Tag: loss and longing

“In Winter,” Michael Ryan

At four o’clock it’s dark.
Today, looking out through dusk
at three gray women in stretch slacks
chatting in front of the post office,
their steps left and right and back
like some quick folk dance of kindness,
I remembered the winter we spent
crying in each other’s laps.
What could you be thinking at this moment?
How lovely and strange the gangly spines
of trees against a thickening sky
as you drive from the library
humming off-key? Or are you smiling
at an idea met in a book
the way you smiled with your whole body
the first night we talked?
I was so sure my love of you was perfect,
and the light today
reminded me of the winter you drove home
each day in the dark at four o’clock
and would come into my study to kiss me
despite mistake after mistake after mistake.

“Heaven,” Cathy Song

He thinks when we die we’ll go to China.
Think of it—a Chinese heaven   
where, except for his blond hair,   
the part that belongs to his father,   
everyone will look like him.
China, that blue flower on the map,   
bluer than the sea
his hand must span like a bridge   
to reach it.
An octave away.

I’ve never seen it.
It’s as if I can’t sing that far.
But look—
on the map, this black dot.
Here is where we live,
on the pancake plains
just east of the Rockies,
on the other side of the clouds.
A mile above the sea,
the air is so thin, you can starve on it.   
No bamboo trees
but the alpine equivalent,
reedy aspen with light, fluttering leaves.   
Did a boy in Guangzhou dream of this   
as his last stop?

I’ve heard the trains at night
whistling past our yards,
what we’ve come to own,
the broken fences, the whiny dog, the rattletrap cars.   
It’s still the wild west,
mean and grubby,
the shootouts and fistfights in the back alley.   
With my son the dreamer
and my daughter, who is too young to walk,   
I’ve sat in this spot
and wondered why here?
Why in this short life,
this town, this creek they call a river?

He had never planned to stay,   
the boy who helped to build   
the railroads for a dollar a day.   
He had always meant to go back.   
When did he finally know
that each mile of track led him further away,   
that he would die in his sleep,   
dispossessed,
having seen Gold Mountain,
the icy wind tunneling through it,
these landlocked, makeshift ghost towns?

It must be in the blood,   
this notion of returning.
It skipped two generations, lay fallow,
the garden an unmarked grave.
On a spring sweater day   
it’s as if we remember him.   
I call to the children.   
We can see the mountains   
shimmering blue above the air.
If you look really hard
says my son the dreamer,
leaning out from the laundry’s rigging,   
the work shirts fluttering like sails,   
you can see all the way to heaven

“Self-Portrait in the Body of a Whale,” Frances Justine Post

We come upon the body of a whale, a fresh beaching.
      It smells like a thousand fishes.      
I crawl in on the carpet of its tongue, seeking the injury out.

      Outside, you cough and look away as I squint
            through the eye at you. I dig into the room
its ribs make and squat in the warm gloom. The heart,

a chandelier, hangs down, ringed with veins. Here and there
      the skin, thinned by hermit crabs, lets in the light
like a stained glass window with blood red panes.


      I lie down on the bed of its liver as the tide fills the body,
            each wave, higher. You give the whale a kick
I almost didn’t feel and gesture towards the dunes,

backing away, disappearing. Is this who you really are?
      This is where I live now like a barnacle,
stern and grumpy. If you try to move me, I will cut you.

“It’s Always Something,” Sally Delehant

Yesterday the wind took our picture
off the wall over the piano;               birds chirped
their curt symphonies in the box elder.             I thought
of you—         your obvious loveliness,                 your obliviousness
to lost things.        An ambulance blinks two lanes over,
a restaurant goes under,       your little niece kicks off her shoe.

We pantomime infatuations,             put on scarves.
you’ll never again speak to your father.            What was
once my knee in a theater                 is tired eyes at a kitchen sink;
we fall into us.                       A squirrel upsets the feeder, hangs by one leg
and reaches.                   (Even my feet are angry.)               You tromp in
muddy leaves,                test the alarm,              whisper lub-dub.

