Poems for grief
I compiled this list of poems two years ago for a favorite college English professor after the death of her husband. I just thought it might help someone else out there, so here it is, internet.
Now that I Am Never Alone // Tess Gallagher
(Written after the death of her husband, Raymond Carver)
In the bath I look up and see the brown moth
pressed like a pair of unpredictable lips
against the white wall. I heat up
the water, running as much hot in as I can stand.
These handfuls over my shoulder--how once
he pulled my head against his thigh and dipped
a rivulet down my neck of coldest water from the spring
we were drinking from. Beautiful mischief
that stills a moment so I can never look
back. Only now, brightest now, and the water
never hot enough to drive that shiver out.
But I remember solitude--no other
presence and each thing what it was. Not this raw
fluttering I make of you as you have made of me
your watch-fire, your killing light.
-
The Laundresses // Jan McLaughlin
You came from a distant planet,
bags full of crumpled shirts for me to launder.
With the passion of a month of wins and losses
you searched the house for adrenaline.
I can hear the rumble of the house, hinged
to the slamming door as you went out to drive.
I’ve slept with your dirty shirts around
my pillows, called to you from dreams
for a thigh across the turnpike and an answer.
In the car I imagine you weighing my face
and the sound of my voice against faces and voices.
I’ve wondered who stood in black below the horizon
clutching a headstone like a stack of clean shirts.
I fold the tee-shirts neatly
but take no measure for unwanted creases
hold the just gone scent of you like hibiscus
hold the last light of day until morning.
-
On the Necessity of Sadness // Mikael de Lara Co
Let me tell you about longing.
Let me presume that I have something
new to say about it, that this room,
naked, its walls pining for clocks,
has something new to say
about absence. Somewhere
the crunch of an apple, fading
sunflowers on a quilt, a window
looking out to a landscape
with a single tree. And you
sitting under it. Let go,
said you to me in a dream,
but by the time the wind
carried your voice to me,
I was already walking through
the yawning door, towards
the small, necessary sadnesses
of waking. I wish
I could hold you now,
but that is a line that has
no place in a poem, like the swollen
sheen of the moon tonight,
or the word absence, or you,
or longing. Let me tell you about
longing. In a distant country
two lovers are on a bench, and pigeons,
unafraid, are perching beside them.
She places a hand on his knee
and says, say to me
the truest thing you can.
I am closing my eyes now.
You are far away.
-
Separation // W.S. Merwin
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
-
Trying to Raise the Dead // Dorianne Laux
Look at me. I’m standing on a deck
in the middle of Oregon. There are
friends inside the house. It’s not my
house, you don’t know them.
They’re drinking and singing
and playing guitars. You love
this song, remember, “Ophelia,”
Boards on the windows, mail
by the door. I’m whispering
so they won’t think I’m crazy.
They don’t know me that well.
Where are you now? I feel stupid.
I’m talking to trees, to leaves
swarming on the black air, stars
blinking in and out of heart-
shaped shadows, to the moon, half-
lit and barren, stuck like an axe
between the branches. What are you
now? Air? Mist? Dust? Light?
What? Give me something. I have
to know where to send my voice.
A direction. An object. My love, it needs
a place to rest. Say anything. I’m listening.
I’m ready to believe. Even lies, I don’t care.
Say burning bush. Say stone. They’ve
stopped singing now and I really should go.
So tell me, quickly. It’s April. I’m
on Spring Street. That’s my gray car
in the driveway. They’re laughing
and dancing. Someone’s bound
to show up soon. I’m waving.
Give me a sign if you can see me.
I’m the only one here on my knees.
-
Alone // Jack Gilbert
I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebody’s dalmatian. I meet
the man walking her on a leash
almost every week. He says good morning
and I stoop down to calm her. He said
once that she was never like that with
other people. Sometimes she is tethered
on the lawn when I go by. If nobody
is around, I sit on the grass. When she
finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap
and we watch each other’s eyes as I whisper
in her soft ears. She cares nothing about
the mystery. She likes it best when
I touch her head and tell her small
things about my days and our friends.
That makes her happy the way it always did.
-
Married // Jack Gilbert
I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife’s hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.
