the dark tree, the cold sea

although I know you can never be found
although I know that from the highest height
you cannot be seen you are not hiding
from me or are you is it how you look now
or maybe how I look now all these years gone by
places seen people met not knowing at any time
who I was or how others saw me or did not see me
and how are you wherever you are if I write you a letter
I’ll get no answer if I cry out to you to come in my final
hour you will not come but I will still look for you

-- Emily Fragos

For My Mother

Once more
I summon you
Out of the past
With poignant love,
You who nourished the poet
And the lover.
I see your gray eyes
Looking out to sea
In those Rockport summers,
Keeping a distance
Within the closeness
Which was never intrusive
Opening out
Into the world.
And what I remember
Is how we laughed
Till we cried
Swept into merriment
Especially when times were hard.
And what I remember
Is how you never stopped creating
And how people sent me
Dresses you had designed
With rich embroidery
In brilliant colors
Because they could not bear
To give them away
Or cast them aside.
I summon you now
Not to think of
The ceaseless battle
With pain and ill health,
The frailty and the anguish.
No, today I remember
The creator,
The lion-hearted.

-- May Sarton 

Passage

And there was evening, humid
with lightning, when my father

fell to the earth like summer hail,
scattered. I gathered

my mother, we threw in
a handful of pebbles. And

there was morning, bitterly.
There was evening news

bluing walls, violet morning
on thunderheads, and the evening

when morning
would never again light our bodies in bed.

Morning caravans, headlights,
evening. A long caravan of evenings. Then

there was only me, morning. Awake in a room
in a building vast with rooms. Everyone

evening. Everyone morning. And God
had finished all the work he had been doing—

babies, honeybees, spreadsheets, winter
mornings. I said,

I will not stop here, evening. I’ll see you
in the morning.

--Thomas Dooley

Seeing the Body

Not hers but mine. Not hers ever again. Ever

hers, my body pulled through, two

long windows open in the dark of birth,

the gold cord raised too in its wake. Awake,

the first morning. The first morning & all,

all the windows were closed inside. A blindness

scalding broken sight. The silence pulled through

my nostrils & veins, the ether of air failing

flesh. I get up from the shape I once was

& open the white blinds in my brother’s house.

The light is specific. It is the 29th morning

of July. Last night they dragged me howling from her

body in the room. The room had a name,

number 3315, in the cardiac wing. In the room

I saw her winged shape leave, rise, forgive the

vessel that fled her. Now mine or ours, I

stare in the mirror while everyone sleeps

the aggrieved sleep of the living. Behind my eyes

a dead woman looks back at me with no trace

of recognition. I say ‘Mother’ & my own

feral mouth opens. Closes without any light.

by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Only as the Day is Long

Soon she will be no more than a passing thought,
a pang, a timpani of wind in the chimes, bent spoons
hung from the eaves on a first night in a new house
on a street where no dog sings, no cat visits
a neighbor cat in the middle of the street, winding
and rubbing fur against fur, throwing sparks.

Her atoms are out there, circling the earth, minus
her happiness, minus her grief, only her body’s
water atoms, her hair and bone and teeth atoms,
her fleshy atoms, her boozy atoms, her saltines
and cheese and tea, but not her piano concerto
atoms, her atoms of laughter and cruelty, her atoms
of lies and lilies along the driveway and her slippers,
Lord her slippers, where are they now?

-- Dorianne Laux

The Night Where You No Longer Live

Was it like lifting a veil

And was the grass treacherous, the green grass

Did you think of your own mother

Was it like a virus

Did the software flicker

And was this the beginning

Was it like that

Was there gas station food

and was it a long trip

And is there sun there

or drones

or punishment

or growth

Was it a blackout

And did you still create me

And what was I like on the first day of my life

Were we two from the start

And was our time an entrance

or an ending

Did we stand in the heated room

Did we look at the painting

Did the snow appear cold

Were our feet red with it, with the wet snow

And then what were our names

Did you love me or did I misunderstand

Is it terrible

Do you intend to come back

Do you hear the world’s keening

Will you stay the night

 

--Meghan O'Rourke

Unveiling, Wakefield

I say to the named granite stone, to the brown grass,
to the dead chrysanthemums, Mother, I still have a
body, what else could receive my mind’s transmissions,
its dots and dashes of pain? I expect and get no answer,
no loamy scent of her coral geraniums. She who is now
immaterial, for better or worse, no longer needs to speak
for me to hear, as in a continuous loop, classic messages
of wisdom, love and fury. MAKE! DO! a note on our fridge
commanded. Here I am making, unmaking, doing, undoing.

