153 Sorrow and grieving poems

When my Sorrow was born I nursed it with care, and watched over it with loving tenderness. And my Sorrow grew like all living things, strong and beautiful and full of wondrous delights. And we loved one another, my Sorrow and I, and we loved the world about us; for Sorrow had a kindly heart and mine was kindly with Sorrow. And when we conversed, my Sorrow and I, our days were winged and our nights were girdled with dreams; for Sorrow had an eloquent tongue, and mine was eloquent with Sorrow. And when we sang together, my Sorrow and I, our neighbors sat at their windows and listened; for our songs were deep as the sea and our melodies were full of strange memories. And when we walked together, my Sorrow and I, people gazed at us with gentle eyes and whispered in words of exceeding sweetness. And there were those who looked with envy upon us, for Sorrow was a noble thing and I was proud with Sorrow. But my Sorrow died, like all living things, and alone I am left to muse and ponder. And now when I speak my words fall heavily upon my ears. And when I sing my songs my neighbours come not to listen. And when I walk the streets no one looks at me. Only in my sleep I hear voices saying in pity, “See, there lies the man whose Sorrow is dead.”

The self  refuses to appear in this bare place. It fears that mute chair and the still window. The sunlight scares it. There might rise up a sound. The door doesn’t like to move, and the crow out there hesitates; he knows a hole flown into by mistake would make a bite of   him. What was sits standstill in the chair, hangs, stunned, against the dry-eyed light. Nobody in sight. Inanimate things, still  lifeless. This room’s so empty I doubt I’m standing here; there can’t be room for me and total emptiness. Only some far-off sounds persist. The brute truck over the interstate. The flames in the incinerator chewing his old vests.

O melting rainbow that embrace this roof O persistent covenant hangs around giving us nothing, leaves its muck in the water expects us to be knocked out by its fine colors weren’t you nothing too, weren’t you sea bottom crunched down into fuel and when that eggshell roof busts through mama’s gonna buy you a rainbow ride for free an illumination, an inflammation hyperion flame headdress dream pins in the fuel balloons of Koolaid burst down to cool the sticky baby’s head plus a credit card a glock a new bible a princess dress a mermaid princess dress so you’ll be twice submerged or an erased Indian princess pajama set now go to sleep

What bright soft thing is this? Sweet Mary, the fair eyes’ expense? A moist spark it is, A wat’ry diamond; from whence The very term, I think, was found The water of a diamond. O ’tis not a tear, ’Tis a star about to drop From thine eye its sphere; The sun will stoop and take it up. Proud will his sister be to wear This thine eyes’ jewel in her ear. O ’tis a tear Too true a tear; for no sad eyne, How sad so e’re, Rain so true a teare as thine; Each drop leaving a place so dear, Weeps for itself, is its own tear. Such a pearl as this is, (Slipped from Aurora’s dewy breast) The rose bud’s sweet lip kisses; And such the rose itself, when vexed With ungentle flames, does shed, Sweating in too warm a bed. Such the maiden gem, By the wanton spring put on, Peeps from her parent stem, And blushes on the manly sun: This wat’ry blossom of thy eyne, Ripe, will make the richer wine. Faire drop, why quak’st thou so? ’Cause thou straight must lay thy head In the dust? o no; The dust shall never be thy bed: A pillow for thee will I bring, Stuffed with down of angels’ wing. Thus carried up on high, (For to Heaven thou must go) Sweetly shalt thou lie And in soft slumbers bathe thy woe; Till the singing orbs awake thee, And one of their bright chorus make thee. There thy self shalt be An eye, but not a weeping one, Yet I doubt of thee, Whether th’hadst rather there have shone An eye of Heaven; or still shine here, In th’Heaven of Mary’s eye, a tear.

You work with what you are given, the red clay of grief, the black clay of stubbornness going on after. Clay that tastes of care or carelessness, clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust. Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live, each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table. There are honeys so bitter no one would willingly choose to take them. The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity, honey of cruelty, fear. This rebus—slip and stubbornness, bottom of river, my own consumed life— when will I learn to read it plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire? Not to understand it, only to see. As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty, we become our choices. Each yes, each no continues, this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup. The ladder leans into its darkness. The anvil leans into its silence. The cup sits empty. How can I enter this question the clay has asked?