Silvered streets gird our apartment.                   I fasten
my parka            to leave.                                   Everywhere muck, newspapers,
a blanket—        our neighbor in flip-flops has forgotten her key.
     I daydream the ocean, your hand on my ankle.
I’ll walk without stopping, won’t care if I ever do.               The wind can whip
its wants, can rattle each thing,                          rip roofs from shingles

at angles.           I’ll think of you—            forgetting
which switch is a light                    and which the disposal,

climbing on my back at a carnival,           quieting

after pendulum hung work days.           The streetlights

have been on for an hour.           Nothing will let me come to you.



From A Real Time of It (Cultural Society, 2012).

“For the Man Whose Son My Son Killed,” Gary Earl Ross

You must understand this: my son
called me after his first firefight,
distraught that he had taken life
when I had taught him to cherish it.
He called me, said he felt weird
and needed to talk to somebody.
Who better than the father who
carried him in a backpack, read
him a bedtime story each night,
and would always love him?
I’m here, I said. Tell me about it.
He did, and I listened, offering
mmm-hmms and yesses and words
of comfort when his voice caught.

Afterward he felt better and returned
to his duties in this dubious war.
Meanwhile, I was relieved he had
survived another day of the insanity.
On his second tour his vehicle hit a
roadside bomb. Bleeding from his
eyes because of a concussion, he flew
to the military hospital in Germany and
later came home. Again I was relieved.
Today, on the first leg of his third trip
to the Twilight Zone we’ve made of
your home, he called. I was glad to hear
his voice. Glad every damn time, ever
terrified your experience will be mine.

Later, when NPR broadcast a wailing
Iraqi father who’d lost two sons in this
chaos, I thought of you for the first time,
wondered if you were that father. It was
purely chance that your son aimed at mine
and mine squeezed off an auto burst first.
Two—no, three fathers in agony because
our leaders are all fools. Still, someone
should recognize your pain. I do, sir,
and so does my son, himself a father.
We are both sorry for your loss.

“7:17,” Elijah Patterson

you come back to me in a memory
of frantic morning primping,
a hurricane of flat-ironed hair and unironed pants.
the bathroom mirror still fogged
by your shower and breath as you squintingly apply eyeliner, shouting
“time check!” every few minutes.

you are always late.

it takes some time to trace the memories
of women i have loved and not deserved
before i get to your name and face,
two words instead mean the essence of you.

i    have never been good with time.
i    have never been good with months or years.
i    looked after those hands with unblinking dedication.

and
sleepless tuesday mornings, i wonder
who it is that now attends
to the ticking of your clocks.

“The Sound of One Fork,” Minnie Bruce Pratt

Through the window screen I can see an angle of grey roof
and the silence that spreads in the branches of the pecan tree
as the sun goes down. I am waiting for a lover. I am alone
in a solitude that vibrates like the cicada in hot midmorning,
that waits like the lobed sassafras leaf just before
its dark green turns into red, that waits
like the honeybee in the mouth of the purple lobelia.

While I wait, I can hear the random clink of one fork
against a plate. The woman next door is eating supper
alone. She is sixty, perhaps, and for many years
has eaten by herself the tomatoes, the corn
and okra that she grows in her backyard garden.
Her small metallic sound persists, as quiet almost
as the windless silence, persists like the steady
random click of a redbird cracking a few
more seeds before the sun gets too low.
She does not hurry, she does not linger.

Her younger neighbors think that she is lonely.
But I know what sufficiency she may possess.
I know what can be gathered from year to year,
gathered from what is near to hand, as I do
elderberries that bend in damp thickets by the road,
gathered and preserved, jars and jars shining
in rows of claret red, made at times with help,
a friend or a lover, but consumed long after,
long after they are gone and I sit
alone at the kitchen table.

And when I sit in the last heat of Sunday, afternoons
on the porch steps in the acid breath of the boxwoods,
I also know desolation. The week is over, the coming night
will not lift. I am exhausted from making each day.
My family, my children live in other states,
the women I love in other towns. I would rather be here
than with them in the old ways, but when all that’s left
of the sunset is the red reflection underneath the clouds,
when I get up and come in to fix supper,
in the darkened kitchen I am often lonely for them.

