to my father, CDE, 1928-1990
“from one who has for
you more regard than is
convenient either for
your safety or your salvation…”
Time’s intention
rather than Death’s was what baffled them.
Derek Walcott, Omeros
One
How life talks up the dead
The first time I held you
you had already died
I mean I contained you then
I was suddenly all there was
left of you
When I go you’ll go
I’ll pour
Where you were going was never clear
How you would get there obvious
Even now I’d like to get
a message to someone dying
to deliver to you when he goes
But you can’t talk to the dying
like you can to the dead
***
The river at night is shining
with the weakest light around
Even the current shuddering in it
knows to keep its place
It is shaping water to ocean
The ocean dreams
it is reached for
but doesn’t know it’s happening
that the boiling and swirling
is the river taking on
the direction of the tide
This is where the dead would be out
walking if they walked without us
Where we slip on the bank
trying to get to them
receding like a gleam in the mud
This is how we wake
when the water hits us
***
In the days after you’d gone
we felt cheated of our jokes
After all, there was 162
pounds of new material
Relief came and went
today as calmness
tomorrow as the anger
we had hoped to show everyone
(but not until he’s
gone)
Instead it showed us inside
and that felt good too
almost as good as showing it off
Friends went their ways
Your dead man’s clothes
still hung sharply by the knees
nailed at the shoulders
flatfooted in shadows
stretched toward your memory
***
You were the first in our family to be stopped
Not exactly short but rather dead
and of course in your tracks
Prayer came back to you
a little at a time
Maybe you needed more than we thought
After the morphine you were so silent
just outside of sleep
Your jaw working aching eyes open
You could have been praying!
But we still felt so heroic
filled with such wonderful thoughts
You were always already dead
and we would remember your last days
as days we dreamed your thoughts for you
Two
We went on without you
Dreams end in waking or in sleeping on
We slept on
Whatever we could think brought us
back inside with grief
nothing was there to lead us away
there was always the other side of grief
I no longer believe that
when you stop appearing in dreams
you’ll come back as yourself
that you want to see the body
that you know where we put it
***
We didn’t put it anywhere
It was taken from us
in the winter that changed from
the great space between lives
to the season you didn’t finish
Driving in the woods to your body
that night remembering the owl
hiding its broad-lobed face
its wide wings close like a cape
not hurrying like a crow
always on the lam
not doubling like a mourning dove
always mating
how it did not flash
like a gull always abroad
but arrived great wings first
at the foot of the oak
then rose up to its nest
Because I have not seen him again
I’ve thought him through
Given him shadows to unroll
in his spreading wings
put a mole in his claws
***
One of us has learned such patience
since you that you’d think he died
One of us the oldest
can now approach her childhood
since she has finally lost a child
You have given her relief
her memory was gone away
One finds the night sky
empty promising
but another hates the sky now
the silence expecting him
One finds day’s simple blue killing
One learned to read the jumble
of cufflinks in an ashtray
like a fortune in strange signs
***
I know you’d want your angel
to be the big Irish one
The same one near you all your life
but you have met your match by now
Either Nothing has claimed you
and put infinite space between your parts
or Something has grafted to you
and you are growing complicit
in many nouns in the universe
I feel I keep coming between
your soul and mine to come
that my body waxes the clear signal
between the two occludes the passage
of what you will think of my death