Coldly, sadly descends The autumn-evening. The field Strewn with its dank yellow drifts Of wither'd leaves, and the elms, Fade into dimness apace, Silent;—hardly a shout From a few boys late at their play! The lights come out in the street, In the school-room windows;—but cold, Solemn, unlighted, austere, Through the gathering darkness, arise The chapel-walls, in whose bound Thou, my father! art laid. There thou dost lie, in the gloom Of the autumn evening. But ah! That word, gloom, to my mind Brings thee back, in the light Of thy radiant vigour, again; In the gloom of November we pass'd Days not dark at thy side; Seasons impair'd not the ray Of thy buoyant cheerfulness clear. Such thou wast! and I stand In the autumn evening, and think Of bygone autumns with thee. Fifteen years have gone round Since thou arosest to tread, In the summer-morning, the road Of death, at a call unforeseen, Sudden. For fifteen years, We who till then in thy shade Rested as under the boughs Of a mighty oak, have endured Sunshine and rain as we might, Bare, unshaded, alone, Lacking the shelter of thee. O strong soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? For that force, Surely, has not been left vain! Somewhere, surely afar, In the sounding labour-house vast Of being, is practised that strength, Zealous, beneficent, firm! Yes, in some far-shining sphere, Conscious or not of the past, Still thou performest the word Of the Spirit in whom thou dost live— Prompt, unwearied, as here! Still thou upraisest with zeal The humble good from the ground, Sternly repressest the bad! Still, like a trumpet, dost rouse Those who with half-open eyes Tread the border-land dim 'Twixt vice and virtue; reviv'st, Succourest!—this was thy work, This was thy life upon earth. What is the course of the life Of mortal men on the earth?— Most men eddy about Here and there—eat and drink, Chatter and love and hate, Gather and squander, are raised Aloft, are hurl'd in the dust, Striving blindly, achieving Nothing; and then they die— Perish;—and no one asks Who or what they have been, More than he asks what waves, In the moonlit solitudes mild Of the midmost Ocean, have swell'd, Foam'd for a moment, and gone. And there are some, whom a thirst Ardent, unquenchable, fires, Not with the crowd to be spent, Not without aim to go round In an eddy of purposeless dust, Effort unmeaning and vain. Ah yes! some of us strive Not without action to die Fruitless, but something to snatch From dull oblivion, nor all Glut the devouring grave! We, we have chosen our path— Path to a clear-purposed goal, Path of advance!—but it leads A long, steep journey, through sunk Gorges, o'er mountains in snow. Cheerful, with friends, we set forth— Then on the height, comes the storm. Thunder crashes from rock To rock, the cataracts reply, Lightnings dazzle our eyes. Roaring torrents have breach'd The track, the stream-bed descends In the place where the wayfarer once Planted his footstep—the spray Boils o'er its borders! aloft The unseen snow-beds dislodge Their hanging ruin; alas, Havoc is made in our train! Friends, who set forth at our side, Falter, are lost in the storm. We, we only are left! With frowning foreheads, with lips Sternly compress'd, we strain on, On—and at nightfall at last Come to the end of our way, To the lonely inn 'mid the rocks; Where the gaunt and taciturn host Stands on the threshold, the wind Shaking his thin white hairs— Holds his lantern to scan Our storm-beat figures, and asks: Whom in our party we bring? Whom we have left in the snow? Sadly we answer: We bring Only ourselves! we lost Sight of the rest in the storm. Hardly ourselves we fought through, Stripp'd, without friends, as we are. Friends, companions, and train, The avalanche swept from our side. But thou woulds't not alone Be saved, my father! alone Conquer and come to thy goal, Leaving the rest in the wild. We were weary, and we Fearful, and we in our march Fain to drop down and to die. Still thou turnedst, and still Beckonedst the trembler, and still Gavest the weary thy hand. If, in the paths of the world, Stones might have wounded thy feet, Toil or dejection have tried Thy spirit, of that we saw Nothing—to us thou wage still Cheerful, and helpful, and firm! Therefore to thee it was given Many to save with thyself; And, at the end of thy day, O faithful shepherd! to come, Bringing thy sheep in thy hand. And through thee I believe In the noble and great who are gone; Pure souls honour'd and blest By former ages, who else— Such, so soulless, so poor, Is the race of men whom I see— Seem'd but a dream of the heart, Seem'd but a cry of desire. Yes! I believe that there lived Others like thee in the past, Not like the men of the crowd Who all round me to-day Bluster or cringe, and make life Hideous, and arid, and vile; But souls temper'd with fire, Fervent, heroic, and good, Helpers and friends of mankind. Servants of God!