In the morning and the evening we are by ourselves,
the woman next door and I. Still, we persist.
I open the drawer to get out the silverware.
She goes to her garden to pull weeds and pick
the crookneck squash that turn yellow with late summer.
I walk down to the pond in the morning to watch
and wait for the blue heron who comes at first light
to feed on minnows that swim through her shadow in the water.
She stays until the day grows so bright
that she cannot endure it and leaves with her hunger unsatisfied.
She bows her wings and slowly lifts into flight,
grey and slate blue against a paler sky.
I know she will come back. I see the light create
a russet curve of land on the farther bank,
where the wild rice bends heavy and ripe
under the first blackbirds. I know
she will come back. I see the light curve
in the fall and rise of her wing.

“Snowshoe to Otter Creek,” Stacie Cassarino

love lasts by not lasting
                       —Jack Gilbert 

I’m mapping this new year’s vanishings:    
lover, yellow house, the knowledge of surfaces.
This is not a story of return.
There are times I wish I could erase
the mind’s lucidity, the difficulty of Sundays,
my fervor to be touched
by a woman two Februarys gone. What brings the body
back, grieved and cloven, tromping these woods
with nothing to confide in? New snow reassumes
the circleting trees, the bridge above the creek
where I stand like a stranger to my life.
There is no single moment of loss, there is
an amassing. The disbeliever sleeps at an angle
in the bed. The orchard is a graveyard.
Is this the real end? Someone shoveling her way out
with cold intention? Someone naming her missing?

Stacie Cassarino, “Snowshoe to Otter Creek” from Zero at the Bone. Copyright © 2009 by Stacie Cassarino. Reprinted by permission of New Issues Press.

Source: Zero at the Bone (New Issues Press, 2009)

“Elegy for My Father,” Mark Strand

(Robert Strand 1908-1968)

1 THE EMPTY BODY

The hands were yours, the arms were yours,
But you were not there.
The eyes were yours, but they were closed and would not open.
The distant sun was there.
The moon poised on the hill’s white shoulder was there.
The wind on Bedford Basin was there.
The pale green light of winter was there.
Your mouth was there,
But you were not there.
When somebody spoke, there was no answer.
Clouds came down
And buried the buildings along the water,
And the water was silent.
The gulls stared.
The years, the hours, that would not find you
Turned in the wrists of others.
There was no pain. It had gone.
There were no secrets. There was nothing to say.
The shade scattered its ashes.
The body was yours, but you were not there.
The air shivered against its skin.
The dark leaned into its eyes.
But you were not there.


2 ANSWERS

Why did you travel?
Because the house was cold.
Why did you travel?
Because it is what I have always done between sunset and sunrise.
What did you wear?
I wore a blue suit, a white shirt, yellow tie, and yellow socks.
What did you wear?
I wore nothing. A scarf of pain kept me warm.
Who did you sleep with?
I slept with a different woman each night.
Who did you sleep with?
I slept alone. I have always slept alone.
Why did you lie to me?
I always thought I told the truth.
Why did you lie to me?
Because the truth lies like nothing else and I love the truth.
Why are you going?
Because nothing means much to me anymore.
Why are you going?
I don’t know. I have never known.
How long shall I wait for you?
Do not wait for me. I am tired and I want to lie down.
Are you tired and do you want to lie down?
Yes, I am tired and I want to lie down.

3 YOUR DYING

Nothing could stop you.
Not the best day. Not the quiet. Not the ocean rocking.
You went on with your dying.
Not the trees
Under which you walked, not the trees that shaded you.
Not the doctor
Who warned you, the white-haired young doctor who saved you once.
You went on with your dying.
Nothing could stop you. Not your son. Not your daughter
Who fed you and made you into a child again.
Not your son who thought you would live forever.
Not the wind that shook your lapels.
Not the stillness that offered itself to your motion.
Not your shoes that grew heavier.
Not your eyes that refused to look ahead.
Nothing could stop you.
You sat in your room and stared at the city
And went on with your dying.
You went to work and let the cold enter your clothes.
You let blood seep into your socks.
Your face turned white.
Your voice cracked in two.
You leaned on your cane.
But nothing could stop you.
Not your friends who gave you advice.
Not your son. Not your daughter who watched you grow small.
Not fatigue that lived in your sighs.
Not your lungs that would fill with water.
Not your sleeves that carried the pain of your arms.
Nothing could stop you.
You went on with your dying.
When you played with children you went on with your dying.
When you sat down to eat,
When you woke up at night, wet with tears, your body sobbing,
You went on with your dying.
Nothing could stop you.
Not the past.
Not the future with its good weather.
Not the view from your window, the view of the graveyard.
Not the city. Not the terrible city with its wooden buildings.
Not defeat. Not success.
You did nothing but go on with your dying.
You put your watch to your ear.
You felt yourself slipping.
You lay on the bed.
You folded your arms over your chest and you dreamed of the world
without you,
Of the space under the trees,
Of the space in your room,
Of the spaces that would now be empty of you,
And you went on with your dying.
Nothing could stop you.
Not your breathing. Not your life.
Not the life you wanted.
Not the life you had.
Nothing could stop you.


