Originally posted by Pianoman1Exquisite and especially meaningful and timely: my dear wife Evelyn of twenty three memorable years departed this life on this date January 9, 2003, in Northern California of improperly diagnosed pancreatic cancer. Thank you, Pianoman1.
Sparse breaths, then none -
and it was done.
Listening and hugging hard,
between mouthings
of sweet next-to-nothings
into her ear —
pillow-talk-cum-prayer —
I never heard
the precise cadence
into silence
that argued the end.
Yet I knew it had happened.
Ultimate calm.
Gingerly, as if
loth to disturb it,
I released my arm
from its stiff ...[text shortened]... hs, or more,
I observe it still.
Christopher Reid
(on the death of his wife in 2005)
Poem in Prose
This poem is for my wife.
I have made it plainly and honestly:
The mark is on it
Like the burl on the knife.
I have not made it for praise.
She has no more need for praise
Than summer has
Or the bright days.
In all that becomes a woman
Her words and her ways are beautiful:
Love's lovely duty,
the well-swept room.
Wherever she is there is sun
And time and a sweet air:
Peace is there,
Work done.
There are always curtains and flowers
And candles and baked bread
And a cloth spread
And a clean house.
Her voice when she sings is a voice
At dawn by a freshening spring
Where the wave leaps in the wind
And rejoices.
Wherever she is it is now.
It is here where the apples are:
Here in the stars,
In the quick hour.
The greatest and richest good,
My own life to live in,
This she has given me --
If giver could.
Archibald MacLeish
Widower MacLeish reading his own poem:
Shifting the Sun
When your father dies, say the Irish,
you lose your umbrella against bad weather.
May his sun be your light, say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the Welsh,
you sink a foot deeper into the earth.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the Canadians,
you run out of excuses. May you inherit
his sun, say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the French,
you become your own father.
May you stand up in his light, say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the Indians,
he comes back as the thunder.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the Russians,
he takes your childhood with him.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the English,
you join his club you vowed you wouldn't.
May you inherit his sun, say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the Armenians,
your sun shifts forever.
And you walk in his light.
Diana Der-Hovanessian
The Song of Wandering Angus
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dangled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
"The Song of Wandering Angus" by William Butler Yeats,
from The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. © Scribner, 1996
Soul
Never having known an emptiness so heavy!
I am inclined to call it my new-born soul,
though its state may be more an achieved birth than a pregnancy
lodged oddly, for lack of a womb, in a tight gap
behind the sternum, mid thorax, not far from my heart.
Coddled there, it's needy, an energy-eater.
It kicks, or thumps, hollowly, and I come to a standstill,
breathless, my whole internal economy primed
to attend without delay to its nursing and nourishment:
memories, sorrows, remorses are what it feeds on.
Luckily, I have no shortage of these to give it,
so that it can continue its murky labours,
quintessential upheavals, noxious bubblings,
at the bottom of a flask, as it strives to distil pure tears.
Christopher Reid
A Scattering
I expect you've seen the footage: of elephants
finding the bones of one of their kind
dropped by the wayside, picked clean by scavengers
and the sun, then untidily left there,
decide to do something about it.
But what exactly? They can't, of course,
reassemble the old elephant magnificence;
they can't even make a tidier heap. But they can
hook up bones with their trunks and chuck them
this way and that. So they do.
And their scattering has an air
of deliberate ritual, ancient and necessary.
Their great size, too, makes them the very
embodiment of grief, while the play of their trunks
lends sprezzatura.
Elephants puzzling out
the anagram of their own anatomy,
elephants at their abstracted lamentations -
may their spirit guide me as I place
my own sad thoughts in new, hopeful arrangements.
Christopher Reid
A Reasonable Thing to Ask
Please explain tears.
They must have some purpose
that a Darwin or a Freud
would have understood.
Widowed, a man hears
music off the radio -
Handel - Cole Porter -
that sharply recalls her,
and they swamp up again.
A faculty that interferes
with seeing and speaking
and leaves him feeling weaker:
what does he gain by it?
What do we gain by it -
blind to the tiger's leap,
voiceless under the avalanche?
Somebody must know.
Christopher Reid
Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
-W. H. Auden
Commemorates his soul's despair over death. I find it quite interesting that a sophisticated poet employs
the heavy handed A A, B B Rhyming Scheme as if to the desensitize the senses toward sorrow and loss.
A Hundred Years from Now
I'm sorry I won't be around a hundred years from now. I'd like to
see how it all turns out. What language most of you are speaking.
What country is swaggering across the globe. I'm curious to know
if your medicines cure what ails us now. And how intelligent your
children are as they parachute down through the womb. Have
you invented new vegetables? Have you trained spiders to do your
bidding? Have baseball and opera merged into one melodic sport?
A hundred years....My grandfather lived almost that long. The
doctor who came to the farmhouse to deliver him arrived in a
horse-drawn carriage. Do you still have horses?
"A Hundred Years from Now" by David Shumate from Kimonos
in the Closet. © University of Pittsburg Press, 2013
Mind-Body Problem
When I think of my youth I feel sorry not for myself
but for my body. It was so direct
and simple, so rational in its desires,
wanting to be touched the way an otter
loves water, the way a giraffe
wants to amble the edge of the forest, nuzzling
the tender leaves at the tops of the trees. It seems
unfair, somehow, that my body had to suffer
because I, by which I mean my mind, was saddled
with certain unfortunate high-minded romantic notions
that made me tyrannize and patronize it
like a cruel medieval baron, or an ambitious
English-professor husband ashamed of his wife—
Her love of sad movies, her budget casseroles
and regional vowels. Perhaps
my body would have liked to make some of our dates,
to come home at four in the morning and answer my scowl
with "None of your business!" Perhaps
it would have liked more presents: silks, mascaras.
