In Another Tongue: the Nicene Creed:

In Another Tongue: the Nicene Creed:

Among the Living and the Dead

We are things thrown in the air

alive in flight...

our rust the color of the chameleon.

                                                                Our Afterlife I

                                                                Robert Lowell

Our loyalty to one another sticks like love...

                                                                Our Afterlife II

                                                                Robert Lowell

soft as all things soft the blossoms fall

off the maple.  they make the new green

grass seem lit with pricks of light.  tips

of gold, we all walk through them on our way

into other obligations.  the car door opens

and closes and for a moment, an hour or so,

it’s river river river wider than her shoulders

can carry where a week ago or a few days

more it was strips of ice briefly seeming like

meat strips drying on the banks of a hunt camp. 

i half expected a woman standing over it all

with her swan’s wing waving over and over

like a blessing (but really it was swaying

birches), the way a horse’s tail would in summer

to send the flies to another sky.  it seems

we never really leave places like these

where our dead come to be eaten by us

in some other way, or maybe not eaten but parceled

out, stripped and sun-dried, needing

vigilance, ours, protection from the flies.

like the eye that sees through the eye

of a camera lens, that steady elbow, that held

breath, how close it really is to the hunter,

how the sites line up just under the shoulder,

between the heavy bags of breath the pugilist

chooses to swing between aiming straight

and true to the heart.  taken down that way,

all the light shuffled in then shuttered out, 

and paused forever, I can’t not think a body is almost

like this, caught off guard while some gold

fleck distracts it and pulls its mouth to the grass:

to lay bare the teeth the tongue the open throat

of it all that is patient as that again again again jaw.  or

when the hospital released my mother and I

wasn’t there to stop them, she walked out on her

own (months before she really died for good this time)

and fell down the basement stairs.  it was winter

then and she lay by the woodstove in the low

blossom ash becomes, slow, slow, a tired old

heart.  later, when she picked herself up, the strip

of blood down her inner thigh, dried and flaky,

gave her the only memory of it: looking back

up the stairs a claw hammer handle sticking

out (cellar stairs, they have no risers) and how

she survived that (she’d gone down looking

for the cat) she’d say she spoke to someone standing

on the last step. they were standing there.  they

were.  she insisted.  we know it’s pills, but for

her, knowing who it was made all the difference

in that fall.  she didn’t name them.  she was,

she’d say later, angry at being left behind by

them, kept alive by us.  I don’t know.  I listened to her

suicides all my life.  they fell sometimes like

flies on warm meat, patiently laying eggs.  the 

veins, coagulated, stripped away, mostly, 

with the hide, could give no more blood.  and 

sometimes they were trees coughing up courage 

after a long long winter giving in again, wooed

to and by all that warming dirt, all the roots can

provide.  Alive, sometimes resenting it, but still, alive.