Before Sleeping

I'm tired. In ways I can't explain.
So tired that everything else looks
tired too. Like the rural mailboxes
lining the road on US 41 South.
They lean into the curve of road,
colors faded, flags dangling and broken
by their sides. Year by year, they
have been laden with the heaviness
of obligations hard to fill (final notice--
we turn the gas off 8 a.m. Monday)
and known the emptiness of no Christmas
or birthday cards.

****************************************

Too tired to complete anything. Gone all weekend.
Drove lots. Paying now.

Stuck

Tonight, the southbound
sings relentlessly. I hear
and I don’t. Not like before.
Before your death, lonesome
was comfort in each whistle
blow, in each reverberation
of a window pane.

Pain becomes the immeasurable.
I am stuck at the stoplight west
of the hospital, eyes fixed on the building
whose white walls witnessed your passing.
Death, grief, letting go--these are things
I have no reference for measuring.

Room 370. I’ve walked by it too
many times to count since that last
night in April when you breathed
your last breath, alone, unimpeded.
I can’t remember why we weren’t there
with you. I don’t understand
how I couldn’t know, standing there
at the stove, making pinwheel sandwiches
for a Friday brunch, that you were gone.

The light changes to green,
the color of new. My reverie ends
and my foot responds. I make the left
turn by the CVS. Within seconds,
mind cogent and focused, I marvel at the way
a body keeps moving, long after
the dying, too soon for forgetting.



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A rewrite. Too telly I think but more grounded
images. It's just good to write. If you stop by again, jim, let
me know what you think.



Here's another I'm working on. I think it has a long
way to go too. I am rusty, rusty and suffering from
major brain fog, but I shall keep trying to write. I've
always found it so cathartic and healing and helpful
and frustrating and amazing and fun and difficult, etc.
etc. etc.

************************************************



In A Quiet Room

The back rooms of this house
are quiet tonight. My son reads
The Moon Is Down as I watch a story

on television about widows and mothers
who've lost their lovers and sons in Iraq.
He calls me to his room to ask what genre

this Steinbeck novel fits and how to answer
a question like this: "List memorable quotes.
Tell why they are significant."

And when he reads the first quote to me
that he finds significant, a quote about
Dr. Winter, a simple man so profound

that only the profound recognize him as such,
I think of the widow on the television,
about the last night she spoke to her husband,

about the profound way simple things
like the weather and the holidays occupied
their last conversation. And all the while,

the winds outside were shifting, the weather
turning, the men inside never knowing that death
would become the dictionary to explicate profundity.

Stuck

Tonight, the southbound
sings relentlessly. I hear
and I don’t. Not like before.
Before your death, lonesome
was comfort in each whistle
blow, in each reverberation
of a window pane.

Pain becomes the immeasurable.
I am stuck at the stoplight, eyes
fixed on the brown walls that witnessed
your death. These are things I have no
reference for measuring.

Room 370. I’ve walked by it too
many times to count since that last
night in April when you breathed
your last breath, alone, unimpeded.

The light changes to green,
the color of new. My foot responds
and I make the left turn by the CVS.
Within seconds, I marvel at the way
a body keeps moving, long after
the dying, too soon for forgetting.

Late April

Six months to the morning since the day you died.
Another heartsore Friday full of sun,
temps in the sixties, a stirring in the trees.
We have put a winter in between our griefs--
between the gaping hole and greening sod,
between the wet funeral and the dry one.

There was a comfort in the numbers then.
We counted priests and limousines, flowers,
favors, the sympathies and casseroles
of those who came and followed to the end
in keeping with the common sense that holds
a strength in numbers: the more the merrier.

Late April now and now the number One
assumes its upright stance--the walking wound
that pauses among monuments to count
another season's emblements of loss:
one grave, one stone, one name on it, one rose,
one fist to shake in the face of God then go.

Thomas Lynch



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It was in the sixties here yesterday, but winter
has returned. It's grey and windy and around
40. For me, this would be a perfect day to go
to the cemetery, but I'm not sure I will.

It's a 40 mile drive there. I'm not sure
I can find the green plastic cones I'll need
to place the artificial flowers in to sit next
to the stone. I'm not sure if my stomach
is going to quit hurting. I may not have time
to cook my traditional meal if I go. I may throw up.
I may develop another headache. I may have to drink
a glass of wine first and then I couldn't drive
or wouldn't drive because I would not want to
be arrested for drunk driving even though I would
not be drunk. I may need to finish the laundry
or take the boys home. I may get a phone call.
I'm not sure if I have the right clothes to wear.
I'm not sure that I can bear to look at your name
on that stone, Dad, and keep myself pulled
together. I'm not sure that I believe in much.
I'm not sure I can think of a good reason to go.
I'm not sure where you are or what good it does
to stand in front of the white marker that bears
your name and rank and the lines "Home the sailor
From the sea", part of a poem Mom wanted to put
on the stone but there are rules regarding such things
at the Veteran's Cemetery so there wasn't room for
the entire poem. I'm not sure I even know the poem
though Mom and I talked about it when we were
filling in the paper and making sure we counted
out even the spaces between the numbers and letters
and tributes to you and your life. I'm not sure
but I think the best thing I can do is lie in bed
today and work crossword puzzles and think about
words I've never heard of or have heard of but would
never use them the way they do in crossword
puzzles, and I'm not sure but it seems like a strange
thing to call those puzzles--crosswords. Cross words.
I am sure we had none of those before you passed or left
or died. I am sure it's easier to say I lost you
than it is to say you died or you are dead.
No. No cross words, Dad. Just words about the dead
you had loved and lost and the mower you wanted
to buy when you got stronger and could mow the yard
again and the promise I made to you that I would
not talk about what you said and I'm not sure
why I told you I wouldn't talk about it but I think
it's because I wanted you to rest easy that night.
No cross words then, Dad, nor any or rarely any in all
the years you were my father. I am sure of that.


