Elegy Owed (2 page)

There's a strain of cannibalism

I admire. A beloved has died. A hole

has been dug to be filled or a boat dragged

across a mile of silence to burn

upon the forgetfulness of water. One person

or twenty stand at the hole or the boat

& the body stares through closed eyes. The body

turning gray, filling with clouds, with a rain

that will last until flood. One person

takes a bite and means it, not a nibble

but a devotion, we are locusts

after all. Then the others,

until the body is clothed

with unspeaking ghosts

of mouths, the body an absence

bearing absences. The bite. The soul.

The swallow. Eating the hours

she filled, the shadow she cast. And I.

I should have.

He was made to touch a corpse as a child. His aunt's. Mother's side. When he was very young, he'd hear that phrase — she's from your mother's side — and imagine his aunt's head growing from his mother's ribs, tiny like Barbie's. It was not exactly a vision, more of a thought he had, usually late at night. He wondered if his mother had done his aunt's hair like his sister did Barbie's, and asked her one morning, and she laughed, and soon he was older. His mother was crying in the front row. The tan folding chairs creaked when he sat down. A group of men, ties loose, stood near a back door, stepping out now and then for cigarettes. Smoke was alive in the sunlight, curling and twisting up like the woman he saw dance on TV a few nights before, her dress nearly one long scarf. When he put his head against his mother's shoulder, she slid it around to her chest. He was almost too old for this, but no one said anything when he rested his hand on her breast. They sat quite awhile. People came and spoke of his aunt and Heaven and God. He closed his eyes and thought the light he saw inside might be Heaven. It formed a circle and faded, formed a circle and faded, as his mother hushed rosary beads through her hands. He opened his eyes. They stood. His mother kissed his aunt on each cheek and said something in her ear.
Where do the words go in a dead person,
he decided to ask his mother later, but never did. When she drew his hand toward his aunt's face, he didn't resist. He was like water being lead to water. Drink this, feel. She felt like nothing, he would tell a woman in college, their backs to the wall as they sat in bed. She'd asked what he meant by nothing. It was just that, as if in the silence of her skin, all possibilities had been taken away. But they had just made love and he didn't want to bruise their warmth.
The opposite of this,
he said, putting a finger to the mole on her knee. The rest of the afternoon, it was as if someone had said to them,
Here are the brand-new bodies. Open them.

Do the one where you bring the woman

back from the dead, his host, the king, commanded,

but the magician would not.

He did the one in which he was one half

of the folk-indie duo Heartwind.

He did the one that required a volunteer tornado

from the audience.

He did the one in which the lungs of a warlord

are filled with lava.

But he would not bring the woman back from the dead.

The king wanted to cut his head off

but the queen said,
Perhaps this is just a poem.

This is just a poem.

Everyone is alive as long as the poem is alive.

The king wears a crown of a thousand crows.

The queen keeps three lovers inside the castle

of her dress, the third a spare for the second,

the second a technical advisor to the first.

The magician's tongue is nothing but the word

abracadabra
and the dead woman has just written

cotton candy
on her shopping list, just written

antelopes
and reminded the poet

he is running out of things to say.

The queen asks him,
Do the one in which your heart

is folded over and pounded with moonlight,

in which you claim to miss everything —

I like how big your arms are in that one,

your throat the size of the universe

before silence gets the last word.

Oh, that one,
the poet says,
is this one
,

is the only one.

Listen to it sound like shucked corn,

like a single blade of grass eating sun,

like any train or noisemaker or hallelujah

that will keep this line from being

the last line, and this line

but not the coming line, the hush,

the crush it is.

The gray pantry moths are back, the morning and I

already guilty of a double murder, then something black

flies and dies in my coffee, I drink anyway

while the insect's past sags and drips on the tip

of the tongue of a spoon, a light

above the sleeping table, the sun hours away

and I'm surrounded by death in poems, gaunt books stacked

unmortared along the walls, I'm home from pre-planning

digging my parents under, dark blue caskets, minimal flowers,

a few of the open questions: when

and who will carry them and was yesterday

the last I'll see them with capable eyes, what leaves

leaves the wonder of whatever resided, a mist, a powder,

certainly we are batteries, engines, storms, weather

our whole lives, soon my origins will resemble grass

when I go home and look down for them, who are brittle now

and not convincing when they speak of years

Beside her death, forsythia. And everywhere

after: hills and storefronts, the dream

of the yellow pencil with which I wrote her name

to keep it lithe in the body of cursive. A sense

of calm, as a drowner who has said yes to water

might float a last bit unruffled by waves,

or like a metronome has grown in my eyes

and to look is to listen to the counting down

in all things: washing my hands, leaning

against a chain-link fence after two hours

of hitting serves, ball in a box, ball in a box,

a kind of sewing of myself into process,

into the distraction of chatter

by flesh, a love of form, suddenly,

how even the espoused shape of a rock

is a meditation. On what, exactly: the grammar

of the earth? What a palette for loss: forsythia,

redbud, some kind of apple I can never recall,

snow-capped trees on an eighty-degree day. I feel

I'm a mile above spring on a wire, trying to breathe

with an honor that doesn't offend balance,

that earns me in this second the next second

in which her life is my missing of her life.

