelers of this kind, unfasten passion’s burner to identify what’s under it— in short, must court dispassion just to be compassionate.

Now I knew I lost her — Not that she was gone — But Remoteness travelled On her Face and Tongue. Alien, though adjoining As a Foreign Race — Traversed she though pausing Latitudeless Place. Elements Unaltered — Universe the same But Love's transmigration — Somehow this had come — Henceforth to remember Nature took the Day I had paid so much for — His is Penury Not who toils for Freedom Or for Family But the Restitution Of Idolatry.