**************************************************************

I found these two poems:


Requiem

UNDER the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you 'grave for me: 5
Here he lies where he long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Robert Louis Stevenson


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Home Is the Sailor

Home is the sailor, home from sea:
Her far-borne canvas furled
The ship pours shining on the quay
The plunder of the world.

Home is the hunter from the hill:
Fast in the boundless snare
All flesh lies taken at his will
And every fowl of air.

'Tis evening on the moorland free,
The starlit wave is still:
Home is the sailor from the sea,
The hunter from the hill.

A.E. Housman

For The Anniversary Of My Death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what


W.S. Merwin

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THE BIG HEART

"Too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold."
From an essay by W. B. Yeats

Big heart,
wide as a watermelon,
but wise as birth,
there is so much abundance
in the people I have:
Max, Lois, Joe, Louise,
Joan, Marie, Dawn,
Arlene, Father Dunne,
and all in their short lives
give to me repeatedly,
in the way the sea
places its many fingers on the shore,
again and again
and they know me,
they help me unravel,
they listen with ears made of conch shells,
they speak back with the wine of the best region.
They are my staff.
They comfort me.

They hear how
the artery of my soul has been severed
and soul is spurting out upon them,
bleeding on them,
messing up their clothes,
dirtying their shoes.
And God is filling me,
though there are times of doubt
as hollow as the Grand Canyon,
still God is filling me.
He is giving me the thoughts of dogs,
the spider in its intricate web,
the sun
in all its amazement,
and a slain ram
that is the glory,
the mystery of great cost,
and my heart,
which is very big,
I promise it is very large,
a monster of sorts,
takes it all in--
all in comes the fury of love.


Anne Sexton

Marianne

You love Marianne and the slow
way she strums the base guitar.
You love the way her body molds
to the instrument and her spirit
soars above the crowds and you.

She is the untouchable. Two feet
from you and breathing the same
air your lungs take in and savor
like a mouth tasting for the first
time the exotic mango, the perfectly
seared steak. She is lovely,
isn't she?

Marianne lives in your dreams,
inhabits the hidden corners where life
resonates on an early spring morning
with its showy newborn crocus flowers.
She lives along the lines
of poles strung one to the other--opposite,
connective. She is all that romance
could ever capture (geese settling on a
still pond, sunsets over the Ohio,
driftwood carried in the ice floes).
You know I know.

I can't help but love Marianne--
her patchouli infiltrating
your bones and marrow, her beauty
the thrill of unearthing a piece
of fragmented pottery from an ancient
tomb. I love that about her too
and hope when you touch
her, the hairs on your arms
stand on end and the tip of your cock
settles comfortably into the warmth
of missing years. Give her a kiss
for me, and make sure she knows
who loved you well.


***********************************************


Found this in the archives and felt like playing around
with it but I can't now. Mostly I think I wanted to remember
how it felt to feel something other than this overwhelming
sadness.

Anger would be good. Love would be good. Passion too.


Maybe I will feel these things again soon.

*sigh*

Fame

Sometimes in the over-heated house, but not for long,
Smirking and speaking rather loud,
I see myself among the crowd,
Where no one fits the singer to his song,
Or sifts the unpainted from the painted faces
Of the people who are always on my stair;
They were not with me when I walked in heavenly places;
But could I spare
In the blind Earth's great silences and spaces,
The din, the scuffle, the long stare
If I went back and it was not there?
Back to the old known things that are the new,
The folded glory of the gorse, the sweet-briar air,
To the larks that cannot praise us, knowing nothing of what we do
And the divine, wise trees that do not care
Yet, to leave Fame, still with such eyes and that bright hair!
God! If I might! And before I go hence
Take in her stead
To our tossed bed,
One little dream, no matter how small, how wild.
Just now, I think I found it in a field, under a fence--
A frail, dead, new-born lamb, ghostly and pitiful and white,
A blot upon the night,
The moon's dropped child!

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Rooms

I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart;
The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
The little damp room with the seaweed smell,
And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide--
Rooms where for good or for ill, things died:
But there is the room where we two lie dead
Though every morning we seem to wake, and might just as well seem to sleep again
As we shall some day in the other dustier quieter bed
Out there--in the sun--in the rain.


Charlotte Mew