-
Dirge Without Music // Edna St. Vincent Millay
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
Crowned with lilies and with laurel they go: but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains - but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,-
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
-
Funeral Blues // W.H. Auden
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
-
Charles Bukowski // for Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough: -
I pick up the skirt,
I pick up the sparkling beads
in black,
this thing that moved once
around flesh,
and I call God a liar,
I say anything that moved
like that
or knew
my name
could never die
in the common verity of dying,
and I pick
up her lovely
dress,
all her loveliness gone,
and I speak
to all the gods,
Jewish gods, Christ-gods,
chips of blinking things,
idols, pills, bread,
fathoms, risks,
knowledgeable surrender,
rats in the gravy of 2 gone quite mad
without a chance,
hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance,
I lean upon this,
I lean on all of this
and I know:
her dress upon my arm:
but
they will not
give her back to me.
-
Last Days // Donald Hall
"It was reasonable
to expect." So he wrote. The next day,
in a consultation room,
Jane's hematologist Letha Mills sat down,
stiff, her assistant
standing with her back to the door.
"I have terrible news,"
Letha told them. "The leukemia is back.
There's nothing to do."
The four of them wept. He asked how long,
why did it happen now?
Jane asked only: "Can I die at home?"
Home that afternoon,
they threw her medicines into the trash.
Jane vomited. He wailed
while she remained dry-eyed - silent,
trying to let go. At night
he picked up the telephone to make
calls that brought
a child or a friend into the horror.
The next morning,
they worked choosing among her poems
for Otherwise, picked
hymns for her funeral, and supplied each
other words as they wrote
and revised her obituary. The day after,
with more work to do
on her book, he saw how weak she felt,
and said maybe not now; maybe
later. Jane shook her head: "Now," she said.
"We have to finish it now."
Later, as she slid exhausted into sleep,
she said, "Wasn't that fun?
To work together? Wasn't that fun?"
He asked her, "What clothes
should we dress you in, when we bury you?"
"I hadn't thought," she said.
"I wondered about the white salwar
kameez," he said -
her favorite Indian silk they bought
in Pondicherry a year
and a half before, which she wore for best
or prettiest afterward.
She smiled. "Yes. Excellent," she said.
He didn't tell her
that a year earlier, dreaming awake,
he had seen her
in the coffin in her white salwar kameez.
Still, he couldn't stop
planning. That night he broke out with,
"When Gus dies I'll
have him cremated and scatter his ashes
on your grave!" She laughed
and her big eyes quickened and she nodded:
"It will be good
for the daffodils." She lay pallid back
on the flowered pillow:
"Perkins, how do you think of these things?"
They talked about their
adventures - driving through England
when they first married,
and excursions to China and India.
Also they remembered
ordinary days - pond summers, working
on poems together,
walking the dog, reading Chekhov
aloud. When he praised
thousands of afternoon assignations
that carried them into
bliss and repose on this painted bed,
Jane burst into tears
and cried, "No more fucking. No more fucking!"
Incontinent three nights
before she died, Jane needed lifting
onto the commode.
He wiped her and helped her back into bed.
At five he fed the dog
and returned to find her across the room,
sitting in a straight chair.
When she couldn't stand, how could she walk?
He feared she would fall
and called for an ambulance to the hospital,
but when he told Jane,
her mouth twisted down and tears started.
"Do we have to?" He canceled.
Jane said, "Perkins, be with me when I die."
"Dying is simple," she said.
"What's worst is… the separation."
When she no longer spoke,
they lay along together, touching,
and she fixed on him
her beautiful enormous round brown eyes,
shining, unblinking,
and passionate with love and dread.
One by one they came,
the oldest and dearest, to say goodbye
to this friend of the heart.
At first she said their names, wept, and touched;
then she smiled; then
turned one mouth-corner up. On the last day
she stared silent goodbyes
with her hands curled and her eye stuck open.
Leaving his place beside her,
where her eyes stared, he told her,
"I'll put these letters
in the box." She had not spoken
for three hours, and now Jane said
her last words: "O.K."
At eight that night,
her eyes open as they stayed
until she died, brain-stem breathing
started, he bent to kiss
her pale cool lips again, and felt them
one last time gather
and purse and peck to kiss him back.
In the last hours, she kept
her forearms raised with pale fingers clenched
at cheek level, like
the goddess figurine over the bathroom sink.
