153 Sorrow and grieving poems

Down the path between the apples through the maple grove of suicides then left at the old wall along the wire fence to the brook- bank where narcissus noses into skunk cabbage and hepatica: Call me Apollo, crashing in the underbrush with my arrows, my bow saw and clippers out for your flash of white tail and alert to hack me a path to your lair, to your cult’s den, crisscrossing the water with Phoebe again and again as it elbows below us and runs for the creek racks strongest in springtime when everything’s liquid, tightroping over the rocks in the plashing braid, hot on your sharp scent and battling the mayflies the black flies horseflies mosquitoes there under the raspberry brambles and getting no nearer . . . Or am I fleeing your coiling uncoiling tentacular embrace battered and scarred, am I seeing your fabled face in the oily pools, are these fern hairs sprouting at your knuckles branchbones, little leaves halving our limbs with leaves—are they yours or mine? Your bloodhounds bay at the copper creek, your velvet cape’s aloft in the chiaroscuro breeze, you’re near, nearer, hieing, heying, I’m falling, failing, gashed, gutted, kneed-up, muddy and galled—call me Actaeon....

I.M. Ché Frye i Kubla Ché, dreaming of ancient Egypt, ate his hyacinths and was marvelous. Wherever you are is what I’m meant to say. Before you beauty come, Dis crouching among the black basalt, kneading master’s soured linen, watching (bewatched) the great beaten gold litter borne by, deltoids sun-dewed stone, temples bronze & strong &     in train     in thrall perpetual — I am of a mind, daddy. Like, inside the blind-white cloth-of-gold, the scented, sweating box she sat in (think box, lock box) — Phoenician forest, seeder of  known world’s every known green: malachite, sea-green jasper, chrysocolla, olivine — & outside, too, other-handed, other- landed, in rainless, treeless Thebes, my dark knees tendered by two lands, rubbed bare by work & love — Move the tombs to the cliffs of Beni Hasan. Send salt from the four lakes. She is Nefertiti, she shares the crown, she brings the single sun. You do not watch the sun. But in the Deeds of  Suppiluliuma she says she is fearful     but there is no fear past true heresy, her beauty is clear of the next line & the next and that kind of  beauty is     if not redemption the possibility of a separate resurrection. (Am I not beautiful too?) The miners are instructed: Find a vein, gouge it to the very end. ii Princeling Ché, wolfling Ché, fish- eyed prodigy, anabole, brother mine, all-beautiful boy, who’ll turn your pages now? The lines unfurled before you in your sleep, who sets them to song? I cannot. (All men have crowns and every crown can be broken.) Were your senses mixed (blood shaking your heart — orange, with violet veins) or did hearing alone stay and go last, were your nostrils, at last, unblocked, your ears, at last, symmetrized, did you unravel first silence    did you dream? Maimonides says of Abraham it is not God he disobeys but Elohim; that in the bureaucracy of divine instruction the envoy fore the eyes supersedes the voice in the ear     did they close your eyes, daddy?     they must have closed your eyes (enucleate the globe, ligate the four recti, fix in formalin) for under the sole edict of sound the son is killed. iii Of  your father we dare & do not speak. iv Wherever you are, you are not your death. You are not your cold body, your subclavian blood, your spine upon the body block that proffers up your organs, your humors pooled with gravity — you are abed in natron, my friend, you are forty days not in a metal slot but roused into the mirror world, the eastern fields of light, the father sun rayed gentle on the rushes & not the prosector but the jackal keeps your stomach & the falcon your intestines and your heart remains your heart is yours for you there are no more tests of   heart. v My friend, magnificent, across your empty desk they go on trading base metals & precious gems. They found flint in feldspar caves, below the first cataract, where single stones, actioned by wind, can mother a dune. They trade tin south to children of  the stars, mix alum with deep-red alizarin to dye, to delight them who are yet to learn the violence of  such charm heart hanging in its bloodslick chamber     heart gleaming in its rubied darkness My husband, my god, my gold-mad son lorn issue, dim & darling eyes flooding with natal sand, every night flooding my free past. What’s a queen know of this     my babies in their sunless cease     what’s a queen’s knees know but milk & crystalled honey     her throat but subtle Mareotic wine     sun smelted to gold, disced & sledding behind her the whole world’s whole life given her to give — vi Look, the dreamer comes! Was this what you sleep- conceived, this equal dialogue     this black silt talk rife in death & germ all-mixing, estuarizing, high-banked along the flood’s go-down? (it lowers down its voices, the flood     it helps me to think, blessed ram, of death as flood     for in it all things high & low, fair & dun, flax & inlaid faience, free & liened & husbanded are leveled, meet, and proven in the engorged     the enchafèd delta.) I see it now. (The trick of death is that it keeps returning.) Lady of all women, they call me, they are all my children now. (Labors of my dim life.) I will prepare each part for them. (From the front, no back     from behind, no face     am I purged at last of the various envies?) I will build a city for you. (I will build a city for you.) vii Twenty years ago we were nineteen and already elegiac, we were future tensed & annealed, we were quenched in the dark peace of violent histories — Karnak, Babylon, Persepolis, Byzantium — the names alone     (quarry our bones, convey us to Karnak)our names we preserved, bent to stave & strophe, accomplishing our envy, gathering our violence, we were altogether desire, (only ever) all we would be     full of  imminence     (light first, sun later)     stayed, asituate, unforgiving. viii Now you are time’s but I say to you, Ché, in full mouth: We will be perfect. There will be a recognition. The skill has left your fingers, the dream your brainpan but time, too, is prospected by work     (the lumen of the vein)     (the schist afire through the rock) and humans, too, may burn like candles, their spines wicks, their feverdreams the sputting flames — Work in the shadows. We will work in the shadows, the rest being the madness. Naughty naughty boy. Ward residuum. Hold to murmur, hold to method. You see? Time breaks along its faults, lays bare its jeweled fragments for those who love and work. It gives it all for free. It asks only reversion at the end. (And like, that end whereof we could not think     thereof  (no questions asked) you spake & said, My father     and you answered, Here am I, my son)     O tell me — go, you go first (you went first) — what reason makes this right, what insupposable value, what excuse but ultimacy which all know to be the breath of evil? I will build a city for you. ix About beauty they really got it, those masters: great wonders call for great suffering. The father straps down his son, carves along the throat’s chalked crease (signaling purpose), the slavers slough off infants into sand holes (streamlining, focusing the workforce), the queen conceives eternal city, she deracinates a people to upraise it with their bowed backs, mortar it with their warm, oxygenated blood     sunk generations & contingency & opportunity cost     gambling our own lives’ great gamble: that wrong, actioned by time, can be made soluble in art. So, Volchénochëk, you may be absolved — I tried & trying. x Listen, I want to say something to you. You arrived just in time. You told me they’re not better than us, you honored our sin, repaired my will, you were havoc in the trees, the dense infolding fire & its fuel at once (white fusion, wild usufruct)     always your mind was the Emergency, always severaled, chording the upper & lower, equal & bonded in appetency, bonded always to mine. This is a moment of children. Who cares who sees? (Who sees?) We scoff at faultless entropy, we strip the pith from the inner stalk, we count to three. Talk me into it, daddy (the first rolls were blank)     oxidize this carbon black significance — heart of water — this red hematite & blue frit, these yellow ochres that every child knows enflesh the unreal sun — xi Put it another way: the ink gleams for three more words before it (and meaning) sets. In those three beats I must be thousand-faced, entelechied, liable, I must be totally told on — in the middle of my life a myth, a tidal mouth, I am planted in bitter celery, in the phytolithic matrix     all-possible clay     I sense your slow impulsion all around me. Heart’s lake, calendula on my fingers, laughter in the morning- golded reeds (shaking the papyrus), the scale in the wind that shakes the reeds,deus absconditus, the only gossip of the living, I miss you so much. xii Either we are eternal, with neither end nor beginning, or we are sprung from a single thing and proliferative — in either case death is not death (though time cannot but give form to suffering). Believe (if you must) as I must: In all things moment. In each thing everything.

Adieu near those fields that smoke disembowels And that your arm pushes away For a long time until the inevitable stratum of the Adieus until the next Adieu The door in a cliff has closed. I wanted Daylight to enter here only through the arc-lamp of your eyes That the limits of this place be defined only By the carnal walls our bodies erected Opened wider on the recaptured past than the smallest Pocket-watch and its visible trail ever were Your mouth swallowed the hour and my teeth broke on it When I entered you with kisses Under the full-blown palm of multiple hands The rose you know, on the ground now, Perfumed the silence and killed our secrets Marking our garden with fear that was no longer fear Adieu    the songs are ended    the years disemboweled And may your body distance itself For a long time until the ineluctable regret of Adieus until forever

