153 Sorrow and grieving poems

My silks and fine array, My smiles and languish'd air, By love are driv'n away; And mournful lean Despair Brings me yew to deck my grave: Such end true lovers have. His face is fair as heav'n, When springing buds unfold; O why to him was't giv'n, Whose heart is wintry cold? His breast is love's all worship'd tomb, Where all love's pilgrims come. Bring me an axe and spade, Bring me a winding sheet; When I my grave have made, Let winds and tempests beat: Then down I'll lie, as cold as clay. True love doth pass away!

[ February 1954 ] Your nurse could only speak Italian, but after twenty minutes I could imagine your final week, and tears ran down my cheeks.... When I embarked from Italy with my Mother’s body, the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova was breaking into fiery flower. The crazy yellow and azure sea-sleds blasting like jack-hammers across the spumante-bubbling wake of our liner, recalled the clashing colors of my Ford. Mother traveled first-class in the hold; her Risorgimento black and gold casket was like Napoleon’s at the Invalides.... While the passengers were tanning on the Mediterranean in deck-chairs, our family cemetery in Dunbarton lay under the White Mountains in the sub-zero weather. The graveyard’s soil was changing to stone— so many of its deaths had been midwinter. Dour and dark against the blinding snowdrifts, its black brook and fir trunks were as smooth as masts. A fence of iron spear-hafts black-bordered its mostly Colonial grave-slates. The only “unhistoric” soul to come here was Father, now buried beneath his recent unweathered pink-veined slice of marble. Even the Latin of his Lowell motto: Occasionem cognosce, seemed too businesslike and pushing here, where the burning cold illuminated the hewn inscriptions of Mother’s relatives: twenty or thirty Winslows and Starks. Frost had given their names a diamond edge.... In the grandiloquent lettering on Mother’s coffin, Lowell had been misspelled LOVEL. The corpse was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil.

Bury your heart in some deep green hollow Or hide it up in a kind old tree; Better still, give it the swallow When she goes over the sea. In Saturday’s Market there’s eggs a ’plenty And dead-alive ducks with their legs tied down, Grey old gaffers and boys of twenty— Girls and the women of the town— Pitchers and sugar-sticks, ribbons and laces, Poises and whips and dicky-birds’ seed, Silver pieces and smiling faces, In Saturday Market they’ve all they need. What were you showing in Saturday Market That set it grinning from end to end Girls and gaffers and boys of twenty—? Cover it close with your shawl, my friend— Hasten you home with the laugh behind you, Over the down—, out of sight, Fasten your door, though no one will find you, No one will look on a Market night. See, you, the shawl is wet, take out from under The red dead thing—. In the white of the moon On the flags does it stir again? Well, and no wonder! Best make an end of it; bury it soon. If there is blood on the hearth who’ll know it? Or blood on the stairs, When a murder is over and done why show it? In Saturday Market nobody cares. Then lie you straight on your bed for a short, short weeping And still, for a long, long rest, There’s never a one in the town so sure of sleeping As you, in the house on the down with a hole in your breast. Think no more of the swallow, Forget, you, the sea, Never again remember the deep green hollow Or the top of the kind old tree!

My love, how time makes hardness shine. They come in every color, pure or mixed gray-green of basalt, blood-soaked jasper, quartz, granite and feldspar, even bits of glass, smoothed by the patient jeweller of the tides. Volcano-born, earthquake-quarried, shaven by glaciers, wind-carved, heat-cracked, stratified, speckled, bright in the wet surf— no two alike, all torn from the dry land tossed up in millions on this empty shore. How small death seems among the rocks. It drifts light as a splintered bone the tide uncovers. It glints among the shattered oyster shells, gutted by gulls, bleached by salt and sun— the broken crockery of living things. Cormorants glide across the quiet bay. A falcon watches from the ridge, indifferent to the burdens I have carried here. No point in walking farther, so I sit, hollow as driftwood, dead as any stone.

We gave our dogs a button to sniff, or a tissue, and they bounded off confident in their training, in the power of their senses to recreate the body, but after eighteen hours in rubble where even steel was pulverized they curled on themselves and stared up at us and in their soft huge eyes we saw mirrored the longing for death: then we had to beg a stranger to be a victim and crouch behind a girder, and let the dogs discover him and tug him proudly, with suppressed yaps, back to Command and the rows of empty triage tables. But who will hide from us? Who will keep digging for us here in the cloud of ashes?

You’d been gone four months by then, but we brought you along anyway. On my back, you rested riding inside a wooden box. The idea was to lay you gently at the water’s surface, but our clumsy hands spilled you, and it was hard to tell whether you went head or feet first, but it didn’t much matter anyway, I suppose. You would float on down the creek until you had reached the next and so on. My father gave a little wave and joked, “We’ll see you back on down in Denver, Dad.” We stood there in silence listening to you chuckle under the bridge and over the first set of riffles downstream.

I went by the Druid stone That broods in the garden white and lone, And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows That at some moments fall thereon From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing, And they shaped in my imagining To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders Threw there when she was gardening. I thought her behind my back, Yea, her I long had learned to lack, And I said: ‘I am sure you are standing behind me, Though how do you get into this old track?’ And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf As a sad response; and to keep down grief I would not turn my head to discover That there was nothing in my belief. Yet I wanted to look and see That nobody stood at the back of me; But I thought once more: ‘Nay, I’ll not unvision A shape which, somehow, there may be.’ So I went on softly from the glade, And left her behind me throwing her shade, As she were indeed an apparition— My head unturned lest my dream should fade.

She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A Maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love: A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! —Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me!

She had a death in me, knees drawn up and my bowl and cloth rinsed through with her. As morning takes night, field closes the hare, and ay would burrow into her. Over the altar, catalpas rattle, shadow and bother the branch. Is this her white? Dress me. Her rain? Wash me with that. Her bowl? Feed me empty. Her colding? Ay am forgot. Then mask me the g’wen, hers skin being mine, and body that pools in the brine of her, rivers the silt and stone of her wrapt in the warm of hers fell. She were the watcher and tender of pyres when the wet grass shined with quiet and ay lean to the mouth hole:ay, mother.

Each morning I made my way among gangways, elevators, and nurses’ pods to Jane’s room to interrogate the grave helpers who tended her through the night while the ship’s massive engines kept its propellers turning. Week after week, I sat by her bed with black coffee and the Globe. The passengers on this voyage wore masks or cannulae or dangled devices that dripped chemicals into their wrists. I believed that the ship traveled to a harbor of breakfast, work, and love. I wrote: "When the infusions are infused entirely, bone marrow restored and lymphoblasts remitted, I will take my wife, bald as Michael Jordan, back to our dog and day." Today, months later at home, these words turned up on my desk as I listened in case Jane called for help, or spoke in delirium, ready to make the agitated drive to Emergency again for readmission to the huge vessel that heaves water month after month, without leaving port, without moving a knot, without arrival or destination, its great engines pounding.