38 Loss poems

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair. Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then, Standing as when I drew near to the town Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then, Even to the original air-blue gown! Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness Travelling across the wet mead to me here, You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness, Heard no more again far or near? Thus I; faltering forward, Leaves around me falling, Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward, And the woman calling.

He's gone, and all our plans Are useless indeed. We'll walk no more on Cotswold Where the sheep feed Quietly and take no heed. His body that was so quick Is not as you Knew it, on Severn river Under the blue Driving our small boat through. You would not know him now ... But still he died Nobly, so cover him over With violets of pride Purple from Severn side. Cover him, cover him soon! And with thick-set Masses of memoried flowers— Hide that red wet Thing I must somehow forget.

Raymond Radiguet Like seven birds sleeping on the plateau Overlooking the shipwreck of love, mystery Of the drunken visitors wandering off With your wife, men who talk with a bad accent, The condemned the abandoned, one day of silence, Two days of silence, dreams shattered and protected, The more the blossoms the more you suffer.

It was the thought that — if you could watch, if I could leak to the public the film of when I needed to reach you — that would be one way. • From a little-known bluff overgrown last summer with wildflowers, if you could watch a family of turkeys, a mother and 162 poults, if you could watch them abandon their roost on the lowest branch of a cottonwood tree, and lugging 163 tow cables behind them when they departed, if you could watch them dragging the tree through a field overgrown last summer with tanglehead grass. And discarding the yellow tree pitilessly across the rails of the Sunset Limited, which was carrying that day exactly 162 passengers west to their sentencings. It could be one way, I kept telling myself, to awake in summer when everyone’s sentenced and film myself shut of those dead to me. If the lights came up on my train in a field overgrown last summer with tanglehead. If we could slow to a halt in front of the yellow tree obstructing our path. There could be a smash cut, an establishing shot of the bluff where you knelt cutting wildflowers, and off-camera if the cottonwood started hemorrhaging yellow termites, if you could see the mites glowing yellow having drunk the yellow blood of the tree. If I could leak to you what the camera work couldn’t — in a hand-me-down suit an unsavory man he’s inside a renaissance cherry casket, and the casket’s buried eight feet beneath the Sunset Limited’s engine room, and the casket’s rigged on the inside with a hand-crank generator, with Christmas lights in five colors, if we leaked red first then blue, if we leaked green before we leaked orange, last yellow, the light of which illuminates the interior of the casket enough for the man (he’s alive) to watch his face decompose in the mirror that’s rigged to the ceiling, if we could cut to the sentence handed down to the man many years ago, that any unsavory man is a man who should watch himself die. If there was a slow zoom on a woman’s hands typing eight words in first class, a slow dissolve to a child in coach, if he fingers a text that says don’t change for you, don’t change for me

So many years later, the old dog still circles, head lowered, crippled by arthritis, nearly blind, incontinent. We repeat the litany, as if we need convincing that the end is right. I'll get her an ice cream cone if you'll drive her to the vet, my wife says. So there we sit on the front steps with our friend, and in the car, as always, when she senses the doctor's office drawing near, she moans and tries to burrow underneath the seats. What remains, the memory of how she taught us all the way we need to learn to live with wasting. There we sit, together, one last time as all that sweetness slowly disappears.

How often now, raging weeping for the days love gives then takes away, takes from you the slightly chapped hand laid on the one you’re pointing at a tree, and the voice that breathes coffeeberry bush into your mouth. The finger that taps and feathers your ear but the giggle’s gone before you turn around. The sandalwood scent hanging in the room, the auburn strand like a flaw in the porcelain, the off-course nail clipping in the carpet. The days eat into your stomach, knife you with longing for relief from love that you cannot leave or leave alone, from its rings of fire where you won’t burn down to ash or be transformed. You become them, and they keep burning and have a coffeeberry voice. Listen how their rhymes sing the little deaths you live.

Unused baby blood and this is how you motion with hands clotty leaving You have your apparatus being the Frog Husband and I burn your frog skin to keep you in the shape I prefer Chimes   You wrote in your apple box   Elegant neck I tried to glue the ripped paper back to the religious art but it doesn't work Making a mess of it Wasp friend landed on my shoulder sparkle to say     This place we are in            is a place Broil the asparagus Frog heart apparatus Wash towels and rags on Wednesdays

The house is so quiet now The vacuum cleaner sulks in the corner closet, Its bag limp as a stopped lung, its mouth Grinning into the floor, maybe at my Slovenly life, my dog-dead youth. I’ve lived this way long enough, But when my old woman died her soul Went into that vacuum cleaner, and I can’t bear To see the bag swell like a belly, eating the dust And the woolen mice, and begin to howl Because there is old filth everywhere She used to crawl, in the corner and under the stair. I know now how life is cheap as dirt, And still the hungry, angry heart Hangs on and howls, biting at air.

Lady, lovely lady, Careless and gay! Once when a beggar called She gave her child away. The beggar took the baby, Wrapped it in a shawl, “Bring her back,” the lady said, “Next time you call.” Hard by lived a vain man, So vain and so proud, He walked on stilts To be seen by the crowd. Up above the chimney pots, Tall as a mast, And all the people ran about Shouting till he passed. “A splendid match surely,” Neighbours saw it plain, “Although she is so careless, Although he is so vain.” But the lady played bobcherry, Did not see or care, As the vain man went by her Aloft in the air. This gentle-born couple Lived and died apart. Water will not mix with oil, Nor vain with careless heart.

In this low place between mountains fog settles with the dark of evening. Every year it takes some of those we love—a car full of teenagers on the way home from a dance, or a father on his way to the paper mill, nightshift the only opening. Each morning, up on the ridge, the sun lifts this veil, sees what night has accomplished. The water on our window- screens disappears slowly, gradually, like grief. The heat of the day carries water from the river back up into the sky, and where the fog is heaviest and stays longest, you’ll see the lines it leaves on trees, the flowers that grow the fullest.