June Jordan, 1936-2002 I. The city where I knew you was swift. A lover cabbed to Brooklyn (broke, but so what) after the night shift in a Second Avenue diner. The lover was a Quaker, a poet, an anti-war activist. Was blonde, was twenty-four. Wet snow fell on the access road to the Manhattan Bridge. I was neither lover, slept uptown. But the arteries, streetlights, headlines, phonelines, feminine plural links ran silver through the night city as dawn and the yellow cab passed on the frost-blurred bridge, headed for that day’s last or first coffee. The city where I knew you was rich in bookshops, potlucks, ad hoc debates, demos, parades and picnics. There were walks I liked to take. I was on good terms with two rivers. You turned, burned, flame-wheel of words lighting the page, good neighbor on your homely street in Park Slope, whose Russian zaydes, Jamaican grocers, dyke vegetarians, young gifted everyone, claimed some changes —at least a new food co-op. In the laundromat, ordinary women talked revolution. We knew we wouldn’t live forever but it seemed as if we could. The city where I knew you was yours and mine by birthright: Harlem, the Bronx. Separately we left it and came separately back. There’s no afterlife for dialogue, divergences we never teased apart to weave back together. Death slams down in the midst of all your unfinished conversations. Whom do I address when I address you, larger than life as you always were, not alive now? Words are not you, poems are not you, ashes on the Pacific tide, you least of all. I talk to my- self to keep the line open. The city where I knew you is gone. Pink icing roses spelled out PASSION on a book-shaped chocolate cake. The bookshop’s a sushi bar now, and PASSION is long out of print. We have a Republican mayor. Threats keep citizens in line: anthrax; suicide attacks. A scar festers where towers once were; dissent festers unexpressed. You are dead of a woman’s disease. Who gets to choose what battle takes her down? Down to the ocean, friends mourn you, with no time to mourn. II. You, who stood alone in the tall bay window of a Brooklyn brownstone, conjuring morning with free-flying words, knew the power, terror in words, in flying; knew the high of solitude while the early light prowled Seventh Avenue, lupine, hungry like you, your spoils raisins and almonds, ballpoint pen, yellow foolscap. You, who stood alone in your courage, never hesitant to underline the connections (between rape, exclusion and occupation...) and separations were alone and were not alone when morning blotted the last spark of you out, around you voices you no longer had voice to answer, eyes you were blind to. All your loves were singular: you scorned labels. Claimed black;woman, and for the rest eluded limits, quicksilver (Caribbean), staked out self-definition. Now your death, as if it were “yours”: your house, your dog, your friends, your son, your serial lovers. Death’s not “yours,” what’s yours are a thousand poems alive on paper, in the present tense of a thousand students’ active gaze at printed pages and blank ones which you gave permission to blacken into outrage and passion. You, at once an optimist, a Cassandra, Lilith in the wilderness of her lyric, were a black American, born in Harlem, citizen soldier If you had to die—and I don’t admit it— who dared “What if, each time they kill a black man / we kill a cop?” couldn’t you take down with you a few prime villains in the capitol, who are also mortal? June, you should be living, the states are bleeding. Leaden words like “Homeland” translate abandoned dissident discourse. Twenty years ago, you denounced the war crimes still in progress now, as Jenin, Rammallah dominate, then disappear from the headlines. Palestine: your war. “To each nation, its Jews,” wrote Primo Levi. “Palestinians are Jews to Israelis.” Afterwards, he died in despair, or so we infer, despairing. Top each nation its Jews, its blacks, its Arabs, Palestinians, immigrants, its women. From each nation, its poets: Mahmoud Darwish, Kavanaugh, Shahid (who, beloved witness for silenced Kashmir, cautioned, shift the accent, and he was “martyr”), Audre Lorde, Neruda, Amichai, Senghor, and you, June Jordan.

From my window I watch the roots of a willow push your house crooked, women rummage through boxes, your sons cart away the TV, its cord trailing like your useless arms. Only weeks ago we watched the heavyweights, and between rounds you pummeled the air, drank whiskey, admonished “Know your competition!” You did, Kansas, the ‘20s when you measured the town champ as he danced the same dance over and over: left foot, right lead, head down, the move you’d dreamt about for days. Then right on cue your hay-bale uppercut compressed his spine. You know. That was that. Now your mail piles up, RESIDENT circled “not here.” Your lawn goes to seed. Dandelions burst in the wind. From my window I see you flat on your back on some canvas, above you a wrinkled face, its clippy bow tie bobbing toward ten. There’s someone behind you, resting easy against the ropes, a last minute substitute on the card you knew so well, vaguely familiar, taken for granted, with a sucker punch you don’t remember ever having seen.