If we had had a more democratic arrangement
we might even have come, despite our different backgrounds,
to a grudging respect for each other, like Tony Curtis
and Sidney Poitier fleeing handcuffed together,
instead of the current curious shift of power
in which I find I am being reluctantly
dragged along by my body as though by some
swift and powerful dog. How eagerly
it plunges ahead, not stopping for anything,
as though it knows exactly where we are going.
"Mind-Body Problem" by Katha Pollitt from The Mind-Body Problem.
© Random House, 2009
Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief
Blue landing lights make
nail holes in the dark.
A fine snow falls. We sit
on the tarmac taking on
the mail, quick freight,
trays of laboratory mice,
coffee and Danish for
the passengers.
Wherever we're going
is Monday morning.
Wherever we're coming from
is Mother's lap.
On the cloud-pack above, strewn
as loosely as parsnip
or celery seeds, lie
the souls of the unborn:
my children's children's
children and their father.
We gather speed for the last run
and lift off into the weather.
"Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief" by Maxine Kumin
from Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief. © Penguin, 1989.
Who Killed Cock Robin?
"Who killed Cock Robin?" "I," said the Sparrow,
"With my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin."
"Who saw him die?" "I," said the Fly,
"With my little eye, I saw him die."
"Who caught his blood?" "I," said the Fish,
"With my little dish, I caught his blood."
"Who'll make the shroud?" "I," said the Beetle,
"With my thread and needle, I'll make the shroud."
"Who'll dig his grave?" "I," said the Owl,
"With my pick and shovel, I'll dig his grave."
"Who'll be the parson?" "I," said the Rook,
"With my little book, I'll be the parson."
"Who'll be the clerk?" "I," said the Lark,
"If it's not in the dark, I'll be the clerk."
"Who'll carry the link?" "I," said the Linnet,
"I'll fetch it in a minute, I'll carry the link."
"Who'll be chief mourner?" "I," said the Dove,
"I mourn for my love, I'll be chief mourner."
"Who'll carry the coffin?" "I," said the Kite,
"If it's not through the night, I'll carry the coffin."
"Who'll bear the pall?" "We," said the Wren,
"Both the cock and the hen, we'll bear the pall."
"Who'll sing a psalm?" "I," said the Thrush,
"As she sat on a bush, I'll sing a psalm."
"Who'll toll the bell?" "I," said the bull,
"Because I can pull, I'll toll the bell."
All the birds of the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,
When they heard the bell toll for poor Cock Robin.
"Who Killed the Cock Robin" by Anonymous. Public domain.
"Famous Love Poem: Pablo Neruda's was born in 1904 in Chile, his real name was Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He wrote in green ink as a symbol of love and desire. Many of his poems have been translated from the original Spanish.
I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You
Pablo Neruda
I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.
I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.
Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.
In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.
* Listen to the poem, "I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You"
http://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/i-do-not-love-you-except-because-i-love-you-by-pablo-neruda
Windchime
She goes out to hang the windchime
in her nightie and her work boots.
It’s six-thirty in the morning
and she’s standing on the plastic ice chest
tiptoe to reach the crossbeam of the porch,
windchime in her left hand,
hammer in her right, the nail
gripped tight between her teeth
but nothing happens next because
she’s trying to figure out
how to switch #1 with #3.
She must have been standing in the kitchen,
coffee in her hand, asleep,
when she heard it—the wind blowing
through the sound the windchime
wasn’t making
because it wasn’t there.
No one, including me, especially anymore believes
till death do us part,
but I can see what I would miss in leaving—
the way her ankles go into the work boots
as she stands upon the ice chest;
the problem scrunched into her forehead;
the little kissable mouth
with the nail in it.
Tony Hoagland, 1953
Love Explained
Guy calls the doctor, says the wife’s
contractions are five minutes apart.
Doctor says, Is this her first child?
guy says, No, it’s her husband.
I promise to try to remember who
I am. Wife gets up on one elbow,
says, I wanted to get married.
It seemed a fulfillment of some
several things, a thing to be done.
Even the diamond ring was some
thing like a quest, a thing they
set you out to get and how insane
the quest is; how you have to turn
it every way before you can even
think to seek it; this metaphysical
refraining is in fact the quest. Who’d
have guessed? She sighs, I like
the predictability of two, I like
my pleasures fully expected,
when the expectation of them
grows patterned in its steady
surprise. I’ve got my sweet
and tumble pat. Here on earth,
I like to count upon a thing
like that. Thus explained
the woman in contractions
to her lover holding on
the telephone for the doctor
to recover from this strange
conversational turn. You say
you’re whom? It is a pleasure
to meet you. She rolls her
eyes, but he’d once asked her
Am I your first lover? and she’d
said, Could be. Your face looks
familiar. It’s the same type of
generative error. The grammar
of the spoken word will flip, let alone
the written, until something new is
in us, and in our conversation.
From Funny by Jennifer Michael Hecht.
Winner of the 2005 Felix Pollack Prize in Poetry.