should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn’t
be so hard.
Kay Ryan
DIRGE WITHOUT MUSIC
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
ORPHANED OLD
I feel less lucky since my parents died.
Father first, then mother, have left me
out in a downpour
roofless in cold wind
no umbrella no hood no hat no warm
native place, nothing
between me and eyeless sky.
In the gritty prevailing wind
I think of times I’ve carelessly lost things:
that white-gold ring when I was eight,
a classmate named Mercedes Williams,
my passport in Gibraltar,
my maiden name.
Marie Ponsot
While our parents are still alive, they somehow protect us even as we ourselves age. With their deaths, nothing stands between us and oblivion. Much of our loss is what they take with them—who we were as children, our history. Their deaths bring to mind other losses, both commonplace and profound.
IN VIEW OF THE FACT
The people of my time are passing away: my
wife is baking for a funeral, a 60-year-old who
died suddenly, when the phone rings, and it’s
Ruth we care so much about in intensive care:
it was once weddings that came so thick and
fast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo:
now, it’s this that and the other and somebody
else gone or on the brink: well, we never
thought we would live forever (although we did)
and now it looks like we won’t: some of us
are losing a leg to diabetes, some don’t know
what they went downstairs for, some know that
a hired watchful person is around, some like
to touch the cane tip into something steady,
so nice: we have already lost so many,
brushed the loss of ourselves ourselves: our
address books for so long a slow scramble now
are palimpsests, scribbles and scratches: our
index cards for Christmases, birthdays,
Halloweens drop clean away into sympathies:
at the same time we are getting used to so
many leaving, we are hanging on with a grip
to the ones left: we are not giving up on the
congestive heart failure or brain tumors, on
the nice old men left in empty houses or on
the widows who decide to travel a lot: we
think the sun may shine someday when we’ll
drink wine together and think of what used to
be: until we die we will remember every
single thing, recall every word, love every
loss: then we will, as we must, leave it to
others to love, love that can grow brighter
and deeper till the very end, gaining strength
and getting more precious all the way.…
A. R. Ammons
THE LAST THINGS
Of course there’s always a last everything.
The last meal, the last drink, the last sex.
The last meeting with a friend. The last
stroking of the last cat, the last
sight of a son or daughter. Some would be more
It’s not knowing that makes it all so piquant.
A good many lasts have taken place already.
Then there are last words, variously reported,
such as: Don’t let poor Nelly starve. Or:
I think I could eat one of Bellamy’s veal pies.
If there were time I’d incline to a summary:
Alcohol made my life shorter but more interesting.
My father said (not last perhaps): Say goodbye to Gavin.
Gavin Ewart
ONE ART
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is not disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Elizabeth Bishop
This poem is a villanelle, an originally French form of verse consisting of five three-line stanzas, or tercets, and one concluding four-line stanza, or quatrain. The nineteen-line poem uses only two rhymes; the first and third lines of the first stanza alternate as refrains in the following stanzas and are repeated as the final two lines of the poem.
Obviously this poetic form is complicated and presents a real challenge to its author. But when it works, as here, the repetitions and subtle variations of rhyme and meaning and the escalation of emotion make it both powerful and memorable.
DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas
Like the previous poem, this, too, is a villanelle. At first hearing, preferably as recited by Thomas himself, the listener is carried away by its hypnotic intricacy.
THOSE–DYING THEN
Those–dying then,
Knew where they went–
They went to God’s Right Hand–
That Hand is amputated now
And God cannot be found–
The abdication of Belief
Makes the Behavior small–
Better an ignis fatuus
Than no illume at all–
Emily Dickinson
“Ignis fatuus,” a Latin phrase, literally translates as “foolish fire.” It is used in the sense of “will-o’-the-wisp”—something deluding or deceptive. A will-o’-the-wisp is a ghostly light sometimes seen over marshes that recedes as travelers approach it and leads them to stray off their path. This painful conflict between lack of and hunger for religious belief pervades many of Dickinson’s poems.
EXCEPT
Now that you have gone
and I am alone and quiet,
my contentment would be
complete, if I did not wish
you were here so I could say,
“How good it is, Tanya,
to be alone and quiet.”
Wendell Berry
MARY NO MORE
Yesterday, the day you died,
Was dark and wet. The sky wept.
It was easy to leave such a miserable place,
Damp and cold, the woods almost black at noon.
But today! O Mary
The world is washed clean and bright;
The air is clear and fresh;
The sun falls in pools of light on the lawn;
Everything is new again, restored to health.
Look, if you had lived,
At what you would see!
I think you are still here,
Looking through my eyes
At what you have left,
Calling on me to attend to it,
To all of it in your absence.
