153 Sorrow and grieving poems

who would believe them winged who would believe they could be beautiful         who would believe they could fall so in love with mortals that they would attach themselves as scars attach and ride the skin sometimes we hear them in our dreams rattling their skulls         clicking their bony fingers envying our crackling hair our spice filled flesh they have heard me beseeching as I whispered into my own cupped hands       enough not me again enough       but who can distinguish one human voice amid such choruses of desire

I would like to take something with me but even one chair is too awkward too heavy peeling paint falls off in a suitcase hinge sounds betray a theft cheeses won’t keep the clothespin without its surroundings would be mediocre the big thunder rolled elsewhere the umbrella is for sale but in a desert what you want is a soaking the do not disturb sign is tattered I have many times taken some cafe’s small packets of sugar so that in Turkey I might sweeten my coffee with China, and in Italy remember a Lithuanian pastry but where is the coffee hands left and right useless knees clattery heart finally calm as some hero at the end of a movie squinting silently into the sun you can’t hold an umbrella there anyhow and what would he hang from the clothespin

I'll not weep that thou art going to leave me, There's nothing lovely here; And doubly will the dark world grieve me, While thy heart suffers there. I'll not weep, because the summer's glory Must always end in gloom; And, follow out the happiest story— It closes with a tomb! And I am weary of the anguish Increasing winters bear; Weary to watch the spirit languish Through years of dead despair. So, if a tear, when thou art dying, Should haply fall from me, It is but that my soul is sighing, To go and rest with thee.

The sun is warm, the sky is clear, The waves are dancing fast and bright, Blue isles and snowy mountains wear The purple noon's transparent might, The breath of the moist earth is light, Around its unexpanded buds; Like many a voice of one delight, The winds, the birds, the ocean floods, The City's voice itself, is soft like Solitude's. I see the Deep's untrampled floor With green and purple seaweeds strown; I see the waves upon the shore, Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown: I sit upon the sands alone,— The lightning of the noontide ocean Is flashing round me, and a tone Arises from its measured motion, How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion. Alas! I have nor hope nor health, Nor peace within nor calm around, Nor that content surpassing wealth The sage in meditation found, And walked with inward glory crowned— Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure. Others I see whom these surround— Smiling they live, and call life pleasure; To me that cup has been dealt in another measure. Yet now despair itself is mild, Even as the winds and waters are; I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne and yet must bear, Till death like sleep might steal on me, And I might feel in the warm air My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony. Some might lament that I were cold, As I, when this sweet day is gone, Which my lost heart, too soon grown old, Insults with this untimely moan; They might lament—for I am one Whom men love not,—and yet regret, Unlike this day, which, when the sun Shall on its stainless glory set, Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet.

My eyes turned to salt in looking back, my thoughts stood still in gestures, in the silence of what’s been done; I gathered the crumbs of another lunch and shook them into the garden’s vitreous air where the sun’s just cracked and spilled. Here, even a flutter of blackbird beyond the hedge stands still, as my words stand still, like ships in bottles. Your language is mine but mine is not yours. At home, I could feel myself thinking while the television glowed in shadow and a film score spread like smoke in a saloon. I keep to myself what it means to tend a fire, the thick scent of soaked wood, a match between my fingers, the way a day resides in what’s to do, in another light split by the clouds, a different sunset tied to the tallest trees flush in the eyes of houses, on the poor man’s livestock; a touch here, a touch there — the way loneliness comes, today, a day like this, one day more alone. Translated from the Italian

She took the spareribs out of the oven and set them steaming on a plate before leaving her apartment. I didn't know how long to wait, tore into cold meat when I decided my mother wasn't coming back. * No one knew about the gun she kept in her purse until the authorities called—a .38 caliber pistol with a pearl handle and a trigger even she could easily pull— her car still waiting to be towed from a roadside ditch when they arrived on the scene. * Yesterday morning, I was leaning over a kitchen sink, my husband upstairs sleeping. Between his snores muffled under a down comforter and a portable electric heater that kept our bedroom warm, I knew I could sob as loud as I wanted without disturbing his dreams. * At the sports arena between musical acts and clouds of dope, I texted my lover a wide-angle shot of the stage— the reception bars on my phone bouncing back and forth between high and low—a text I had to send several times before it went through even though there was a chance his phone would be off or the text get lost for hours in the ether, even days. The silence is the agony. * My therapist says: It's not your fault. No way for you to have known exactly where your mother was headed. Then why am I left weeping in my kitchen decades after the fact? When I went upstairs and sat beside my husband, he could feel the mattress shift beneath our weight even though I felt much lighter after watching translucent ropes of snot lowering down into the sink, arms around me when I asked if he was awake, knowing that he wasn't. * How many romances get derailed when a text that has been sent fails to go through? How many mothers disappear through a kitchen door never to return—the food on the table the last meal they will ever serve? * My lover texted back: where are you now? Having no idea what I'd been going through when he texted again: Wish I was there with you.

Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears; Yet slower, yet, O faintly, gentle springs! List to the heavy part the music bears, Woe weeps out her division, when she sings. Droop herbs and flowers; Fall grief in showers; Our beauties are not ours. O, I could still, Like melting snow upon some craggy hill, Drop, drop, drop, drop, Since nature’s pride is now a withered daffodil.

Someone has left us now before we have even touched hands. Getting lost in the pity of it sweeps you into an unknown stretch of canyon where oars thud against rock and rip free, you clutch at help, and even though you save yourself, the river funnels through the gorge and roars, roars, roars. Regret, a backwash of pain, one lost life swirls down rapids, rushes away, out of reach. It’s not forgetting that you want — it would be easy to drop one shoulder and dive, to come up gasping in a car on the way to work or blue in the face over the dishpan staring for who knows how long at a cup scoured clean under the suds. And not remembering. But the absence that is born must live as long as a man or a woman. There: it comes invisible headfirst, a bloodstreaked nothing, and is flushed away. While in the white room the dry light is cold; and waiting to be taken home mute ghosts lie in a row of empty cribs.

With a flick of her wrist, she broke the chicken's neck and set it on her lap where my sister's head had just been. Over her bare knees dangled waxy yellow bird feet, while the white feathers she began to pluck fell all around us.

from “Elegy for the First Century” Bells on our eyelashes and the death throes of words, and I among fields of speech, a knight on a horse made of dirt. My lungs are my poetry, my eyes a book, and I, under the skin of words, on the beaming banks of foam, a poet who sang and died leaving this singed elegy before the faces of poets, for birds at the edge of sky.