38 Loss poems

The telephone never rings. Still you pick it up, smile into the static, the breath of those you’ve loved; long dead. The leaf you pick from the fall rises and dips away with every ridge. Fingers stiff from time, you trace. Staring off into a distance limned by cataracts and other collected debris, you have forgotten none of the long-ago joy of an ice-cream truck and its summer song. Between the paving stones; between tea, a cup, and the sound of you pouring; between the time you woke that morning and the time when the letter came, a tired sorrow: like an old flagellant able only to tease with a weak sting. Riding the elevator all day, floor after floor after floor, each stop some small victory whittled from the hard stone of death, you smile. They used to write epics about moments like this.

in memory of R.I.S. 1. Would I know her anywhere, this child who never knew you except in photographs? She has your high clear polished forehead, but “No, my sister has his dimple, the cleft in his chin ...” Tight curly hair (like yours) drawn back, and your face, thinned, refined, to a girl’s—you in a girl’s body, you (thick, muscular, tempestuous) newly slight, polite:you in a neat print skirt, loose black blouse! Now a seventeen-year-old classicist— “Latin’s my favorite”—you translate Catullus, write tidy sonnets, envy the sister who remembers the dead father, but (as you always did) adore your mother and walk with your head thrown slightly back as if the weight of thought were hard to bear. I rock in my teacherly chair. She’s shy, constrained. “I don’t want to read my father’s poems, they’re all in tatters in the closet, they scare me.” I tell her I’m kind of a long-lost aunt, tell her about the photo of you as (you said) “the young Shelley”— about your huntsman’s bow, opera, baseball, endless games of chess in the dorm parlor with you boasting your prowess. And she’s embarrassed, you’re embarrassed, living in her blood, to think you ever acted like that! 2. When you were a man, a thirty-seven-year old, long after our last fight, last kiss, you OD’d on morphine and disappeared into the blanks that always framed your mind. But she’s sent two poems and a thank-you note, and her handwriting—yours—hasn’t changed. “It meant a lot to me to talk about my dad,” you scribbled with your new small fingers. I want to believe this, want to believe you’re really starting out again! Do me a favor: forget Catullus, Horace, love and hate and think, instead, of the epic cell, the place where the chromosomes are made and made for a moment perfect. Translate those lines from Virgil some of us once liked to chant, the ones about beginning, about those who first left Troy to seek the Italian shore.

Everything dies. Without you I saw one million flamingos ignite a lake in Africa. The same darkness descended everywhere. When you dropped your body, I hoped you would tremble for the beak of God. Why did we wash you three times tearing off the girl’s white dress to swaddle you in an austere shroud? Some say, dying, not death, teaches. You gained nothing from that reduction. Months in the narrow foxhole of disease– you dug it; we filled it in. My father is thin as you were in his hospital bed, both of you let everything go, care for nothing except that barbed hook– life. It grabbed you like a thorn until you begged me, “Pull it out.”

I slid the white louvers shut so I could stand in your closet a little while among the throng of flowered dresses you hadn’t worn in years, and touch the creases on each of their sleeves that smelled of forgiveness and even though you would still be alive a few more days I knew they were ready to let themselves be packed into liquor store boxes simply because you had asked that of them, and dropped at the door of the Salvation Army without having noticed me wrapping my arms around so many at once that one slipped a big padded shoulder off of its hanger as if to return the embrace.

Throwing his life away, He picks at and smells it. Done up. When did I do this up? I date its death to the time someone Said something. Back then. Everything else, all striving, making, Marrying, error, Is this old bird. Pah! He throws it. As the long string lengthens Out of his hand, It begins unwinding The ligaments of his hand.