Mary Ann Hoberman
I wrote this poem when I was in my thirties. Mary was a neighbor, the mother of three friends of my three children. It was the first time I experienced the death of a contemporary who was also a wife and mother, and I felt it very deeply. Coincidentally fifty years later, one of my dearest friends, also named Mary, died on a dark, rainy day. I was with her at the time of her death, and at that very moment the sun appeared. I read this poem at her memorial.
FATHER
May 19, 1999
Today you would be ninety-seven
if you had lived, and we would all be
miserable, you and your children,
driving from clinic to clinic,
an ancient, fearful hypochondriac
and his fretful son and daughter,
asking directions, trying to read
the complicated, fading map of cures.
But with your dignity intact
you have been gone for twenty years,
and I am glad for all of us, although
I miss you every day—the heartbeat
under your necktie, the hand cupped
on the back of my neck, Old Spice
in the air, your voice delighted with stories.
On this day each year you loved to relate
that at the moment of your birth
your mother glanced out the window
and saw lilacs in bloom. Well, today
lilacs are blooming in side yards
all over Iowa, still welcoming you.
Ted Kooser
The conflict between the wish to prolong an ailing loved one’s life as long as possible and the misery too often attendant on such a prolongation is a familiar one. Here the son imagines the scenario had his father gone on living and is grateful that it did not play out. Instead, he can rejoice in the memories of his father each year as the lilacs bloom again on his birthday.
CLEARANCES (EXCERPT)
in memoriam M.K.H., 1911–1984
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.
Seamus Heaney
This memory of quiet intimacy between mother and son, sharing a familiar and homely household task, is contrasted with the bombast of formulaic prayer and behavior at her bedside as she lay dying.
OH ANTIC GOD
oh antic God
return to me
my mother in her thirties
leaned across the front porch
the huge pillow of her breasts
pressing against the rail
summoning me in for bed.
I am almost the dead woman’s age times two.
I can barely recall her song
the scent of her hands
though her wild hair scratches my dreams
at night. return to me, oh Lord of then
and now, my mother’s calling,
her young voice humming my name.
Lucille Clifton
An arbitrary God is here called to account for acting in inexplicable ways. “Antic,” as originally defined, meant “grotesque” or “bizarre.”
PARTING WITH A VIEW
I don’t reproach the spring
for starting up again.
I can’t blame it
for doing what it must
year after year.
I know that my grief
will not stop the green.
The grass blade may bend
but only in the wind.
It doesn’t pain me to see
that clumps of alders above the water
have something to rustle with again.
I take note of the fact
that the shore of a certain lake
is still—as if you were living—
as lovely as before.
I don’t resent
the view for its vista
of a sun-dazzled bay.
I am even able to imagine
some not-us
sitting at this minute
on a fallen birch trunk.
I respect their right
to whisper, laugh,
and lapse into happy silence.
I can even allow
that they are bound by love
and that he holds her
with a living arm.
Something freshly birdish
starts rustling in the reeds.
I sincerely want them
to hear it.
I don’t require changes
from the surf,
now diligent, now sluggish,
obeying not me.
I expect nothing
from the depths near the woods,
first emerald,
then sapphire,
then black.
There’s one thing I won’t agree to:
my own return.
The privilege of presence—
I give it up.
I survived you by enough,
and only by enough,
to contemplate from afar.
Wislawa Szymborska
(translated from the Polish by
Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)
“GOOD NIGHT, WILLIE LEE, I’LL SEE YOU IN T
HE MORNING”
Looking down into my father’s
dead face
for the last time
my mother said without
tears, without smiles
without regrets
but with civility
“Good night, Willie Lee, I’ll see you
in the morning.”
And it was then I knew that the healing
of all our wounds
is forgiveness
that permits a promise
of our return
at the end.
Alice Walker
The apparent simplicity of this brief poem belies its hard-earned wisdom about death and forgiveness.
6
“INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY”
If we are lucky enough to live a long life, youth and age are at the opposite ends of a continuum. When we are young, age is a foreign country, one we expect to visit but not for a long time. And when we eventually arrive there, we see that even if we did give it some thought, most of our speculations were off the mark.
Focusing only on our fear of death may prevent us from realizing the positive aspects of this last period of life. In our youth-centered culture, age is considered a negative: whatever wisdom it may offer cannot compensate for the physical and mental losses we sustain. In Western society this is the common viewpoint. But it is not the only one; and it need not be the one we choose to abide by.
The last years are as much a part of life as the first ones and can be equally meaningful. And while youth cannot know what it is to be old, the opposite does not hold true. It is only in old age that the whole of life becomes visible and may be seen in its entirety. Why ignore this precious gift of perspective?
The afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning;
only, its meaning and purpose are different.
Carl Jung
FINALLY
(in memory of Theo Moszynski)
This is what I tell myself: you are gone
On a journey, somewhere far away, perhaps
China, somewhere where they love small children,
Somewhere calm and warm, and golden
Like you, smiling, somewhere you are loved
The way you were here with us, the way
You still are. And I tell myself you are young