Sometimes her right fist flicked
or spasmed toward her face. For twelve hours
until she died, he kept
scratching Jane Kenyon's big bony nose.
A sharp, almost sweet
smell began to rise from her open mouth.
He watched her chest go still.
With his thumb he closed her round brown eyes.
-
Distressed Haiku // Donald Hall
In a week or ten days
the snow and ice
will melt from Cemetery Road.
I'm coming! Don't move!
Once again it is April.
Today is the day
we would have been married
twenty-six years.
I finished with April
halfway through March.
You think that their
dying is the worst
thing that could happen.
Then they stay dead.
Will Hall ever write
lines that do anything
but whine and complain?
In April the blue
mountain revises
from white to green.
The Boston Red Sox win
a hundred straight games.
The mouse rips
the throat of the lion
and the dead return.
the whole sky.
-
Songs from the House of Death, Or How to Make It Through to the End of a Relationship // Joy Harjo
for Donald Hall
1.
From the house of death there is rain.
From rain is flood and flowers.
And flowers emerge through the ruins
of those who left behind
stores of corn and dishes,
turquoise and bruises
from the passion
of fierce love.
2.
I run my tongue over the skeleton
jutting from my jaw. I taste
the grit of heartbreak.
3.
The procession of spirits
who walk out of their bodies
is ongoing. Just as the procession
of those who have loved us
will go about their business
of making a new house
with someone else who smells
like the dust of a strange country.
4.
The weight of rain is unbearable to the sky
eventually. Just as desire will
burn a hole through the sky
and fall to earth.
5.
I was surprised by the sweet embrace
of the perfume of desert flowers after the rain
though after all these seasons
I shouldn’t be surprised.
6.
All cities will be built and then destroyed.
We built too near the house of the gods of lightning,
too close to the edge of a century.
What could I expect,
my bittersweet.
7.
Even death who is the chief of everything
on this earth (all undertakings, all matters of human
form) will wash his hands, stop to rest under
the cottonwood before taking you from me
on the back of his horse.
8.
Nothing I can sing
will bring you back.
Not the songs of a hundred horses running
until they become wind
Not the personal song of the rain
who makes love to the earth.
9.
I will never forget you. Your nakedness
haunts me in the dawn when I cannot distinguish your
flushed brown skin from the burning horizon, or my hands.
The smell of chaos lingers in the clothes
you left behind. I hold you
there.
-
Death is nothing at all // Henry Scott Holland
Death is nothing at all,
I have only slipped away
into the next room.
I am I,
and you are you;
whatever we were to each other,
that, we still are.
Call me by my old familiar name,
speak to me in the easy way
which you always used,
put no difference in your tone,
wear no forced air
of solemnity or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed
at the little jokes we shared together.
Let my name ever be
the household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without effect,
without the trace of a shadow on it.
Life means all
that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was.
There is unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind
because I am out of sight?
I am waiting for you,
for an interval,
somewhere very near,
just around the corner.
All is well.
-
How It Will Happen, When // Dorianne Laux
There you are, exhausted from a night of crying, curled up on the couch,
the floor, at the foot of the bed, anywhere you fall you fall down crying,
half amazed at what the body is capable of, not believing you can cry
anymore. And there they are, his socks, his shirt, your underwear
and your winter gloves, all in a loose pile next to the bathroom door,
and you fall down again. Someday, years from now, things will be
different, the house clean for once, everything in its place, windows
shining, sun coming in easily now, sliding across the high shine of wax
on the wood floor. You'll be peeling an orange or watching a bird
spring from the edge of the rooftop next door, noticing how,
for an instant, its body is stopped on the air, only a moment before
gathering the will to fly into the ruff at its wings and then doing it:
flying. You'll be reading, and for a moment there will be a word
you don't understand, a simple word like now or what or is
and you'll ponder over it like a child discovering language.
Is you'll say over and over until it begins to make sense, and that's
when you'll say it, for the first time, out loud: He's dead. He's not
coming back. And it will be the first time you believe it.
-
What The Living Do // Marie Howe
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil
probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes
have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday
we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight
pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here
and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street,
the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday,
hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my
wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to
pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more
and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in
the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a
cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
-
Starlings in Winter // Mary Oliver
Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly
they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,
dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,
then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can't imagine
how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard, I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
-
Blackwater Woods // Mary Oliver
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
-
The Thing Is // Ellen Bass
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again."
