Elegy Owed Read online

  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.

  Pre-planning

  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

  l ah g

  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.

  Sound scape

  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.

  You name this one

  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.

  A request

  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.

  One of those things we say

  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 ide
a 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?

  Making do

  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.

  The gift

  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.

  Listen

  She ran backward on a ship sailing forward

  toward a man running west on a world

  spinning east, waving at her

  running out of ship waving at him

  running out of her, until finally

  they were so far apart, it was expedient

  to write a novel in which a woman

  tears pages from her notebook and drifts them

  on the sea, which reads the story aloud

  to the moon as it carries the words

  to the wrong man, who dresses himself

  in the novel and walks the countryside,

  until one day, the right man

  finds the wrong man dying

  by the side of the road, and offers him

  water, and reads the wrong man’s chest

  and arms and thighs, the word sun

  in her handwriting casting a shadow

  of the word tree

  A country mapped with invisible ink

  Like we are the hole that grows in poor, unmendable

  nothing: we blind needles: we unmoored threads:

  like feeling I’m the enaction of a waterfall by my tongue

  upon your body, as when a boat is brought to the edge

  of exile and a hand extends to a hand or a tree

  beseeches with its shadeshawl: however born,

  there is reaching, we agree the wind smelled of copper

  one day, a passport the next: like how to escape

  my brain’s slum of words, the ghetto of the said,

  while adoring there the rocks, the teacups,

  if half of me is a Molotov cocktail and half

  the inflection of loss and half a genuflection

  to breath: like wondering if this extra half

  is a country mapped with invisible ink:

  like how windows ask to come along with the going

  and preside over the staying, and I look at them

  with all the love, all the shatter I can muster:

  shards cutting me when I try to put the sky,

  the distance back together: boredom cutting me

  deeper when I don’t: like searching for a man

  in a burning house and finding a piano as echo flees:

  a whetstone still warm from the blade: sheets pressed

  with brainfolds of sleep: a whisper from the bathroom

  of running water: but no body: and I carry

  these things to safety that are not the man: the piano

  in my arms, running water in my mouth, the vespers

  of sleep, the knife, so like a wing, like flight:

  and say of him, that was me, to the ashes, the char:

  and sift the memory of flames for their sorrow,

  holding smoke to the mirror interested only

  in solid dreams: like it will finally see

  what isn’t there and give it my face, this presence

  of absence I have tried and tried not to be

  Elegy to unnamed sources

  Attempts to say a thing:

  Took a day off from breathing

  to see if that would be like talking to you.

  I’ve tasted your ashes twice, once today,

  once tomorrow.

  I study a dead tree that has a living shadow

  made of God and crow shit, it resembles winter

  all summer, what a stark easel the sky

  never asked to be.

  If you see a man chopping down wind,

  it’s me or someone who resembles me, with calluses

  and an untied anchor falling through the ocean of his body.

  A critique of the attempts to say a thing:

  Grief is punch-drunk

  stupid, that’s why we get along, we have the same

  empty IQ, the same silhouette of a scarecrow

  challenging lightning to a duel.

  A final attempt to say a thing:

  It was the worst decision of my life, to hold

  your last breath, to say anything out loud, anything

  in quiet, I should have left it to the professional stabbers

  in white, the professional pokers in squeaky shoes,

  I had no business trying to see you leave, see death

  arrive, I owe you an apology, an elegy, I owe you

  the drift of memory, the praise of everything,

  of saying it was the best decision of my life,

  to hold you full, hold you empty, & live

  as the only bond between the two

  The missing

  They go to the woods, the town, the entire town

  looking for a girl but finding

  a different girl with her own

  missing eyes, her own beetle

  in her mouth. They circle, the town,

  the entire town, this wrong girl

  whose splintered repose

  appears to be running

  against the side of the Earth,

  who makes them imagine

  this same becoming

  for the right girl. We should lift her,

  one is thinking, bury her

  under the modesty of leaves, another,

  and another

  wants to burn the woods, shoot the crows,

  poison the coyotes, and beneath

  those thoughts, wants to touch

  the wrong girl, reach

  where she is open, into death,

  as some would rest their heads

  between the teeth of a lion. They turn,

  the town, the entire town,

  to where the priest

  considers that the closest

  he’s come to a miracle

  is when he backed out of a room,

  the woman naked

  on a bed, smiling, his pants

  undone, his life

&
nbsp; pointing where it had never been.

  He sees them expecting him

  to bring God into the moment

  and wants to tell them, God is here,

  God was here the whole time,

  but instead, makes the sign of the cross

  and asks them to pray silently

  for the girl. Then it’s dark

  but no one leaves, then it’s light

  and they’ve grown accustomed

  to the habits of ants, no one

  wants to let the wrong girl go,

  who is more of a scrap

  every moment, as if they know

  it’s not their mourning

  they tend but the mourning

  of those from another town. Where

  the right girl might be alive

  in a kitchen, reminding the woman

  who asks the right girl

  if she knows her phone number,

  of her own daughter’s

  pride of knowledge, her slow pleasure

  in repeating seven digits, in holding

  what is not real and making it

  seem so, as flesh does,

  until it does not.

  Some recent weather

  The rain is pregnant with a shape

  exactly like you, late to tell your lover