Poems

Deathsongs

1

I hear a long word flying low against its edges. Every wing that ever curved through the sky, fluttered, dropped on the ground demands its rightful name.Listen.



The songs we sing for the dead are always losing their words. New words come quickly, filling the ground as leaves do. They find us, muffle us, trick us into believing they were always there.



If we planted a word in the ground it would creep the length of the garden at night. In each dim window there might be a face, in each bed a sleeper waiting. Who but the dead could pick such a word, hold it, put it in our ready hands?



2

The air in graveyards is rich and thick with the voices of the dead. Like clabbered cream holding a spoon, this air, too, holds us, upright.

Let these noisy breaths we breathe nourish us, as they expand our lungs with death.



3

Each night as we lie down, we put on the faces of the dead. When we wake, they are singing.

Our mouths are long and new. What word, what shapely refrain do they grant us?



4

All my life, I’ve been waiting for something that brushed my face before I was born. Sometimes I think it will be a white sound ringing through me fast as lightning. Sometimes a hand, clenched in a fist that will punch me into clarity. And sometimes a perfect wing arching out of nowhere, beating the air around my head, taking my breath making me gasp and cry mercy, mercy.



Yortzeit: Aunt Mary



Tonight the candle in the glass burns for you, like a hot mouth sucking a hole in the dark. It’s burned thirty hours, already longer than it should.



I remember how another night, you stood in an angry doorway nodding too late.

You told me all the ways the milk in a woman’s breasts could go sour, then turned out the light.



In the fading picture, you crouch, your hand like a hook on a dog’s back, caught in a shaft of light twenty years before I was born.

You remind me of a child. Oh child, you whispered, the milky darkness swallows us all without our consent.



Now you burn and burn, impersonal, sweet light washing my walls.

I can make of your shining absence a sustenance or a story, but not the glassblower’s breath I’d need to blow the candle out.



In the Swaying Field



Now a man on his porch raises his hands in the air over his head. In the swaying field below, the dogs stand still.



He turns the air dark with his separate fingers then cuts it with two handsto whiteness. Now the dogs dance the movement of his hands they dance in light arcs as if they could climb the distance out of longing, as if nothing else mattered.



Now:

This is transformation this is the night blinding its double this is the hands of a man like luminous paths of stars pushing past desire rushing clear through the dark circling dogs dancing in the web of a field this is the hands of a man this is dogs cradled in darkness this is our lives swaying in a field of stars, holding, moving toward us.



These Branches, These Trees



Porchlight, plum blossom, the green glider pushing through folds of air: it is easiest to remember branches, caught in the slipknot of spring snagged with regret.



Small breeze fluttering curtains in the open windows, my father’s house in a thicket of trees, drifting all night, swelling in the boned air. These branches belong to the trees of the dead.



There are stars buried in the roots of these trees, waiting patiently in Crosshatch and murmur, ancestors shaped like five-fingered hands, waiting still to take hold of the air, waiting to shine.