4 YOUR SHADOW

You have your shadow.
The places where you were have given it back.
The hallways and bare lawns of the orphanage have given it back.
The Newsboys Home has given it back.
The streets of New York have given it back and so have the streets of
Montreal.
The rooms in Bel?m where lizards would snap at mosquitos have
given it back.
The dark streets of Manaus and the damp streets of Rio have given it
back.
Mexico City where you wanted to leave it has given it back.
And Halifax where the harbor would wash its hands of you has given
it back.
You have your shadow.
When you traveled the white wake of your going sent your shadow
below, but when you arrived it was there to greet you. You had
your shadow.
The doorways you entered lifted your shadow from you and when you
went out, gave it back. You had your shadow.
Even when you forgot your shadow, you found it again; it had been
with you.
Once in the country the shade of a tree covered your shadow and you
were not known.
Once in the country you thought your shadow had been cast by somebody
else. Your shadow said nothing.
Your clothes carried your shadow inside; when you took them off, it
spread like the dark of your past.
And your words that float like leaves in an air that is lost, in a place
no one knows, gave you back your shadow.
Your friends gave you back your shadow.
Your enemies gave you back your shadow. They said it was heavy and
would cover your grave.
When you died your shadow slept at the mouth of the furnace and ate
ashes for bread.
It rejoiced among ruins.
It watched while others slept.
It shone like crystal among the tombs.
It composed itself like air.
It wanted to be like snow on water.
It wanted to be nothing, but that was not possible.
It came to my house.
It sat on my shoulders.
Your shadow is yours. I told it so. I said it was yours.
I have carried it with me too long. I give it back.


5 MOURNING

They mourn for you.
When you rise at midnight,
And the dew glitters on the stone of your cheeks,
They mourn for you.
They lead you back into the empty house.
They carry the chairs and tables inside.
They sit you down and teach you to breathe.
And your breath burns,
It burns the pine box and the ashes fall like sunlight.
They give you a book and tell you to read.
They listen and their eyes fill with tears.
The women stroke your fingers.
They comb the yellow back into your hair.
They shave the frost from your beard.
They knead your thighs.
They dress you in fine clothes.
They rub your hands to keep them warm.
They feed you. They offer you money.
They get on their knees and beg you not to die.
When you rise at midnight they mourn for you.
They close their eyes and whisper your name over and over.
But they cannot drag the buried light from your veins.
They cannot reach your dreams.
Old man, there is no way.
Rise and keep rising, it does no good.
They mourn for you the way they can.


6 THE NEW YEAR

It is winter and the new year.
Nobody knows you.
Away from the stars, from the rain of light,
You lie under the weather of stones.
There is no thread to lead you back.
Your friends doze in the dark
Of pleasure and cannot remember.
Nobody knows you. You are the neighbor of nothing.
You do not see the rain falling and the man walking away,
The soiled wind blowing its ashes across the city.
You do not see the sun dragging the moon like an echo.
You do not see the bruised heart go up in flames,
The skulls of the innocent turn into smoke.
You do not see the scars of plenty, the eyes without light.
It is over. It is winter and the new year.
The meek are hauling their skins into heaven.
The hopeless are suffering the cold with those who have nothing to
hide.
It is over and nobody knows you.
There is starlight drifting on the black water.
There are stones in the sea no one has seen.
There is a shore and people are waiting.
And nothing comes back.
Because it is over.
Because there is silence instead of a name.
Because it is winter and the new year.