Now that I Am Never Alone // Tess Gallagher
(Written after the death of her husband, Raymond Carver)
In the bath I look up and see the brown moth
pressed like a pair of unpredictable lips
against the white wall. I heat up
the water, running as much hot in as I can stand.
These handfuls over my shoulder--how once
he pulled my head against his thigh and dipped
a rivulet down my neck of coldest water from the spring
we were drinking from. Beautiful mischief
that stills a moment so I can never look
back. Only now, brightest now, and the water
never hot enough to drive that shiver out.
But I remember solitude--no other
presence and each thing what it was. Not this raw
fluttering I make of you as you have made of me
your watch-fire, your killing light.
-
The Laundresses // Jan McLaughlin
You came from a distant planet,
bags full of crumpled shirts for me to launder.
With the passion of a month of wins and losses
you searched the house for adrenaline.
I can hear the rumble of the house, hinged
to the slamming door as you went out to drive.
I’ve slept with your dirty shirts around
my pillows, called to you from dreams
for a thigh across the turnpike and an answer.
In the car I imagine you weighing my face
and the sound of my voice against faces and voices.
I’ve wondered who stood in black below the horizon
clutching a headstone like a stack of clean shirts.
I fold the tee-shirts neatly
but take no measure for unwanted creases
hold the just gone scent of you like hibiscus
hold the last light of day until morning.
-
On the Necessity of Sadness // Mikael de Lara Co
Let me tell you about longing.
Let me presume that I have something
new to say about it, that this room,
naked, its walls pining for clocks,
has something new to say
about absence. Somewhere
the crunch of an apple, fading
sunflowers on a quilt, a window
looking out to a landscape
with a single tree. And you
sitting under it. Let go,
said you to me in a dream,
but by the time the wind
carried your voice to me,
I was already walking through
the yawning door, towards
the small, necessary sadnesses
of waking. I wish
I could hold you now,
but that is a line that has
no place in a poem, like the swollen
sheen of the moon tonight,
or the word absence, or you,
or longing. Let me tell you about
longing. In a distant country
two lovers are on a bench, and pigeons,
unafraid, are perching beside them.
She places a hand on his knee
and says, say to me
the truest thing you can.
I am closing my eyes now.
You are far away.
-
Separation // W.S. Merwin
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
-
Trying to Raise the Dead // Dorianne Laux
Look at me. I’m standing on a deck
in the middle of Oregon. There are
friends inside the house. It’s not my
house, you don’t know them.
They’re drinking and singing
and playing guitars. You love
this song, remember, “Ophelia,”
Boards on the windows, mail
by the door. I’m whispering
so they won’t think I’m crazy.
They don’t know me that well.
Where are you now? I feel stupid.
I’m talking to trees, to leaves
swarming on the black air, stars
blinking in and out of heart-
shaped shadows, to the moon, half-
lit and barren, stuck like an axe
between the branches. What are you
now? Air? Mist? Dust? Light?
What? Give me something. I have
to know where to send my voice.
A direction. An object. My love, it needs
a place to rest. Say anything. I’m listening.
I’m ready to believe. Even lies, I don’t care.
Say burning bush. Say stone. They’ve
stopped singing now and I really should go.
So tell me, quickly. It’s April. I’m
on Spring Street. That’s my gray car
in the driveway. They’re laughing
and dancing. Someone’s bound
to show up soon. I’m waving.
Give me a sign if you can see me.
I’m the only one here on my knees.
-
Alone // Jack Gilbert
I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebody’s dalmatian. I meet
the man walking her on a leash
almost every week. He says good morning
and I stoop down to calm her. He said
once that she was never like that with
other people. Sometimes she is tethered
on the lawn when I go by. If nobody
is around, I sit on the grass. When she
finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap
and we watch each other’s eyes as I whisper
in her soft ears. She cares nothing about
the mystery. She likes it best when
I touch her head and tell her small
things about my days and our friends.
That makes her happy the way it always did.
-
Married // Jack Gilbert
I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife’s hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.