--Gail Mazur

A Kiss

And sometimes it is
loss

                                                         that we lose,

             and sometimes

it is just lips. When I was


                               a child, I would ask my mother
to tuck me

                                   in, wrap me tight in blankets,

             make me into a burrito.


                               Sometimes I would wait in bed,

pressing my body stiff, like a board,

mind like a feather, silly— setting the scene



                           to be seen.
                  
                                              So I could be wrapped.
                                              
                                                   So I could be kissed.


And what

                                    I miss most,


is being              made                                    again.


-- David Tomas Martinez

excerpt from Red Doc >

Shuffling recipes
coupons horoscopes in
a kitchen drawer he turns
up an old B&W
photograph of her posed in
dashing swim costume on
some long ago back porch.
One leg forward like a
Greek kouros a cigarette
in the other hand she
glows as a drop of water
glows in sun. She looks
sexually astute in a way
that terrifies him he puts
this aside and all at once
the grainy photograph the
early marvel of her life
flung up at him a thing
hardly believable! knocks
him to his knees. He grips
his arms and weeps. Pain
catches the whole insides
of him and wrings it.
Oddly now remembering
his grandmother’s wringer
washer silvergreen and
upright on a platform of
wet boards in her back
kitchen beside the
washing tubs. How
carefully he’d been taught
to feed a piece of dripping
cloth between the two big
lips of the rollers while
she cranked the handle
and the cloth grabbed
forward to emerge on the
other side as a weird
compressed pane of itself.
He hadn’t known his
grandmother long or well.
She smelled of Noxzema.
Didn’t like doctors.
Believed in herbs and the
Bible. When the apostles
walked down the street
she said their shadows
would heal people. His
mother once told him a
story about her dying.
They never liked each
other hadn’t visited for
years but someone
arranged a phone call. So
there they were mother
and daughter on the
telephone separate cities
separate nights both
suffering from asthma and
so moved they couldn’t
speak. I heard her
breathing I knew what it
was his mother said. He
looks up. He’d almost
forgot about the rain.
Unloading on the roof and
squandering down the
gutters. Rain continuous
since the funeral a
wrecking rattling
bewildering Lethe-
knuckling mob of rain. A
rain with no instructions.

Listening to rain
he thinks how strange all
its surfaces sound like
they’re sliding up. How
strange his mother is lying
out there in her little
soaked Chanel suit. The
weeping has been arriving
about every seven
minutes. In the days to
come it will grow less.



--Anne Carson

Brokeheart: Just like that

When the bass drops on Bill Withers’
Better Off Dead, it’s like 7 a.m.
and I confess I’m looking
over my shoulder once or twice
just to make sure no one in Brooklyn
is peeking into my third-floor window
to see me in pajamas I haven’t washed
for three weeks before I slide
from sink to stove in one long groove
left foot first then back to the window side
with my chin up and both fists clenched
like two small sacks of stolen nickels
and I can almost hear the silver
hit the floor by the dozens
when I let loose and sway a little back
and just like that I’m a lizard grown
two new good legs on a breeze
-bent limb. I’m a grown-ass man
with a three-day wish and two days to live.
And just like that everyone knows
my heart’s broke and no one is home.
Just like that, I’m water.
Just like that, I’m the boat.
Just like that, I’m both things in the whole world
rocking. Sometimes sadness is just
what comes between the dancing. And bam!,
my mother’s dead and, bam!, my brother’s
children are laughing. Just like—ok, it’s true
I can’t pop up from my knees so quick these days
and no one ever said I could sing but
tell me my body ain’t good enough
for this. I’ll count the aches another time,
one in each ankle, the sharp spike in my back,
this mud-muscle throbbing in my going bones,
I’m missing the six biggest screws
to hold this blessed mess together. I’m wind-
rattled. The wood’s splitting. The hinges are
falling off. When the first bridge ends,
just like that, I’m a flung open door.