—or sons Shall I not call you? Because Not as servants ye knew Your Father's innermost mind, His, who unwillingly sees One of his little ones lost— Yours is the praise, if mankind Hath not as yet in its march Fainted, and fallen, and died! See! In the rocks of the world Marches the host of mankind, A feeble, wavering line. Where are they tending?—A God Marshall'd them, gave them their goal. Ah, but the way is so long! Years they have been in the wild! Sore thirst plagues them, the rocks Rising all round, overawe; Factions divide them, their host Threatens to break, to dissolve. —Ah, keep, keep them combined! Else, of the myriads who fill That army, not one shall arrive; Sole they shall stray; in the rocks Stagger for ever in vain, Die one by one in the waste. Then, in such hour of need Of your fainting, dispirited race, Ye, like angels, appear, Radiant with ardour divine! Beacons of hope, ye appear! Languor is not in your heart, Weakness is not in your word, Weariness not on your brow. Ye alight in our van! at your voice, Panic, despair, flee away. Ye move through the ranks, recall The stragglers, refresh the outworn, Praise, re-inspire the brave! Order, courage, return. Eyes rekindling, and prayers, Follow your steps as ye go. Ye fill up the gaps in our files, Strengthen the wavering line, Stablish, continue our march, On, to the bound of the waste, On, to the City of God.

Today I woke and believed in nothing. A grief at once intimate and unfelt, like the death of a good friend’s dog. Tired of the mind reaching back in the past for rescue I praise the day. I don’t mean merely some mythical, isolate instant like the mindless mindfulness specialist who at the terminal cancer convention (not that it was called that) exhorted the new year’s crop of slaughters (ditto) to “taste” the day, this one unreplicable instant of being alive. (The chicken glistened.) Nor do I mean a day devoid of past and future as craved that great craze of minds and times Fernando Pessoa, who wanted not “the present” but reality itself, things in their thingness rather than the time that measures them. Time is in the table at which I sit and in the words I type. In the red-checked shirt my father’s mother used to wear when she was gardening and which I kept because it held her smell (though it does no longer) there is still plenty of time. Two murderers keep their minds alive while they wait to die. They talk through slots in their doors of whatever mercy or misery the magazine has ordained for the day — the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, say, ten signs that a relationship is on the rocks. When their communion flags, as communions will, they rekindle it with personal revelations, philosophical digressions, humor. This is a true story, one of them says sometimes by way of preface, as if that gave the moment more gravity, asked of the listener a different attention, at once resisted and reinforced an order wherein every hour has its sound, every day its grace, and every death is by design. “Love is possible for anyone,” I hear the TV talk-show host say, which is true in the way most things in this life are true, which is to say, false, unless and until the nullifying, catalyzing death is felt. Love is possible for anyone because it is equally impossible for everyone. To be is to be confronted with a void, a blankness, a blackness that both appeals and appalls. Once known — known by the void, I mean — one has three choices. Walk away, and unlearn the instinct of awe. Walk along, and learn to believe that awe asks nothing of you. Are you with me, love? (For love read faith.) Naked once and after a rat, my father cried, “Die, vermin, die!” banging the broomstick over and over on the floor so incorrigibly dirty it might as well have been the earth itself. This is my mother’s story, though I was there, I’m told, and no small part of the pandemonium. We were five souls crammed into one life, and so incorrigibly poor — or was that fear? — we all slept in one room and shared one great big chester drawers, as we called it, and not with irony but in earnest ignorance, just as like meant lack, as in “How much do you like bein’ done with your chemo?” and just as I and every other child I knew, before we tucked into our lemon