for memorial at Zinc Bar, 23 June 2007, NYC I am your sugarplum fairy commodore in chief. —kari edwards conturbabimus illa (vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus [let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love]) —Catullus V.II damesirs of fishairs princes reginae I dont need this botheration guilded toe in a gendered pension embedded narcissism skirts can or could be worn w/ intentional disgrace getting oh-aff I sleep where I sit gog and magog ope myopia sweetness and delight do it for sidney, as starlover did rue on star, thir mistress cloying the lack, with thir poesis toying twill never hurt regina prince alack, areft locks beset candle agrove a buck in a corridor as like with likeness grace the tongue and sweets with sweets cloy them among conturbabimus illa let us confound them beasts implored and character impaled agathas breast in a 14 th century pincer anon 7 heads w/ 7 comings on horns on their horns wings at their feet and at their wings well you have three seconds to live bespeckled apprentice freckled daylilly a penny uneasily pleaded myrtle iron bootblackening at the speed we levatate con there is no missus I am among limbed elms colluding with doves nor tide nor tail angels w/ svelte angles the rub and tug goils languid as jersey too early for supper etc was their pimp and whatever their sucker shitslinger master cleanser w/ corporate coffee and torture pâté my present page in l-l-livery old glut of a beast’s spleen the glory over lordling socked ajaw nassau ablog by fairly a sweepmate a swoopster bedeviled in gullet swashbuckld by proxy homosexuality eh? red river andaloos funny albeit friday all the dork-rock gender suggests we levitate avec held captive patrón, bothermonger ah myrtle why sie is taken my mind impertinent parasol glossy wit promise of salt caint leave thir cellphone alone ipode eternal satellite viscera muscadetted papillon (that one) strident 17 stallions with horns on their heads and horns coming out of the horns a papillon that one a buck in a corridor conturbabimus illa let us confound them all ridded of giggling anthropomorphia aghast DL in the bowries the tee hee ambigenuity of amputee-wannabees googling tee hee silly faggot dicks are for chicks dicks are for chicks wicked hee to bury my heart at my heart was in my knee

Silence augmenteth grief, writing increaseth rage, Staled are my thoughts, which loved and lost the wonder of our age; Yet quickened now with fire, though dead with frost ere now, Enraged I write I know not what; dead, quick, I know not how. Hard-hearted minds relent and rigor's tears abound, And envy strangely rues his end, in whom no fault was found. Knowledge her light hath lost, valor hath slain her knight, Sidney is dead, dead is my friend, dead is the world's delight. Place, pensive, wails his fall whose presence was her pride; Time crieth out, My ebb is come; his life was my spring tide. Fame mourns in that she lost the ground of her reports; Each living wight laments his lack, and all in sundry sorts. He was (woe worth that word!) to each well-thinking mind A spotless friend, a matchless man, whose virtue ever shined; Declaring in his thoughts, his life, and that he writ, Highest conceits, longest foresights, and deepest works of wit. He, only like himself, was second unto none, Whose death (though life) we rue, and wrong, and all in vain do moan; Their loss, not him, wail they that fill the world with cries, Death slew not him, but he made death his ladder to the skies. Now sink of sorrow I who live—the more the wrong! Who wishing death, whom death denies, whose thread is all too long; Who tied to wretched life, who looks for no relief, Must spend my ever dying days in never ending grief. Farewell to you, my hopes, my wonted waking dreams, Farewell, sometimes enjoyëd joy, eclipsëd are thy beams. Farewell, self-pleasing thoughts which quietness brings forth, And farewell, friendship's sacred league, uniting minds of worth. And farewell, merry heart, the gift of guiltless minds, And all sports which for life's restore variety assigns; Let all that sweet is, void; in me no mirth may dwell: Philip, the cause of all this woe, my life's content, farewell! Now rhyme, the son of rage, which art no kin to skill, And endless grief, which deads my life, yet knows not how to kill, Go, seek that hapless tomb, which if ye hap to find Salute the stones that keep the limbs that held so good a mind.

In memory of two English poets, Matt Simpson and Michael Murphy, d. 2009 Teach-cheap, teach-cheap, teach-cheap, teach-cheap— Sparrows are plying their chisels in the summer ivy, Chipping the seconds spark by spark out of the hours. I read in each whistling chip the sun’s holography. My brain’s a film, I’m made of timed exposures, And pounding my ears and eyes with waves of light— These animate flakes, these pictures I call sight. But now you’re out of the picture, no one can keep Coherent sightings of you, except in language.