-- Patrick Rosal

Wintering

I am no longer ashamed
how for weeks, after, I wanted
to be dead - not to die,

mind you, or do
myself in - but to be there
already, walking amongst

all those I'd lost, to join
the throng singing,
if that's what there is -

or the nothing, the gnawing -
So be it. I wished
to be warm - & worn -

like the quilt my grandmother
must have made, one side
a patchwork of color -

blues, green like the underside
of a leaf - the other
an old pattern of the dolls

of the world, never cut out
but sewn whole - if the world
were Scotsmen & sailors

in traditional uniforms.
Mourning, I've learned, is just
a moment, many,

grief the long betrothal
beyond. Grief what
we wed, ringing us -

heirloom brought
from my father's hot house -
the quilt heavy tonight

at the foot of my marriage bed,
its weight months of needling
& thread. Each straightish,

pale, uneven stitch
like the white hairs I earned
all that hollowed year - pull one

& ten more will come,
wearing white, to its funeral -
each a mourner, a winter,


gathering ash at my temple.


by Kevin Young

Gapped Sonnet

Between the blinds Past the coded locks

Past the slanted gold bars of the day

Smelling of all-night salt rain on the docks

Of grief Of birth Of bergamot Of May



In the wind that lifts the harbor litter

Wet against my fingers in a dream

Salvaging among the tideline's bitter

gleanings Generous Exigent Lush and lean



Your voice A tune I thought I had forgotten

The taste of cold July brook on my tongue

A fire built on thick ice in the winter

The place where lost and salvaged meet and fit

The cadences a class in grief is taught in

The sound when frozen rivers start to run

by Suzanne Gardinier

Cruel Cogito

How joyous!,
passing this time alone
with your father, how bright his golden laugh
which drew you to laugh yourself uncontrolled,
how sweet the happy hour oysters you two pry and eat,
piling wobbling shells that glisten on the table
while the pianist plays by the kitchen doors.
You find yourself reminded of what you wrote
in the eulogy: that you two would still possess
a relationship even though
he was dead, that you could still
go and speak with him
when you dreamed

and so you see the seat opposite from you seats no one.



by Ken Chen

I Give a Convincing Sermon

I give a convincing sermon. I say The body

is a coat. It is a very dark and heavy coat

but worthless. Mother Mary nods from the pews.

If I give Mary all my atoms she will plant them

in a garden where ripened women relinquish

their bones to make room for littler women.

It is dangerous to grow accustomed to a garden.

Just when the flowers soften you, they disappear.

Then you are a weepy fern among skyscrapers.

I don't want my soul exposed like that.

Neither can you make a garden stay. Don't even try.

Every plot becomes a dark city over time.

I have collected many dark ideas over time.

I have so many ideas they are a second coat.


by Melissa Broder

Now it is fall

 

when all the golden birds

fly home across the blue deep water;

On shore I sit rapt in its scattering

                                                       glitter;

departure rustles through the trees.

This farewell is vast and separation draws close,

but reunion, that also is certain.

My head on my arm I fall asleep easily.

On my eyes a mother’s breath,

from her mouth to my heart:

sleep, child, and dream now the sun is gone.—

 

By Edith Södergran 1892–1923 Edith Sodergran

Translated from the Swedish by Averill Curdy Read the translator's notes

An Eternity

There is no dusk to be,

There is no dawn that was,

Only there's now, and now,

And the wind in the grass.


Days I remember of

Now in my heart, are now;

Days that I dream will bloom

White peach bough.



Dying shall never be

Now in the windy grass;

Now under shooken leaves

Death never was.


by Archibald MacLeish

The Present

The Present

I wanted to give you something —
no stone, clay, bracelet,
no edible leaf could pass through.
Even a molecule's fragrance by then too large.
Giving had been taken, as you soon would be.
Still, I offered the puffs of air shaped to meaning.
They remained air.
I offered memory on memory,
but what is memory that dies with the fallible inks?
I offered apology, sorrow, longing. I offered anger.
How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
I stood on one side of the present, you stood on the other.

--Jane Hirshfield

Horses at Midnight Without a Moon

Horses at Midnight Without a Moon

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there's music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.

-- Jack Gilbert