Collected Poems (39 page)

Jed, three weeks old, sleeps in his floppy straw cradle on the counter next to the bread box;

we’ve just arrived, and I’m so weary with jet lag, with the labor of tending to a newborn

that my mind drifts and, instead of their words, I listen to the music of the women’s voices.

Some family business must be being resolved: Renée is agitated, her tone suddenly urgent,

there’s something she’s been waiting to tell; her eyes hold on Catherine’s and it’s that,

the intensity of her gaze, that brings back to me how Catherine looked during her labor —

all those hours — then, the image startlingly vivid, I see Renée giving birth to Catherine.

I see the darkened room, then the bed, then, sinews drawn tight in her neck, Renée herself,

with the same abstracted look in her eyes that Catherine had, layer on layer of self disadhering,

all the dross gone, all but the fire of concentration, the heart-stopping beauty, and now,

at last, my Catherine, our Catherine, here for us all, blazing, bawling, lacquered with gore.

Cave

Not yet a poet, not yet a person perhaps, or a human, or not so far as I’d know now,

I lurk in the lobe of a cave, before me sky, a tangle of branch, a tree I can’t name.

Not yet in a myth, tale, history, chronicle of a race, or a race, I don’t know if I speak,

and if I do speak, I don’t know if I pray — to what pray? — or if I sing; do I dare sing?

Who would be with me? Would there be indication of household past the scatter of seed,

the cracked-open, gnawed-open bones there would have to have been to sustain me?

Cold, cold ending; rain rising and ending, ever-menacing night circling towards me;

might I dream, at least, singing; toneless nearly, two notes or three, modeless, but singing?

Not yet in a garden, of morality or of mind, not yet in the shimmering prisms of reflection,

there must still be past the prattle and haggle of breath some aspiration to propel me.

A gust of upgroaning ardor, flurries of sad meditation, nostalgia for so much already lost:

in a stumble of uncountable syllables spun from pulse and passion something sings, and I sing.

Grief

Dossie Williams, 1914–1995

1.

Gone now, after the days of desperate, unconscious gasping, the reflexive staying alive,

tumorous lungs, tumorous blood, ruined, tumorous liver demanding to live, to go on,

even the innocent bladder, its tenuous, dull golden coin in the slack translucent bag;

gone now, after the months of scanning, medication, nausea, hair loss and weight loss;

remission, partial remission, gratitude, hope, lost hope, anxiety, anger, confusion,

the hours and days of everyday life, something like life but only as dying is like life;

gone the quiet at the end of dying, the mouth caught agape on its last bite at a breath,

bare skull with its babylike growth of new hair thrown back to open the terrified larynx;

the flesh given way but still of the world, lost but still in the world with the living;

my hand on her face, on her brow, the sphere of her skull, her arm, so thin, so wasted;

gone, yet of us and with us, a person, not yet mere dream or imagination, then, gone, wholly,

under the earth, cold earth, cold grasses, cold winter wind, freezing eternity, cold, forever.

2.

Is this grief? Tears took me, then ceased; the wish to die, too, may have fled through me,

but not more than with any moment’s despair, the old, surging wish to be freed, finished.

I feel pain, pain for her fear, pain for her having to know she was going, though we must;

pain for the pain of my daughter and son, for my wife whose despair for her mother returned;

pain for all human beings who know they will go and still go as though they knew nothing,

even pain for myself, my incomprehension, my fear of stories never begun now never ending.

But still, is this grief: waking too early, tiring too quickly, distracted, impatient, abrupt,

but still waking, still thinking and working; is this what grief is, is this pain enough?

I go to the mirror: someone who might once have felt something merely regards me,

eyes telling nothing, mouth saying nothing, nothing reflected but the things of the world,

nothing told not of any week’s, no, already ten days now, any ten days’ normal doings.

Shouldn’t the face evidence anguish, shouldn’t its loving sadness and loss be revealed?