-
Dirge Without Music // Edna St. Vincent Millay
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
Crowned with lilies and with laurel they go: but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains - but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,-
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
-
Funeral Blues // W.H. Auden
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
-
Charles Bukowski // for Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough: -
I pick up the skirt,
I pick up the sparkling beads
in black,
this thing that moved once
around flesh,
and I call God a liar,
I say anything that moved
like that
or knew
my name
could never die
in the common verity of dying,
and I pick
up her lovely
dress,
all her loveliness gone,
and I speak
to all the gods,
Jewish gods, Christ-gods,
chips of blinking things,
idols, pills, bread,
fathoms, risks,
knowledgeable surrender,
rats in the gravy of 2 gone quite mad
without a chance,
hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance,
I lean upon this,
I lean on all of this
and I know:
her dress upon my arm:
but
they will not
give her back to me.
-
Last Days // Donald Hall
"It was reasonable
to expect." So he wrote. The next day,
in a consultation room,
Jane's hematologist Letha Mills sat down,
stiff, her assistant
standing with her back to the door.
"I have terrible news,"
Letha told them. "The leukemia is back.
There's nothing to do."
The four of them wept. He asked how long,
why did it happen now?
Jane asked only: "Can I die at home?"
Home that afternoon,
they threw her medicines into the trash.
Jane vomited. He wailed
while she remained dry-eyed - silent,
trying to let go. At night
he picked up the telephone to make
calls that brought
a child or a friend into the horror.
The next morning,
they worked choosing among her poems
for Otherwise, picked
hymns for her funeral, and supplied each
other words as they wrote
and revised her obituary. The day after,
with more work to do
on her book, he saw how weak she felt,
and said maybe not now; maybe
later. Jane shook her head: "Now," she said.
"We have to finish it now."
Later, as she slid exhausted into sleep,
she said, "Wasn't that fun?
To work together? Wasn't that fun?"
He asked her, "What clothes
should we dress you in, when we bury you?"
"I hadn't thought," she said.
"I wondered about the white salwar
kameez," he said -
her favorite Indian silk they bought
in Pondicherry a year
and a half before, which she wore for best
or prettiest afterward.
She smiled. "Yes. Excellent," she said.
He didn't tell her
that a year earlier, dreaming awake,
he had seen her
in the coffin in her white salwar kameez.
Still, he couldn't stop
planning. That night he broke out with,
"When Gus dies I'll
have him cremated and scatter his ashes
on your grave!" She laughed
and her big eyes quickened and she nodded:
"It will be good
for the daffodils." She lay pallid back
on the flowered pillow:
"Perkins, how do you think of these things?"
They talked about their
adventures - driving through England
when they first married,
and excursions to China and India.
Also they remembered
ordinary days - pond summers, working
on poems together,
walking the dog, reading Chekhov
aloud. When he praised
thousands of afternoon assignations
that carried them into
bliss and repose on this painted bed,
Jane burst into tears
and cried, "No more fucking. No more fucking!"
Incontinent three nights
before she died, Jane needed lifting
onto the commode.
He wiped her and helped her back into bed.
At five he fed the dog
and returned to find her across the room,
sitting in a straight chair.
When she couldn't stand, how could she walk?
He feared she would fall
and called for an ambulance to the hospital,
but when he told Jane,
her mouth twisted down and tears started.
"Do we have to?" He canceled.
Jane said, "Perkins, be with me when I die."
"Dying is simple," she said.
"What's worst is… the separation."
When she no longer spoke,
they lay along together, touching,
and she fixed on him
her beautiful enormous round brown eyes,
shining, unblinking,
and passionate with love and dread.
One by one they came,
the oldest and dearest, to say goodbye
to this friend of the heart.
At first she said their names, wept, and touched;
then she smiled; then
turned one mouth-corner up. On the last day
she stared silent goodbyes
with her hands curled and her eye stuck open.
Leaving his place beside her,
where her eyes stared, he told her,
"I'll put these letters
in the box." She had not spoken
for three hours, and now Jane said
her last words: "O.K."
At eight that night,
her eyes open as they stayed
until she died, brain-stem breathing
started, he bent to kiss
her pale cool lips again, and felt them
one last time gather
and purse and peck to kiss him back.
In the last hours, she kept
her forearms raised with pale fingers clenched
at cheek level, like
the goddess figurine over the bathroom sink.
Sometimes her right fist flicked
or spasmed toward her face. For twelve hours
until she died, he kept
scratching Jane Kenyon's big bony nose.