I The house near the sea The houses I had they took away from me. The times happened to be unpropitious: war, destruction, exile; sometimes the hunter hits the migratory birds, sometimes he doesn’t hit them. Hunting was good in my time, many felt the pellet; the rest circle aimlessly or go mad in the shelters. Don’t talk to me about the nightingale or the lark or the little wagtail inscribing figures with his tail in the light; I don’t know much about houses I know they have their own nature, nothing else. New at first, like babies who play in gardens with the tassels of the sun, they embroider coloured shutters and shining doors over the day. When the architect’s finished, they change, they frown or smile or even grow resentful with those who stayed behind, with those who went away with others who’d come back if they could or others who disappeared, now that the world’s become an endless hotel. I don’t know much about houses, I remember their joy and their sorrow sometimes, when I stop to think; again sometimes, near the sea, in naked rooms with a single iron bed and nothing of my own, watching the evening spider, I imagine that someone is getting ready to come, that they dress him up in white and black robes, with many-coloured jewels, and around him venerable ladies, grey hair and dark lace shawls, talk softly, that he is getting ready to come and say goodbye to me; or that a woman — eyelashes quivering, slim-waisted, returning from southern ports, Smyrna Rhodes Syracuse Alexandria, from cities closed like hot shutters, with perfume of golden fruit and herbs — climbs the stairs without seeing those who’ve fallen asleep under the stairs. Houses, you know, grow resentful easily when you strip them bare. II Sensual Elpenor I saw him yesterday standing by the door below my window; it was about seven o’clock; there was a woman with him. He had the look of Elpenor just before he fell and smashed himself, yet he wasn’t drunk. He was speaking fast, and she was gazing absently towards the gramophones; now and then she cut him short to say a word and then would glance impatiently towards where they were frying fish: like a cat. He muttered with a dead cigarette-butt between his lips: — ‘Listen. There’s this too. In the moonlight the statues sometimes bend like reeds in the midst of ripe fruit — the statues; and the flame becomes a cool oleander, the flame that burns one, I mean.’ — ‘It's just the light. . . shadows of the night.’ — ‘Maybe the night that split open, a blue pomegranate, a dark breast, and filled you with stars, cleaving time. And yet the statues bend sometimes, dividing desire in two, like a peach; and the flame becomes a kiss on the limbs, then a sob, then a cool leaf carried off by the wind; they bend; they become light with a human weight. You don’t forget it.’ — ‘The statues are in the museum.’ — ‘No, they pursue you, why can’t you see it? I mean with their broken limbs, with their shape from another time, a shape you don’t recognize yet know. It’s as though in the last days of your youth you loved a woman who was still beautiful, and you were always afraid, as you held her naked at noon, of the memory aroused by your embrace; were afraid the kiss might betray you to other beds now of the past which nevertheless could haunt you so easily, so easily, and bring to life images in the mirror, bodies once alive: their sensuality. It’s as though returning home from some foreign country you happen to open an old trunk that’s been locked up a long time and find the tatters of clothes you used to wear on happy occasions, at festivals with many-coloured lights, mirrored, now becoming dim, and all that remains is the perfume of the absence of a young form. Really, those statues are not the fragments. You yourself are the relic; they haunt you with a strange virginity at home, at the office, at receptions for the celebrated, in the unconfessed terror of sleep; they speak of things you wish didn’t exist or would happen years after your death, and that’s difficult because. . .’ — ‘The statues are in the museum. Good night.’ — ‘. . . because the statues are no longer fragments. We are. The statues bend lightly. . . Good night.’ At this point they separated. He took the road leading uphill toward the North and she moved on towards the light-flooded beach where the waves are drowned in the noise from the radio: The radio — ‘Sails puffed out by the wind are all that stay in the mind. Perfume of silence and pine will soon be an anodyne now that the sailor’s set sail, flycatcher, catfish and wagtail. O woman whose touch is dumb, hear the wind’s requiem. ‘Drained is the golden keg the sun’s become a rag round a middle-aged woman’s neck who coughs and coughs without break; for the summer that’s gone she sighs, for the gold on her shoulders, her thighs. O woman, O sightless thing, Hear the blind man sing. ‘Close the shutters: the day recedes; make flutes from yesteryear’s reeds and don’t open, knock how they may: they shout but have nothing to say. Take cyclamen, pine-needles, the lily, anemones out of the sea; O woman whose wits are lost, listen, the water’s ghost. . . — ‘Athens. The public has heard the news with alarm; it is feared a crisis is near. The prime minister declared: “There is no more time. . .” Take cyclamen. . . needles of pine. . . the lily. . . needles of pine. . . O woman. . . — . . . is overwhelmingly stronger. The war. . .’ S oulmonger . III The wreck‘Thrush’ ‘This wood that cooled my forehead at times when noon burned my veins will flower in other hands. Take it. I’m giving it to you; look, it’s wood from a lemon tree. . .’ I heard the voice as I was gazing at the sea trying to make out a ship they’d sunk there years ago; it was called ‘Thrush’, a small wreck; the masts, broken, swayed at odd angles deep underwater, like tentacles, or the memory of dreams, marking the hull: vague mouth of some huge dead sea-monster extinguished in the water. Calm spread all around. And gradually, in turn, other voices followed, whispers thin and thirsty emerging from the other side of the sun, the dark side; you might say they were asking to drink a drop of blood; familiar voices, but I couldn’t distinguish one from the other. And then the voice of the old man reached me; I felt it falling into the heart of day, quietly, as though motionless: ‘And if you condemn me to drink poison, I thank you. Your law will be my law; how can I go wandering from one foreign country to another, a rolling stone. I prefer death. Whose path is for the better only God knows.’ Countries of the sun yet you cannot face the sun. Countries of men yet you cannot face man. The light As the years go by the judges who condemn you grow in number; as the years go by and you converse with fewer voices, you see the sun with different eyes: you know that those who stayed behind were deceiving you the delirium of flesh, the lovely dance that ends in nakedness. It’s as though, turning at night into an empty highway, you suddenly see the eyes of an animal shine, eyes already gone; so you feel your own eyes: you gaze at the sun, then you’re lost in darkness. The Doric chiton that swayed like the mountains when your fingers touched it is a marble figure in the light, but its head is in darkness. And those who abandoned the stadium to take up arms struck the obstinate marathon runner and he saw the track sail in blood, the world empty like the moon, the gardens of victory wither: you see them in the sun, behind the sun. And the boys who dived from the bowsprits go like spindles twisting still, naked bodies plunging into black light with a coin between the teeth, swimming still, while the sun with golden needles sews sails and wet wood and colours of the sea; even now they’re going down obliquely toward the pebbles on the sea floor, white oil-flasks. Light, angelic and black, laughter of waves on the sea’s highways tear-stained laughter, the old suppliant sees you as he moves to cross the invisible fields — light mirrored in his blood, the blood that gave birth to Eteocles and Polynices. Day, angelic and black; the brackish taste of woman that poisons the prisoner emerges from the wave a cool branch adorned with drops. Sing little Antigone, sing, O sing. . . I’m not speaking to you about things past, I’m speaking about love; adorn your hair with the sun’s thorns, dark girl; the heart of the Scorpion has set, the tyrant in man has fled, and all the daughters of the sea, Nereids, Graeae, hurry toward the shimmering of the rising goddess: whoever has never loved will love, in the light; and you find yourself in a large house with many windows open running from room to room, not knowing from where to look out first, because the pine trees will vanish, and the mirrored mountains, and the chirping of birds the sea will empty, shattered glass, from north and south your eyes will empty of the light of day the way the cicadas all together suddenly fall silent. Poros, ‘Galini’, 31 October 1946