What beck'ning ghost, along the moon-light shade Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade? 'Tis she!—but why that bleeding bosom gor'd, Why dimly gleams the visionary sword? Oh ever beauteous, ever friendly! tell, Is it, in heav'n, a crime to love too well? To bear too tender, or too firm a heart, To act a lover's or a Roman's part? Is there no bright reversion in the sky, For those who greatly think, or bravely die? Why bade ye else, ye pow'rs! her soul aspire Above the vulgar flight of low desire? Ambition first sprung from your blest abodes; The glorious fault of angels and of gods; Thence to their images on earth it flows, And in the breasts of kings and heroes glows. Most souls, 'tis true, but peep out once an age, Dull sullen pris'ners in the body's cage: Dim lights of life, that burn a length of years Useless, unseen, as lamps in sepulchres; Like eastern kings a lazy state they keep, And close confin'd to their own palace, sleep. From these perhaps (ere nature bade her die) Fate snatch'd her early to the pitying sky. As into air the purer spirits flow, And sep'rate from their kindred dregs below; So flew the soul to its congenial place, Nor left one virtue to redeem her race. But thou, false guardian of a charge too good, Thou, mean deserter of thy brother's blood! See on these ruby lips the trembling breath, These cheeks now fading at the blast of death: Cold is that breast which warm'd the world before, And those love-darting eyes must roll no more. Thus, if eternal justice rules the ball, Thus shall your wives, and thus your children fall; On all the line a sudden vengeance waits, And frequent hearses shall besiege your gates. There passengers shall stand, and pointing say, (While the long fun'rals blacken all the way) "Lo these were they, whose souls the furies steel'd, And curs'd with hearts unknowing how to yield. Thus unlamented pass the proud away, The gaze of fools, and pageant of a day! So perish all, whose breast ne'er learn'd to glow For others' good, or melt at others' woe." What can atone (oh ever-injur'd shade!) Thy fate unpitied, and thy rites unpaid? No friend's complaint, no kind domestic tear Pleas'd thy pale ghost, or grac'd thy mournful bier. By foreign hands thy dying eyes were clos'd, By foreign hands thy decent limbs compos'd, By foreign hands thy humble grave adorn'd, By strangers honour'd, and by strangers mourn'd! What though no friends in sable weeds appear, Grieve for an hour, perhaps, then mourn a year, And bear about the mockery of woe To midnight dances, and the public show? What though no weeping loves thy ashes grace, Nor polish'd marble emulate thy face? What though no sacred earth allow thee room, Nor hallow'd dirge be mutter'd o'er thy tomb? Yet shall thy grave with rising flow'rs be drest, And the green turf lie lightly on thy breast: There shall the morn her earliest tears bestow, There the first roses of the year shall blow; While angels with their silver wings o'ershade The ground, now sacred by thy reliques made. So peaceful rests, without a stone, a name, What once had beauty, titles, wealth, and fame. How lov'd, how honour'd once, avails thee not, To whom related, or by whom begot; A heap of dust alone remains of thee, 'Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be! Poets themselves must fall, like those they sung, Deaf the prais'd ear, and mute the tuneful tongue. Ev'n he, whose soul now melts in mournful lays, Shall shortly want the gen'rous tear he pays; Then from his closing eyes thy form shall part, And the last pang shall tear thee from his heart, Life's idle business at one gasp be o'er, The Muse forgot, and thou belov'd no more!

When first, descending from the moorlands, I saw the Stream of Yarrow glide Along a bare and open valley, The Ettrick Shepherd was my guide. When last along its banks I wandered, Through groves that had begun to shed Their golden leaves upon the pathways, My steps the Border-minstrel led. The mighty Minstrel breathes no longer, 'Mid mouldering ruins low he lies; And death upon the braes of Yarrow, Has closed the Shepherd-poet's eyes: Nor has the rolling year twice measured, From sign to sign, its stedfast course, Since every mortal power of Coleridge Was frozen at its marvellous source; The rapt One, of the godlike forehead, The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth: And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, Has vanished from his lonely hearth. Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits, Or waves that own no curbing hand, How fast has brother followed brother, From sunshine to the sunless land! Yet I, whose lids from infant slumber Were earlier raised, remain to hear A timid voice, that asks in whispers, "Who next will drop and disappear?" Our haughty life is crowned with darkness, Like London with its own black wreath, On which with thee, O Crabbe! forth-looking, I gazed from Hampstead's breezy heath. As if but yesterday departed, Thou too art gone before; but why, O'er ripe fruit, seasonably gathered, Should frail survivors heave a sigh? Mourn rather for that holy Spirit, Sweet as the spring, as ocean deep; For Her who, ere her summer faded, Has sunk into a breathless sleep. No more of old romantic sorrows, For slaughtered Youth or love-lorn Maid! With sharper grief is Yarrow smitten, And Ettrick mourns with her their Poet dead.