A sharp, almost sweet
smell began to rise from her open mouth.
He watched her chest go still.
With his thumb he closed her round brown eyes.
-
Distressed Haiku // Donald Hall
In a week or ten days
the snow and ice
will melt from Cemetery Road.
I'm coming! Don't move!
Once again it is April.
Today is the day
we would have been married
twenty-six years.
I finished with April
halfway through March.
You think that their
dying is the worst
thing that could happen.
Then they stay dead.
Will Hall ever write
lines that do anything
but whine and complain?
In April the blue
mountain revises
from white to green.
The Boston Red Sox win
a hundred straight games.
The mouse rips
the throat of the lion
and the dead return.
the whole sky.
-
Songs from the House of Death, Or How to Make It Through to the End of a Relationship // Joy Harjo
for Donald Hall
1.
From the house of death there is rain.
From rain is flood and flowers.
And flowers emerge through the ruins
of those who left behind
stores of corn and dishes,
turquoise and bruises
from the passion
of fierce love.
2.
I run my tongue over the skeleton
jutting from my jaw. I taste
the grit of heartbreak.
3.
The procession of spirits
who walk out of their bodies
is ongoing. Just as the procession
of those who have loved us
will go about their business
of making a new house
with someone else who smells
like the dust of a strange country.
4.
The weight of rain is unbearable to the sky
eventually. Just as desire will
burn a hole through the sky
and fall to earth.
5.
I was surprised by the sweet embrace
of the perfume of desert flowers after the rain
though after all these seasons
I shouldn’t be surprised.
6.
All cities will be built and then destroyed.
We built too near the house of the gods of lightning,
too close to the edge of a century.
What could I expect,
my bittersweet.
7.
Even death who is the chief of everything
on this earth (all undertakings, all matters of human
form) will wash his hands, stop to rest under
the cottonwood before taking you from me
on the back of his horse.
8.
Nothing I can sing
will bring you back.
Not the songs of a hundred horses running
until they become wind
Not the personal song of the rain
who makes love to the earth.
9.
I will never forget you. Your nakedness
haunts me in the dawn when I cannot distinguish your
flushed brown skin from the burning horizon, or my hands.
The smell of chaos lingers in the clothes
you left behind. I hold you
there.
-
Death is nothing at all // Henry Scott Holland
Death is nothing at all,
I have only slipped away
into the next room.
I am I,
and you are you;
whatever we were to each other,
that, we still are.
Call me by my old familiar name,
speak to me in the easy way
which you always used,
put no difference in your tone,
wear no forced air
of solemnity or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed
at the little jokes we shared together.
Let my name ever be
the household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without effect,
without the trace of a shadow on it.
Life means all
that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was.
There is unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind
because I am out of sight?
I am waiting for you,
for an interval,
somewhere very near,
just around the corner.
All is well.
-
How It Will Happen, When // Dorianne Laux
There you are, exhausted from a night of crying, curled up on the couch,
the floor, at the foot of the bed, anywhere you fall you fall down crying,
half amazed at what the body is capable of, not believing you can cry
anymore. And there they are, his socks, his shirt, your underwear
and your winter gloves, all in a loose pile next to the bathroom door,
and you fall down again. Someday, years from now, things will be
different, the house clean for once, everything in its place, windows
shining, sun coming in easily now, sliding across the high shine of wax
on the wood floor. You'll be peeling an orange or watching a bird
spring from the edge of the rooftop next door, noticing how,
for an instant, its body is stopped on the air, only a moment before
gathering the will to fly into the ruff at its wings and then doing it:
flying. You'll be reading, and for a moment there will be a word
you don't understand, a simple word like now or what or is
and you'll ponder over it like a child discovering language.
Is you'll say over and over until it begins to make sense, and that's
when you'll say it, for the first time, out loud: He's dead. He's not
coming back. And it will be the first time you believe it.
-
What The Living Do // Marie Howe
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil
probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes
have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday
we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight
pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here
and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street,
the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday,
hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my
wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to
pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more
and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in
the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a
cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
-
Starlings in Winter // Mary Oliver
Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly
they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,
dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,
then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can't imagine
how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard, I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
-
Blackwater Woods // Mary Oliver
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
-
The Thing Is // Ellen Bass
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again."