Tag Archives: grief
Ancestral
Subject to a bygone majesty, the blood born in Lancashire twelve generations back wants to hear the bells toll, wants to line the somber roads of slow procession, pay homage to the oak coffin draped in the Royal Standard, occupy this mute ancestral grief with reverence, with respect gone from these brazen, broken Colonies, wants […]
The young farmer’s widow considers the harvest
You say nothing and what could you, what words can tongue the abruptly absent body? You will long for shock once it dissipates, but now this fearful frenzy, all that must be done when nothing can be done: the obit, the funeral, receiving the food, the cards. Helplessness weights the air like humidity in storm-bruised […]
Epilogue
Mostly, you nearly told the truth. Sometimes. I never knew if you knew the difference, only that in the end, I couldn’t tell whether you exhaled sewage or bagels, only that your mouth was not made for kissing. Before, in love, I thought: Let our poem survive the stanzas I don’t understand. After, I understood […]
Somewhere, swallowtails
A half-second, maybe. No more. You hang in the air, a question too pretty to diminish with answers, wings opening and closing on the hinge of your thorax, bright lemon and black; cyan patches, splashes of orange. Black, too, those perfect points, limned in light. A half-second to see you; a half-second — no more […]
In praise of dead fathers,
the clarity of their absence. Does enough of you remain to shoulder the dulled implement, excavate some shard of horror at your disappeared life? No. Your fluid, nimble brain has gone porous and brittle, and what can you see in the attenuating dark? This is you now, slumped in the wheel chair, confused and compliant, a […]
When it breaks
When it breaks, may it break well for you. When grief stills your tongue, may it be consoled by a Hostess Ho Ho, a pale ale, a dry red or dark roast. By anything that comforts, may your silent tongue be comforted. When it breaks, may it break well for you. May your surviving […]
After you died
there commenced a grief of indeterminate nature wily and severe ambushing from hidden corners retreating and regrouping I thought I knew all the secret places from which the heart blossoms or breaks this sorrow has about it the completeness of joy its heedless spontaneity and how does one bear such rigorous purity the necessary incoherence […]
All will be well
My little black hen trails me, agitated by tectonic shifts in her young body: ova gathering, releasing, moving through the dark tunnel of her maturity. She has laid two eggs; still, the strange sensations trouble her. And why not? It is hard to lose your childhood, the first and least consolable grief. I cradle her, […]
Tempest
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. — C.S. Lewis Four a.m. and the black wind thrashes implodes pauses resumes half-awake I quake like a primitive acute with smallness trembling with my part of the damage her warm weight and rumbling benediction have sweetened my life for years now my old […]
Lot’s wife reflects
Grief, she thought, permeates everything, may bind and cast salt in the shape of a woman. And what of the backward look? Shall I not gaze upon what I love what I leave what I lose? Flesh, she thought, is wasted on those who flee the God of their fears and gone from me now, […]
Meditatio Ephemera 