153 Sorrow and grieving poems

Love has gone and left me and the days are all alike; Eat I must, and sleep I will, — and would that night were here! But ah! — to lie awake and hear the slow hours strike! Would that it were day again! — with twilight near! Love has gone and left me and I don't know what to do; This or that or what you will is all the same to me; But all the things that I begin I leave before I'm through, — There's little use in anything as far as I can see. Love has gone and left me, — and the neighbors knock and borrow, And life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse, — And to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow There's this little street and this little house.

Who can face the sea and not inherit its loneliness? — Olin Ivory I Gray sky, gray sea —gray mind, the man thinks. He thinks: To grow old with it and kicks a stone into the water. He mucks at the seam and it crumbles below him. A sea gull beaks a crab, flights vertically and drops it to the rocks. The man cracks with laughter, tossing a stone to a stone. II Working alone means the voice must grow louder, for who can stand to think quietly all through the day’s calculations? I cannot. I let the voice grow loud. I let the voice hum outside my body in distinguishable phrasings, and count the increments as I set the fence according to the blade. All day I stand before a blade and push things into its path. I stand aside as what is removed is whisked alongside me. The smallest particles of   what is removed thicken the air, making a dream inside which one cannot live. All day the voice is learning how to be outside of   the body. III A man is not a beach, nor is he stone, though he collects their entirety in a single thought. He works alone and his thoughts begin to smack of stone. His teeth clatter with their collection. IV A man can hold a secret between his teeth, and it will never leave his mouth, for who would listen to his wavering tune of so sad and how hard and hear anything original? He is that he is — the errand and the fool running to himself over and over only to find that even he is tired of telling about it. To grow old with it was the task, and the question always: would he last? A man can believe in the body and have no one, as though he were ghost or stone, nothing to speak at or be heard from. V All work, no pay makes a body bray. Though he may bray — Though he may bray and bray, forgive him the bit. If he tells you his secret, he will have no secret. This is how one sings a sentence into stone.

There’s a black wind howlin’ by Whylah Falls; There’s a mad rain hammerin’ the flowers; There’s a shotgunned man moulderin’ in petals; There’s a killer chucklin’ to himself; There’s a mother keenin’ her posied son; There’s a joker amblin’ over his bones. Go down to the Sixhiboux River, hear it cry, “Othello Clemence is dead and his murderer’s free!” O sang from Whylah Falls and lived by sweat, Walked that dark road between desire and regret. He pitched lumber, crushed rock, calloused his hands: He wasn’t a saint but he was a man. Scratch Seville shot him and emptied his skull, Tore a hole in his gut only Death could fill. Now his martyr-mother witnesses in cries Over his corpse cankered white by lilies. There’s a black wind snakin’ by Whylah Falls; There’s a river of blood in Jarvis County; There’s a government that don’t know how to weep; There’s a mother who can’t get no sleep. Go down to the Sixhiboux, hear it moan Like a childless mother far, far, from home, “There’s a change that’s gonna have to come, I said, a change that’s gonna have to come.”

After Lorca mother’s malison The burr of the wind is seeping through the door, pink stumps of rhubarb are breaking through the soil. Though it is February I have the mind of autumn. Though it is February

For Eleanor For seventeen years I was caught in the surf. Drubbed and scoured, I’d snatch a breath and be jerked down again, dragged across broken shells and shingle. I loved it, mostly, the need, how I fed the frantic. I’d skipped into that sea. Certainly not a girl, but I could still turn a head as I took the foam between my thighs. Then it was over. Hiss of a match snuffed with spit. The sea had trotted off. I stood in the stink of flapping fish. At first it stung. A galaxy of dimes eyed my sag and crinkles and dismissed me like a canceled stamp, but something tugged at me, silver braids weaving and unweaving themselves and either the path was shrinking or I was getting bigger, for soon the way was just a hair, the extra bit of wit a grandma leaves on her chin to scare the boys, and it led me into a cave crackling like a woodstove with laughter. A landslide opened a seam of rubies and we stepped inside.

And when my Joy was born, I held it in my arms and stood on the house-top shouting, “Come ye, my neighbours, come and see, for Joy this day is born unto me.  Come and behold this gladsome thing that laugheth in the sun.” But none of my neighbours came to look upon my Joy, and great was my astonishment. And every day for seven moons I proclaimed my Joy from the house-top—and yet no one heeded me.  And my Joy and I were alone, unsought and unvisited. Then my Joy grew pale and weary because no other heart but mine held its loveliness and no other lips kissed its lips. Then my Joy died of isolation. And now I only remember my dead Joy in remembering my dead Sorrow. But memory is an autumn leaf that murmurs a while in the wind and then is heard no more.

Like fossil shells embedded in a stone, you are an absence, rimmed calligraphy, a mouthing out of silence, a way to see beyond the bedroom where you lie alone. So why not be the vast, antipodal cloud you soloed under, riven by cold gales? And why not be the song of diving whales, why not the plosive surf   below the road? The others are one thing. They know they are. One compass needle. They have found their way and navigate by perfect cynosure. Go wreck yourself once more against the day and wash up like a bottle on the shore, lucidity and salt in all you say.

Day after day of rain. A ticket straight to the mild-mannered hell of rethinking whatever, the drive to EconoFoods: not a lot of grief in that. You need staples — bread, rice, eggs. Here’s a list: almonds, yogurt, all the little anti-griefs add up. Did I tell you? my grandfather sings from the grave. They have my old Philco here. I know all about your world of godawful and too bad. I keep driving. In rain. Some luck required. Stop light. Flashy cars on both sides playing radios too loud. Ear damage! I used to shout out the window, my boy in the front seat trying hard to shrink, not to know who is that crazy at the wheel. Grandfather likes saying: what? Half-deaf even now. Half a lot of things, anytime. Half, what gives? giving way. If there is a we or a you or an I finally. He’d cup an ear if he had an ear. So it is, the first anti-grief, a feather he picked up. My childhood, walking with the oldest man I ever, 1874 his start date. Alarm and Should Have, two roads he would not cross, and Consequence a street over, he ignored completely. Always an eye out for the great small peculiar. A feather. Sometimes handed to me. Or he’d oil a clock with it right off the curb. Into a pocket.

Do me my elegy now, or I'll scrawl the thing I scrawl as you're going or screw in a ball when you're gone, Or you and I write unaware in each other's tongue That you or I ever set foot . . . Or do what our son And/or little daughter got done: got our brilliant names Pricily grooved in marble by one skilled In times of loss; dream iridescent dreams It's that first Saturday. Let this hour be filled With anything but the case, so that Time the clerk Goes panting in horror from gremlin to error to glitch And his screen is stripes and he knows he saved his work In one of a billion files but fuck knows which, And he lets us alone or, at worst, as we tiptoe by, Feels we're familiar, can't for the world say why.

The night you died, I dreamed you came to camp to hear confession from an Eagle Scout tortured by forty years of sin and doubt. You whispered vespers by a hissing lamp. Handlers, allowing you to hike with me, followed us to the Bad Axe waterfront down a firebreak this camper used to hunt. Through all I said you suffered silently. I blamed the authors of my unbelief: St. Paul, who would have deemed my love obscene, the Jesuit who raped me as a teen, the altar boy when I was six, the grief of a child chucked from Eden, left for dead by Peter’s Church and all the choirs above. In a thick Polish accent choked with love,