The dark is thrown Back from the brightness, like hair Cast over a shoulder. I am alone, Four years older; Like the chairs and the walls Which I once watched brighten With you beside me. I was to waken Never like this, whatever came or was taken. The stalk grows, the year beats on the wind. Apples come, and the month for their fall. The bark spreads, the roots tighten. Though today be the last Or tomorrow all, You will not mind. That I may not remember Does not matter. I shall not be with you again. What we knew, even now Must scatter And be ruined, and blow Like dust in the rain. You have been dead a long season And have less than desire Who were lover with lover; And I have life—that old reason To wait for what comes, To leave what is over.

Amy, Amy, at this distance you’re the smell of liver, tinnitus that keeps me up, afraid: your fortressness must now be tested. The way you took me in without a surfeit click or gesture: seagull kerchief binding my gut to safety on the swimming haul among night-images.       I went to the place I was born and it plainly was a bride. So I ran after her. When she turned into a star I swallowed her. And out of this uneasiness will come an aster. Amy, I’m inside my granddad’s mind of wood: the grass is finer, constellations thicker. The plums are normal. How much sugar did you buy alone at Waldbaums? Brook reeds here wake from your hair’s soul’s chilly patronage. The hair’s the soul, the reeds its body—alone in their beds like schoolgirls: I feel and feel them up. The cigarettes have made them crazy! But a rabbit someone flows out of the embankment and I shiver for you, Amy oh lengthy dappled wig: there’s a swan in your breathing. There always is.

What is mysterious about loss, flush of arm pulled from a wilted sleeve, summer’s urine-tang in autumn leaves? Let   John Keats light another fag. Or Brontë refuse the doctor on her black sateen settee. For whatever part of   you may be taken away, you said, is the scar I will visit first with my mouth, each time, as gold visits the thieved till, sun the obliterated sill, saying praise you for leaving me this you, this living still.

They were nearing the end of their story. The fire was dying, like the fire in the story. Each page turned was torn and fed to flames, until word by word the book burned down to an unmade bed of ash. Wet kindling from an orchard of wooden spoons, snow stewing, same old wind on the Gramophone, same old wounds. Turn up the blue dial under the kettle until darkness boils with fables, and mirrors defrost to the quick before fogging with steam, and dreams rattle their armor of stovepipes and ladles. Boots in the corner kick in their sleep. A jacket hangs from a question mark.