Ineffable, vague, elusive, uncertain, distracted: shouldn’t grief have a form of its own,

and shouldn’t mind know past its moment of vague, uncertain distraction the sureness of sorrow;

shouldn’t soul flinch as we’re taught proper souls are supposed to, in reverence and fear?

Shouldn’t grief be pure and complete, reshaping the world in itself, in grief for itself?

3.

Eighty, dying, in bed, tubes in her chest, my mother puts on her morning makeup;

the broad, deft strokes of foundation, the blended-in rouge, powder, eye shadow, lipstick;

that concentration with which you must gaze at yourself, that ravenous, unfaltering focus.

Grief for my mother, for whatever she thought her face had to be, to be made every morning;

grief for my mother-in-law in her last declining, destroying dementia, getting it wrong,

the thick ropes of rouge, garish green paint on her lips; mad, misplaced slash of mascara;

grief for all women’s faces, applied, created, trying to manifest what the soul seeks to be;

grief for the faces of all human beings, our own faces telling us so much and no more,

offering pain to all who behold them, but which when they turn to themselves, petrify, pose.

Grief for the faces of adults who must gaze in their eyes deeply so as not to glimpse death,

and grief for the young who see only their own relentless and grievous longing for love.

Grief for my own eyes that try to seek truth, even of pain, of grief, but find only approximation.

4.

My face beneath your face, face of grief, countenance of loss, of fear, of irrevocable extinction;

matrix laid upon matrix, mystery on mystery, guise upon guise, semblance, effigy, likeness.

Oh, to put the face of grief on in the morning; the tinting, smoothing, shining and shaping;

and at the end of the day, to remove it, detach it, emerge from the sorrowful mask.

Stripped now of its raiment, the mouth, caught in its last labored breath, finds last resolution;

all the flesh now, stripped of its guises, moves towards its place in the peace of the earth.

Grief for the earth, accepting the grief of the flesh and the grief of our grieving forever;

grief for the flesh and the body and face, for the eyes that can see only into the world,

and the mind that can only think and feel what the world gives it to think and to feel;

grief for the mind gone, the flesh gone, the imperfect pain that must stay for its moment;

and grief for the moment, its partial beauties, its imperfect affections, all severed, all torn.

II

Symbols

1. /
WIND

Night, a wildly lashing deluge driving in great gusts over the blind, defeated fields,

the usually stoical larches and pines only the mewling of their suddenly malleable branches;

a wind like a knife that never ceased shrieking except during the stunning volleys of thunder.

By morning, half the hundred pullets in the henhouse had massed in a corner and smothered,

an inert, intricate structure of dulled iridescence and still-distracted, still-frenzied eyes,

the vivid sapphire of daybreak tainted by a vaporous, gorge-swelling fetor.

The tribe of survivors compulsively hammered their angular faces as usual into the trough:

nothing in the world, they were saying, not carnage or dissolution, can bear reflection;

the simplest acts of being, they were saying, can obliterate all, all madness, all mourning.

2. /
GUITAR

For long decades the guitar lay disregarded in its case, unplucked and untuned,

then one winter morning, the steam heat coming on hard, the maple neck swelling again,

the sixth, gravest string, weary of feeling itself submissively tugged to and fro

over the ivory lip of the bridge, could no longer bear the tension preceding release,

and, with a faint thud and a single, weak note like a groan stifled in a fist, it gave way,

its portions curling agonizingly back on themselves like sundered segments of worm.

… The echoes abruptly decay; silence again, the other strings still steadfast, still persevering,

still feeling the music potent within them, their conviction of timelessness only confirmed,

of being essential, elemental, like earth, fire, air, from which all beauty must be evolved.

3. /
OWL

The just-fledged baby owl a waiter has captured under a tree near the island restaurant

seems strangely unfazed to be on display on a formica table, though she tilts ludicrously,

all her weight on one leg as though she had merely paused in her lift towards departure.

Immobile except for her constantly swiveling head, she unpredictably fixes her gaze,

clicking from one far focus to another — sea, tree, sky, sometimes it seems even star —

but never on hand or eye, no matter how all in the circle around her chirp and cajole.