Far below, yellow dot after yellow dot

leads me to the conclusion I like yellow

better now that it has come to me from so many

directions, from so deep a sleep

and touched me brightly/softly with its inadvertent

there there.

I recorded the woods and played this listening

back to the woods and wondered why we call it

playing catch and not playing throw.

The sound of goldenrod reminded me

that an empty shirtsleeve takes after a flute. Leaving a bar

twenty-eight years later, I realized

Betty Caulder was talking to me in handsprings

as a child I couldn't hear. Drunken stars

have been the kind of friends to nod and listen.

I never get this right: stars or planets

shimmer? Is shimmer the word for seeming always

about to break into song? Shimmering rocks,

shimmering dirt, the shimmering sense

that if I stopped wondering what follows this,

I'd feel a part, not apart. All I'd have asked,

my Incan heart removed from my chest,

is that the priest hold it to my ear

so I could hear myself inhabit the quiet.

Dear whisper: tell me a story

in which the hole is the hero. What falls

out, what reaches through.

Trying to decide what's as beautiful

as a bucket of nails on a deck, rain by rust

almost blood-colored, almost life

starting over from nothing, I pick the moment

I didn't kill a milk snake, diverted

the spade at the last, harmlessly cutting

the ground, finally knowing the difference

between bright and poisonous. Or when

I realized
she loves me, she loves me not

explains why daisies avoid us

as often as they can, I say
Run, simple flower,

away from my need to know

anything at all, everything

would be better.
Or when

I was given an electron microscope

by the Tooth Fairy, that was beautiful

too, to sleep painfully

on a deeper seeing, and wake, and cut

my mother's tongue to show her the cells

by which she told me,
Your toast

is ready, sweetie.
Which it was

every morning, buttered and jammed

and cut in half, an application

of disorder that created

a different sense of order. As when Chartres

is broken into a thousand

puzzle pieces and becomes

a system on a table

more interesting when a piece or two

or three go missing.

The fact of an end, of gone having a moment, coordinates at which I stood

and have since lived stuck, looking then and now down at a bed, looking then

and now for an arm to move as an arm had moved, we say countless

though I could have counted the times, looking there when there has ceased

to be a place, looking when when when has ceased to be a point, is an always, a virus

of memory. And then she was aperture, pore, mouth, anus, vagina, was the opened Earth

and I was Orpheus, I am Orpheus, please the removal of my head to the river, the severing

of my singing tumbling all the way to the forgetting sea.

My thoughts are with you.

They're the left sleeve of the white shirt in your closet,

at the far end, away from the other disguises of flesh.

The twist tie in your ponytail when all else fails.

I am here, weeks of walking away, Ohio and skin

between us, West Virginia and strip mines, I'd hate to count

the rivers, how many other women

with their dying mothers,

their long nights at the picnic table

with stars and the stars of cigarettes again

after so many years of no.

But my thoughts are there and my thoughts

are hands washing the oatmeal pot, taking out the diapers, breath

should come with a warning,

YOU WILL RAISE YOUR MOTHER INTO DEATH LIKE A CHILD

but you would, anyway, breathe.

Breathe and drop a red ball into a lake,

breathe and go to the prom,

breathe and throw a party for the house when the mortgage

has lost its teeth.

And there you are, old.

And as everyone else quits breathing, you keep on.

And then it's your turn to stop.

And in the second you do, you know something you can't tell us,

about after, about the story of here.

And your daughter, looking at your face, has no idea

you're trying to comfort her.

And you have no idea I'm trying to comfort you.

I love how intimate I've become with failure.

That leaves, having given up green for brown, sky for earth,

say things when I walk through them.

Gibberish, I think it's called.

Like my thoughts after six hundred miles of travel,

that shutter banging in wind, that dog

barking at nothing

because every time he's barked at nothing,

nothing's gone wrong and why not keep it that way?

Out here, no one would know

if I set the bit of human jaw I found under the house

on the grass above a dress, a flowered dress I stretch

to the full length of wind and walk away, giving memory

some privacy. A dress that appeared one morning

after a storm, beside the woman who'd been wearing it,

who asked if this was her life or some other window

being opened, and left before I could answer,

almost as if I'm making her and this poem and my past

up as I go, to help me feel nothing

goes to waste, not even waste.

My wife gave me a tie made of the thread

of life. I was afraid to wear a tie

made of the thread of life. That it would snag.

That I'd spill coffee on it. But I wore it,

and every person who looked at it

saw something different. One

a waterfall, one a lava flow, one a forest

primeval. Coming home, I took it off

and forgot it on the bus. When I told

my wife, she laughed and said,

Did you really think I'd give you a tie

made of the thread of life? That was a tie

made of silk, which is the memory

of cocoons, which are wombs, you were wearing

birth.
I told her her thoughts

are the happy childhood I didn't have.

The sun was in her hair, where it stayed

until she combed it out that night.