meringue pie, solemnly wiped the calf slobbers off. Ah, local color, peasant levity, the language fuming and steaming rich as the mist of rot that rises off the compost heap (“kitchen midden,” you might hear an old Scot still say). When do we first know? That there’s a world to which we’ve been, not oblivious, exactly, but so inside we couldn’t see it, who now see nothing else? Heaven is over. Or hell. Did you forget the rat? It thumps and thrashes like a poltergeist inside the chest of drawers but somehow, though my father is fast, and though his rage is becoming real, every drawer he opens is empty. What happens when we die, every child of every father eventually asks. What happens when we don’t is the better question. To kill a wasp on water is the peak of speed. My brother who is other has a mind of lead. I with my stinging griefs watch from away. How can it be there are no adults left? What matters here is timing, not time. His hand is high and white above the blue. A wasp is also atom and urge, hover and touch. Even wings are not a clean distinction. Down comes the slap like a rifle shot. What vengeance can there be on blank necessity? My brother who is other has a way. His hand is high and white. And then it’s not. Once when my father’s mother’s health was failing and she found it more and more difficult to tend to the tiny family plot at Champion, Texas, which is less town than time at this point, a blink of old buildings and older longings the rare driver flashes past, I took it upon myself to salt the graves as I must have read somewhere would work for unwanted growths. As indeed it did. In the months after, every Sunday when we spoke, she thanked me for the blankness, the blackness, (my words, of course) this new ease I had allowed her mind. Until one day leaning over with flowers the leached earth opened and my eighty-year-old grandmother tumbled right down among the bones of the woman from whom she’d first emerged. To see that image you have to be that sky. It has to happen in you, that crushing calling viewless blue that is so deeply in you that it is not you. “O, Law’, honey, I like to died.” You don’t climb out of poverty so much as carry it with you. Some shell themselves with wealth. Some get and spend, get and spend, skimming existence like a Jesus lizard. But for those whose souls have known true want — whose souls perhaps are true want — money remains, in some sense, permanently inert, like an erotic thought that flashes through a eunuch’s brain. In 1980 my father bought his first airplane, a scream-proof four-seater we crammed five inside, which he considerately slammed into a sorghum field alone. Unkillable, he killed the next ten years with work and wives, then bought another, and brought it down in the solitary fire that was his aspect and atmosphere. Homes, schemes, thirty years of savings plowed into a sign company (!) that did not, it turned out, exist. A hole is hard to carry. People ask if I believe in God and the verb is tedious to me. Not wrong, not offensive, not intrusive, not embarrassing. Tedious. Today I saw a hawk land on Elizabeth’s chimney. It sat with its bone frown and banker’s breast above the proud houses of Hamden. Are you with me? Then see, too, a lump of animate ash rising from the flue (or so it seems) to be a pigeon fluttering dumbly down next to that implacable raptor, suddening a world of strange relations wherein there is no need for fear, or far, or meat. There was a man made of airplane parts, one of which was always missing. He wandered the hospital grounds in search of a rudder, an aileron, or some other fragment that would let him fly from this place where he was not meant to be. There was a woman who emitted invective ceaselessly, dispassionately, an obscenity machine. One timid gentleman saved Saran wrap for five full years and every night wrought an ever-more-solid ball with which, it turned out, he planned to bash the skull of the first soul he saw the dawn God blessed his weapon. (A success story, alas.) Another man with anvil hands sat six months of nights in faith that there would come occasion of darkness, unguardedness, and vision sufficient to rip from its socket one of my father’s bright blue eyes. (Ditto.) My father moved among them like a father. He attended and pacified, he instructed and consoled. Late to the trade, he worked too much, and trusted his heart, no doubt, more than he should, but was, by all accounts, at this one thing, and despite the end, good. For love read faith into these lines that so obviously lack it. For love let words turn to