Until something like this, some Harold Brodkey wandering into your mind,
as exasperating as ever, and, oh my, as brilliant, as charming, unwound from his web
to confront you with how ridden you are with unthought regret, how diminished,
how well you’ll know you’ll clink on to the next rationalization, the next loss, the next lie.
C.K. WILLIAMS (b. 1936)
Years go by
(FROM Poem without a title)
Father I say. Dad? You again?
I take your arm, your elbow,
I turn you around in the dark and I say
go back now, you’re sleepwalking again,
you’re talking out loud again, talking in tongues
and your dream is disturbing my dream.
And none of this is any of your apples,
and even now as the centuries begin to happen
I can say: go away, you and all your violence.
Shush, now, old man.
Time to go back to your seat in the one-and-nines,
to your black bench on the Esplanade,
your name and your dates on a metal plate, back
to your own deckchair on the pier, your very own
kitchen chair tipped back on the red kitchen tiles
and you asleep, your feet up on the brass fender
and the fire banked, your cheek cocked
to the radio set, this is the 9 o’clock news Dad.
It’s time. It’s long past it.
Time to go back up the long pale corridor
there’s no coming back from.
KEN SMITH (1938-2003)
I See You Dancing, Father
No sooner downstairs after the night’s rest
And in the door
Than you started to dance a step
In the middle of the kitchen floor.
And as you danced
You whistled.
You made your own music
Always in tune with yourself.
Well, nearly always, anyway.
You’re buried now
In Lislaughtin Abbey
And whenever I think of you
I go back beyond the old man
Mind and body broken
To find the unbroken man.
It is the moment before the dance begins,
Your lips are enjoying themselves
Whistling an air.
Whatever happens or cannot happen
In the time I have to spare
I see you dancing, father.
BRENDAN KENNELLY (b. 1936)
In Memory of My Mother
I do not think of you lying in the wet clay
Of a Monaghan graveyard; I see
You walking down a lane among the poplars
On your way to the station, or happily
Going to second Mass on a summer Sunday –
You meet me and you say:
‘Don’t forget to see about the cattle –’
Among your earthiest words the angels stray.
And I think of you walking along a headland
Of green oats in June,
So full of repose, so rich with life –
And I see us meeting at the end of a town
On a fair day by accident, after
The bargains are all made and we can walk
Together through the shops and stalls and markets
Free in the oriental streets of thought.
O you are not lying in the wet clay,
For it is a harvest evening now and we
Are piling up the ricks against the moonlight
And you smile up at us – eternally.
PATRICK KAVANAGH (1904-67)
The Dead
The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.
They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.
BILLY COLLINS (b. 1941)
Resurrection
Is it true that after this life of ours we shall one day be awakened
by a terrifying clamour of trumpets?
Forgive me, God, but I console myself
that the beginning and resurrection of all of us dead
will simply be announced by the crowing of the cock.
After that we’ll remain lying down a while…
The first to get up
will be Mother… We’ll hear her
quietly laying the fire,
quietly putting the kettle on the stove
and cosily taking the teapot out of the cupboard.
We’ll be home once more.
VLADIMÍR HOLAN (1905-80)
translated from the Czech by George Theiner
Eden Rock
They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.
My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.
She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight
From an old H.P. sauce bottle, a screw
Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out
The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.
The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.
My mother shades her eyes and looks my way
Over the drifted stream. My father spins
A stone along the water. Leisurely,
They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is!
Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’
I had not thought that it would be like this.
CHARLES CAUSLEY (b. 1917)
Inside Our Dreams
Where do people go to when they die?
Somewhere down below or in the sky?
‘I can’t be sure,’ said Grandad, ‘but it seems
They simply set up home inside our dreams.’
JEANNE WILLIS (b. 1959)
Song
Hari is a dhobi
takes in
all stained souls.
In the river
of his love,
with the soap
of his peace
glowing
iridescent in the sun
he washes
every one.
No envious smear
returns.
The souls
he’s done
are like muslin
when worn, says Meera.
MEERA (16th century poet-saint)
translated from the Rajasthani version of Hindu
by Shama Futehally
Haiku
White butterfly
darting among pinks –
whose spirit?
