I Think Grief Maybe Doesn't It Starts Like This:

I Think Grief

               

Maybe—Doesn’t It?—

Starts Like This:

Suppose you leave today

Suppose you take all your own

                music and sit-

                                                uate it

in the speakers

of your car loud

Suppose you sweat leaving

the driveway but don’t look

back not even for that

perpetual

                                last

                                                check

perhaps

or Suppose worse you don’t stop on your way

                out don’t even look

or maybe Suppose

you can’t see me or find time for me the time

                a brief rendezvous:

                                I told you they were showing

                                Thoreau not far from here I wanted

                                to take you the last time

                                I called you from Walden

                                                holding you

                                                in the phone

                                                beside an old cairn Whitman wrote

                                                about, setting stones

                                                when he stood here

                                I called you

                                                mud on my shoes

                                                I’d slipped in the marsh

                                                across from the pond

                                                and then taken it all       

                                                back home

                                                with me:

where he walked...

and suppose you went too

                                anyway I’m afraid

maybe

                you are too far away now Suppose suppose

just suppose

you’re supposed to leave today

Suppose you stay

one more day waiting

the snow the wet heavy snow-- Listen it’s just one day
into Fall--the snow

is still

months away

For Emeline One Hundred Years Old

For Emeline One Hundred Years Old                                                      

Tonight let us fill

our wineglass without fretting about the futures, which only

sours the Beaujolais.  Forget tomorrow’s blueberries; eat todays.

                                                                                                                Donald Hall

                                                                                                                Camilla, Never Ask

Today you would have been one hundred

years old.  Your hands and feet.  Your

eyes.  All of what you’d heard and smelled.

Your body and the blizzards and the scorch

the constant swell you settled by moving

all the time moving through the world

the way water moves through the world

                                the way you’d rise

                                from the night and

                                light a fire

                                and soon there are warm

                                biscuits and butter

                                and a cup of coffee

                                and the sun’s not even

                                up

Today you would have been one hundred

years old.  You made three babies and they

made their own and some strayed

and some remained and the way was long

for all of them. 

Today you would have been one hundred

years old and it’s giving rain.  If you were

alive you’d take it like a skein of your favorite

yarn all knots on one end clear

for miles on the other.  As it comes.

In your hands brief enough to make it

another row and another row and another

nothing coming undone.  Mother grandmother

we cover our bodies with your body

with your hands and wrists with your garden

green beans your blueberries your soft cheek today

today you would have been one hundred!

One Hundred Years Old.!

Sally

Sally:

a sudden charge out of a besieged

place against an enemy, a sortie 

Today back and forth brief

like batting an eye-

lash and the watery dust

she tells me after they took her

uterus laparoscopically and the

fallopian tubes

and all the tools she’d used

to make those babies

she’d say with righteous

distaste the cancer’s

gone they’d got it

all not a cell seen in all

the other cells all the other

peoples bloods (she’d lost

some of her own some-

where) it seems to have come

quiet to a close after that

assault like a new bully

who’d never been up

against the likes of her

done up like Joe

Lewis or I like to think Sally

Ride taxiing down the run-

way after all those days

in space a lone floating bee

seeing the bloom far off

homing in homing in

Extubating You

Extubating You

to walk out into that kind of cold while holding you knowing I'd walk back, I'd have to, alone...

Because it's inevitable: the tongue on the rim

of the mug touching the newest chip of the now

exposed unglazed clay, or if not the tongue, the lip

yes, the one I cut sliding up against writing

about you even though it was all true and couldn’t be

couldn’t be! truer, like the tree bent from

the left to reach the side of the beaver pond path

gone ecstatic stiff one year in a quick ice and blizzard

wind it dipped its head and shoulders in

the water and it cost the tree it’s entire

backbone so that today walking by is walking

under her arch otherwise it’s water

and who can walk on that or who wants to

even in clean ice that hasn’t seen snow

yet you know how it all slows down and yields

and the chips and the glazed gray eye of it

come later much later, in the  middle where it’s thin

or thinner where it suffers

a bob house and a man where it once fell through

and him too, bed and all but he was froze

solid that’s what someone said but he fished

still living while I drew out slush from the new hole

I breathed back into it and soon the lick of wet

and dry wet and dry split the lip and it bled

and I kept at the blood I kept it all to myself

sometimes between my teeth sometimes a pucker

sometimes nothing but me dreaming I was

walking beneath that birch that went out

and over into the pond and still does it goes out

and over from one edge of the world

to the other they say those that’s starved

of oxygen start to hallucinate like a fever’s took

their brain and they start saying things crazy

things so ok tell me how can any crack

in the glass or the back woods path like that

while I catch my breath to jump be avoided?

Saving You

Saving You

Now you’re gone, all of you.

No, you are there,

a rock island twelve miles off…

                                                Variation “Stones” by Donald Hall

Keeping you

saved is not the same

as saving you

outright as diving

in frigid and broke

to grope where you

last went under

trying to remember

what you felt like

after all those years

away from me: you were

a fortress about me, a church

of hand carried

stone, a pew

to sit in with you

to pray away pain.

Keeping you

saved isn’t just

making it

to shore, turning you

over to empty you or

before, my mouth

on your mouth giving

you my breathing.  Or

touching the scar

above your heart

with the paddle

of my hand electric

as want and love

can be to sweet shock

you back

to rhythm this side

of the tape keeping

you saved

drying you

combing you

cleaning you

feeding you when you don’t

speak, limp

and without give

like the weight

of your body

in the water

stone on stone on stone

as though

you’d been building

it all along

out there, a church, all

alone, Sweeny himself

by God but not

a bird yet, no

not yet

a bird.