keep singing

My brother Pete died fifteen years ago in March, which is kind of crazy to think about. How can it have been fifteen years? How has it only been fifteen years? (Maybe less the second one, but later this month I turn 41, which is the age he was when he died, and that sure makes me feel some type of way.) Grief is a very strange thing, and sometimes poetry helps me understand it better, or at least feel less alone in something that is often isolating, even while being completely universal. Since 2012—or 2011, I guess, if you count the original day—I've been posting grief poems on April 5, the anniversary of the day we held his memorial.

This poem is from Gregory Orr's How Beautiful the Beloved, which is a whole book of perfect little gems like this one.

Grief will come to you.
Grip and cling all you want,
It makes no difference.

Catastrophe? It's just waiting to happen.
Loss? You can be certain of it.

Flow and swirl of the world.
Carried along as if by a dark current.

All you can do is keep swimming;
All you can do is keep singing.

—Gregory Orr, "Grief will come to you," from How Beautiful the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2008).

one big shadow and one small

I used to be very against prose poems, but in my more relaxed and slightly less pretentious old age (lol), I've read enough good ones that I've come around. Today is April 5, which isn't exactly my brother's yahrzeit, but is the anniversary of his memorial service, and the day—or one of the days, anyway—when I post a poem that has something to do with grief. So here is a really wonderful prose poem about grief.

I sit with my grief. I mother it. I hold its small, hot hand. I don't say, shhh. I don't say, it is okay. I wait until it is done having feelings. Then we stand and we go wash the dishes. We crack open bedroom doors, step over the creaks, and kiss the children. We are sore from this grief, like we've returned from a run, like we are training for a marathon. I'm with you all the way, says my grief, whispering, and then we splash our face with water and stretch, one big shadow and one small.

—Callista Buchen, "Taking Care," from Look Look Look (Black Lawrence Press, 2019)

burning light

Every poem in Eavan Boland's The Historians is amazing, but this is the very first one in the collection and I read it and was like, "well, I guess I'm posting this one," and then I put like 15 more flags in the book for the future.

She loved silver, she loved gold,
my mother. She spoke about the influence
of metals, the congruence of atoms,
the art classes where she learned
these things: think of it
she would say as she told me
to gild any surface a master craftsman
had to meld gold with mercury,
had to heat both so one was volatile,
one was not
and to do it right
had to separate them and then
burn, burn, burn mercury
until it fled and left behind
a skin of light. The only thing, she added—
but what came after I forgot.

What she spent a lifetime forgetting
could be my subject:
the fenced-in small towns of Leinster,
the coastal villages where the language
of the sea was handed on,
phrases bruised by storms,
by shipwrecks. But isn't.
My subject is the part wishing plays in
the way villages are made
to vanish, in the way I learned
to separate memory from knowledge,
so one was volatile, one was not
and how I started writing,
burning light,
building heat until all at once
I was the fire glider
ready to lay radiance down,
ready to decorate it happened
with it never did when
all at once I remember what it was
she said: the only thing is
it is extremely dangerous.

—Eavan Boland (1944-2020), "The Fire Glider," poem I. from "The Historians," which is in turn from The Historians, 2020.

fragrant is the blossom

Ten years ago today, we held the memorial service for my brother, Pete, who died on March 26, 2011. 2011 was my fifth year doing National Poetry Month, and the poems helped. As is often the case, in difficult years, they gave me a kind of lifeline, a rhythm: even when I felt awful, I tried to post poems. Since 2012, I've posted a poem about death, or grief, or both—some more tangential than others—on April 5, as an anniversary. This one is a classic.

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 (1892-1950), "Dirge Without Music," from Collected Poems, 1928.

dolphins crossing the horizon

I missed yesterday, but here is a poem for today. 

Three times she bit the Atlantic but only once barked at thunder.

Lonely thunder and now her teeth-marks float to sea.

This is her first trip to how Ocracoke Island smells

and the ocean, I'll count my encounters 

with the wide, ineffable appetite as I go to bed, 

with the factory of liquid fold and unfold, 

there was Kittery in the morning and the tent-eating tide,

the naked bland Greek crotches of Sfakia. 

My dog is realizing she doesn't like salt water, I 

that a spiritual person could see angels in white winged waves, 

just as another might think of beer. Drunken angels abound. 

I had an actual dream last night, not a, to loosen 

the imaginative stops, I need to invite Carl Jung into the poem 

kind of dream, but my father and I and other men 

tried to save a crop that was probably just suburban 

crewcut lawn grass. I didn't know what to do 

and bleated questions until my father said that asking was rude. 

Which is when I tried to kill him, kill the idea 

that to not know but want to, that to ask, 

to form the voice into waves flowing out from mind, was wrong, 

and couldn't kill him because when I tried to lift 

so I could smash him down, he was heavy as Icarus falling 

and I woke to the sense of a shape breathing the darkness

of the room. I drove eleven hours to remember 

only the second dream in my life. A few feet to my right, 

a ghost crab pitches sand from a hole, its eyes 

on stalks above its sideways life. Sanderlings 

skitter wet sand and with their long bills, probe 

for small crustaceans, I dug one out yesterday 

as water trickled home, sunlight ballrooming 

on its shattering surface, the creature was white 

and writhed, the size of what I pick from my navel 

at the end of the day. My first thought was that I needed 

a name, a sound to wrap around the image, to which I'd attach 

other breaths, breaths of how it lives and what it eats, 

and immediately wanted to know nothing 

except how it felt on my skin, the smallest kiss 

to ever cross my fingerprint. Eleven hours 

to close my eyes and have them turn around. 

At this rate, I'll recall one more dream before I die. 

In the distance, black triangles surface and submerge, 

dolphins crossing the horizon like the teeth 

of a saw cutting this ocean from an ocean that has asked 

to sail away.

—Bob Hicock, "Rising dream tide," originally published—I believe—in the Spring 2006 issue of Ploughshares, although I definitely got it from wintercreek.