SHIKI (1867-1902)
translated from the Japanese
by Lucien Stryk & Takashi Ikemoto
6
Nothing Dies
RELEASE & LETTING GO
Your essence was not born and will not die. It is neither being nor nonbeing. It is not a void nor does it have form. It experiences neither pleasure nor pain. If you ponder what it is in you that feels the pain of this sickness, and beyond that you do not think or desire or ask anything, and if your mind dissolves like vapour in the sky, then the path to rebirth is blocked and the moment of insta
nce release has come.
BASSUI
Total annihilation is impossible. We are the prisoners of an infinity without outlet, wherein nothing perishes, wherein everything is dispersed, but nothing lost. Neither a body nor a thought can drop out of the universe, out of time and space. Not an atom of our flesh, not a quiver of our nerves, will go where they will cease to be, for there is no place where anything ceases to be…It is as contradictory to the nature of our reason and probably of all imaginable reason to conceive nothingness as to conceive limits to infinity.
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
MANY POEMS show our lives as following the natural cycles of the Earth, and when autumn comes, it is time to let go, for winter will be followed by rebirth in spring. We must believe in the possibility of resurrection at the same time as we accept the inevitability of withdrawal, for death is not only inescapable but a defining force in life itself; as American poet Louise Glück has written: ‘Human beings must be taught to love / silence and darkness.’ The poems in this section reflect a range of beliefs: for some, resurrection is followed by reincarnation: ‘Why cling to one life till it is oiled and ragged?’ asks Rumi (82); while for others it involves living on through children or spiritual renewal. That sense of letting go also informs poems which view death as a welcome release from painful illness or from the prison of old age, but death can also be welcomed when life has been lived to the full: ‘I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world,’ writes Mary Oliver in ‘When Death Comes’ (83).
After Great Pain
After great pain a formal feeling comes –
The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;
The stiff Heart questions – was it He that bore?
And yesterday – or centuries before?
The feet mechanical
Go round a wooden way
Of ground or air or Ought, regardless grown,
A quartz contentment like a stone.
This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived,
As freezing persons recollect the snow –
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.
EMILY DICKINSON (1830-96)
In Blackwater Woods
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
MARY OLIVER (b. 1935)
from Song of Myself
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the comers, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
WALT WHITMAN (1819-82)
Unmarked Boxes
Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round
in another form. The child weaned from mother’s milk
now drinks wine and honey mixed.
God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
till one day it cracks them open.
Part of the self leaves the body when we sleep
and changes shape. You might say, ‘Last night
I was a cypress tree, a small bed of tulips,
a field of grapevines.’ Then the phantasm goes away.
You’re back in the room.
I don’t want to make anyone fearful.
Hear what’s behind what I say.
Tatatumtum, tatum, tatadum.
There’s the light gold of wheat in the sun
and the gold of bread made from that wheat.
I have neither. I’m only talking about them,
as a town in the desert looks up
at stars on a clear night.
RUMI (1207-73)
translated from the Persian by Coleman Barks with John Moyne
The Creation
Now that I know you are gone
I have to try, like Rauschenberg,
to rub out, line by line,
your picture, feeling as I rub
the maker’s most inhuman
joy, seeing as I rub
the paper’s slow, awful return
to possibility.
Five times you screamed and won
from your short body a big boy
or a tall girl to join
the rest of us here,
and now let daughter or son
wear all that’s left of your face
when this drawing’s undone.
It is hard, heavy work.
The pencil indented the grain
of the paper, and I scour
a long time on a cheekbone
that doesn’t want to disappear,
hoping my fingers won’t learn
its line from going over and over
it. I replace your chin
with dead white.
Once, in a little vain
coquettishness, you joined
your party late, hair down
to your waist, and let the men
watch you twist it around
to a blonde rope and pin
the richness of its coils
into a familiar bun.
And now I make you bald
with my abrasion.
The hours we had to drink
before you’d put the dinner on!
My eraser’s wet with sweat
as it moves on a frown
of long, tipsy decision:
were we all so drunk
it didn’t matter, or should you strain
the Mornay sauce?
Already we are worn,
the eraser and I, and we
are nearing your eyes. Your garden