life in the way life turns to world under the observer’s eye, the swirl of particles with their waves and entanglements, their chance and havoc, resolving into some one thing: a raptor on a rooftop, say. No power on earth can make it stay. But is it lost or released into formlessness when we look away? To be is to believe that the man or woman who inscribed with an idiosyncratic but demanding calligraphy Fuck da money—Trust no one on the rough blanket of the residential motel where my father spent the last two years of his rough residential life intended the note of defiant, self-conscious (da!) humor that left my father, whom I had not seen in years, and I, whom years had seen grow sere, far even from myself, erupting in laughter until we cried. Before my good friend’s good dog died ten times a day she pressed her forehead to his “to confirm the world and her place in it.” Now she won’t even say his name. Strange how the things that burn worst in one heart one must keep silent to keep. Ten to one you thought of men. The murderers, I mean. But no. This is a true story. There is another cell, you see, in which a woman I have known since childhood, and since childhood have known to be suspended on a wire of time but nimble-witted nonetheless, lies on the cold stone floor. She is even more naked than they have made her. She has killed no one not even herself. Punishment, perhaps, or some contagion of fate, finds her here, her hair shorn, both wrists wrapped, her eyes open, pondering the parable of perfect silence. Remember, he said,memory is a poor man’s prison. Make to have and to love one live infinitive

24. In the last photograph of my sister, she is sprawling in the shade, or what shade’s left, on the converted toolshed’s whitewashed steps. It appears that she has finished for the day, an oil color of some tall sea pines, backlit by twilight off the water behind, her lifelong childlike forest-fear subdued for the moment by a filtered-through, delaminating blue loosening the fretwork of branch and crown. The oversized sweater she always wore is stippled with paint, and her face has the slightly moonstruck look (backlit, as well, by a thin gilt wash too finely filtered for the camera’s lens) of someone who’s stayed up reading late a novel whose story could be her own. Moments before, she’d lifted the painting toward the sun, squinting as she did, imagining—what? we’ll never know— the fading context into which she stared. Then, unpinning her hair, and leaning back against the shed, she yawns once and closes her eyes as if nothing weighed on her thoughts that day, her shoes kicked off, and an unlit cigarette cupped in her hand. And at just the instant the shutter clicks, the shadow of a dog (or a child?) appears at the far right edge of the picture. To think: how once she might’ve been amused by this, this perspective from which we’d frame her life (the perspective from which our own deaths hide) with who she’d been, was, and was tempted to be. 25. And so it continues, day after day, this endless succession of moments culled haphazard from the staticky dark as though each were an event unto itself, as though each inscribed some legible scratch on the frail wax cylinder that kept alive a voice from the ever-receding past .... My sister at thirty or thirty-one: stripping off table varnish while her daughters nap on a folded towel beside her. In the archangel section of the plaster cast gallery, she holds her breath until the security guard stops looking her way. Standing beside the photomat, staring at a strip of pictures, her look of puzzlement slowly gives way to a look of recognition. In the middle of the night—I was eight or nine at the time—I wake to find her patting my head, because she has just had a bad dream. Visiting hours over, she returns down the hall to her hospital room: head down, shoulders stooped, her hands clasped behind her neck. (That same morning, when she started to cry, she somehow managed to distract herself by repeatedly crossing and uncrossing her legs.) Overjoyed to be finally going home, then, mid-sentence, falling silent at the thought of it, as though her mouth had been covered by a hand. A warm spring night. A streetlamp beyond an open window. Beneath the sill: a girl’s hushed voice exhorting itself in whispers. One morning, she leaves the house before dawn. She doesn’t take the car. By noon she finds herself in the business district of the city— a taxi is waiting, the driver is holding the door, and she sees that now, after all these years, she’s about to take the great journey of her life.