Thus the gods once, thus still perhaps gods: that scrutiny densely grained as granite,

the rotation calibrated on chromium bearings; dilation, contraction; wrath, disdain and remove …

But oh, to be slipping ever backwards in time, the savage memories, the withheld cry!

4. /
DOG

Howl after pitiful, aching howl: an enormous, efficiently muscular doberman pinscher

has trapped itself in an old-fashioned phone booth, the door closed firmly upon it,

but when someone approaches to try to release it, the howl quickens and descends,

and if someone in pity dares anyway lean on and crack open an inch the obstinate hinge,

the quickened howl is a snarl, the snarl a blade lathed in the scarlet gape of the gullet,

and the creature powers itself towards that sinister slit, ears flattened, fangs flashing,

the way, caught in the deepest, most unknowing cell of itself, heart’s secret, heart’s wound,

decorous usually, seemly, though starving now, desperate, will turn nonetheless, raging,

ready to kill, or die, to stay where it is, to maintain itself just as it is, decorous, seemly.

5. /
FIRE

The plaster had been burnt from the studs, the two-by-four joists were eaten with char;

ceilings smoke-blackened, glass fragments and foul, soaked rags of old rug underfoot:

even the paint on the outside brick had bubbled in scabs and blisters and melted away.

Though the fire was ostensibly out, smoke still drifted up through cracks in the floor,

and sometimes a windowsill or a door frame would erupt in pale, insidious flames,

subtle in the darkness, their malignancies masked in blushes of temperate violet and rose.

Like love it was, love ill and soiled; like affection, affinity, passion, misused and consumed;

warmth betrayed, patience exhausted, distorted, all evidence of kindness now unkindness …

Yet still the hulk, the gutted carcass; fuming ash and ember; misery and shame.

6. /
DAWN

Herds of goats puttering by on the rock-strewn path in what sounded like felt slippers;

before that (because the sudden awareness of it in sleep always came only after it passed),

the church bell, its cry in the silence like a swell of loneliness, then loneliness healed.

The resonant
clock
of the fisherman’s skiff being tethered to the end of the jetty;

the sad, repetitive smack of a catch of squid being slapped onto a slab of concrete;

the waves, their eternal morning torpor, the cypress leaning warily back from the shore.

A voice from a hill or another valley, expanding, concretizing like light, falling, fading,

then a comic grace-note, the creak of rickety springs as someone turns in their bed:

so much beginning, and now, sadness nearly, to think one might not even have known!

7. /
WIG

The bus that won’t arrive this freezing, bleak, pre-Sabbath afternoon must be Messiah;

the bewigged woman, pacing the sidewalk, furious, seething, can be only the mystic Shekinah,

the presence of God torn from Godhead, chagrined, abandoned, longing to rejoin, reunite.

The husband in his beard and black hat, pushing a stroller a step behind her as she stalks?

The human spirit, which must slog through such degrading tracts of slush and street-filth,

bound forever to its other, no matter how incensed she may be, how obliviously self-absorbed.

And the child, asleep, serene, uncaring in the crank and roar of traffic, his cheeks afire,

ladders of snowy light leaping and swirling above him, is what else but psyche, holy psyche,

always only now just born, always now just waking, to the ancient truths of knowledge, suffering, loss.

8. /
GARDEN

A garden I usually never would visit; oaks, roses, the scent of roses I usually wouldn’t remark

but do now, in a moment for no reason suddenly unlike any other, numinous, limpid, abundant,

whose serenity lifts and enfolds me, as a swirl of breeze lifts the leaves and enfolds them.

Nothing ever like this, not even love, though there’s no need to measure, no need to compare:

for once not to be waiting, to be in the world as time moves through and across me,

to exult in this fragrant light given to me, in this flow of warmth given to me and the world.

Then, on my hand beside me on the bench, something, I thought somebody else’s hand, alighted;