Ay me, to whom shall I my case complain, That may compassion my impatient grief? Or where shall I unfold my inward pain, That my enriven heart may find relief? Shall I unto the heavenly pow’rs it show, Or unto earthly men that dwell below? To heavens? Ah, they, alas, the authors were, And workers of my unremedied woe: For they foresee what to us happens here, And they foresaw, yet suffered this be so. From them comes good, from them comes also ill, That which they made, who can them warn to spill. To men? Ah, they, alas, like wretched be, And subject to the heavens’ ordinance: Bound to abide whatever they decree. Their best redress is their best sufferance. How then can they, like wretched, comfort me, The which no less need comforted to be? Then to myself will I my sorrow mourn, Sith none alive like sorrowful remains: And to myself my plaints shall back return, To pay their usury with doubled pains. The woods, the hills, the rivers shall resound The mournful accent of my sorrow’s ground. Woods, hills, and rivers now are desolate, Sith he is gone the which them all did grace: And all the fields do wail their widow state, Sith death their fairest flow’r did late deface. The fairest flow’r in field that ever grew, Was Astrophel; that was, we all may rue. What cruel hand of cursed foe unknown, Hath cropped the stalk which bore so fair a flow’r? Untimely cropped, before it well were grown, And clean defaced in untimely hour. Great loss to all that ever him did see, Great loss to all, but greatest loss to me. Break now your garlands, O ye shepherds’ lasses, Sith the fair flow’r, which them adorned, is gone: The flow’r, which them adorned, is gone to ashes, Never again let lass put garland on. Instead of garland, wear sad cypress now, And bitter elder, broken from the bough. Ne ever sing the love-lays which he made: Who ever made such lays of love as he? Ne ever read the riddles, which he said Unto yourselves, to make you merry glee. Your merry glee is now laid all abed, Your merry maker now, alas, is dead. Death, the devourer of all the world’s delight, Hath robbed you and reft from me my joy: Both you and me and all the world he quite Hath robbed of joyance, and left sad annoy. Joy of the world, and shepherds’ pride was he, Shepherds’ hope never like again to see. O Death, that hast us of such riches reft, Tell us at least, what hast thou with it done? What is become of him whose flow’r here left Is but the shadow of his likeness gone: Scarce like the shadow of that which he was, Naught like, but that he like a shade did pass. But that immortal spirit, which was decked With all the dowries of celestial grace: By sovereign choice from th’heavenly choirs select, And lineally derived from angels’ race, Oh, what is now of it become, aread. Ay me, can so divine a thing be dead? Ah no: it is not dead, ne can it die, But lives for aye, in blissful Paradise: Where like a new-born babe it soft doth lie, In bed of lilies wrapped in tender wise, And compassed all about with roses sweet, And dainty violets from head to feet. There thousand birds all of celestial brood, To him do sweetly carol day and night: And with strange notes, of him well understood, Lull him asleep in angel-like delight; Whilst in sweet dream to him presented be Immortal beauties, which no eye may see. But he them sees and takes exceeding pleasure Of their divine aspects, appearing plain, And kindling love in him above all measure, Sweet love still joyous, never feeling pain. For what so goodly form he there doth see, He may enjoy from jealous rancor free. There liveth he in everlasting bliss, Sweet spirit never fearing more to die: Ne dreading harm from any foes of his, Ne fearing savage beasts’ more cruelty. Whilst we here, wretches, wail his private lack, And with vain vows do often call him back. But live thou there still happy, happy spirit, And give us leave thee here thus to lament: Not thee that dost thy heaven’s joy inherit, But our own selves that here in dole are drent. Thus do we weep and wail, and wear our eyes, Mourning in other’s, our own miseries.

Last night, all night the dream, the dead mother, my small sister, tiny, her mouth over my shoulder (screaming) like a knapsack when she heard the news, & my brother playing the stereo. I howled like the coyotes; myself. & saw the light outside below the window, my mother, young, playing with me at a rock, in some sunlight falling over us. I was small. An old & famous woman asked her questions: Who wrote this dream? I wanted to know. My brother thought it was our mother who wrote it when she was old. She did not die, he thought. But I knew, & called down to the cotton-head of her then, when she could not see or hear me. She would never hear me. I was not capable of talking then, yet, & she had died, after all, & the mother I call to tell the dream will not remember, after all she was not born then, yet, & needed the first mother to die before she could use her name & feed her children.