The Dead and the Living Read online

  under their bed the trap-door to the

  cellar, with its barrels of fresh apples, and

  somewhere in me too is the path

  down to the creek gleaming in the dark, a

  way out of there.

  Birthday Poem for My Grandmother

  (for L.B.M.C., 1890–1975)

  I stood on the porch tonight— which way do we

  face to talk to the dead? I thought of the

  new rose, and went out over the

  grey lawn— things really

  have no color at night. I descended

  the stone steps, as if to the place where one

  speaks to the dead. The rose stood

  half-uncurled, glowing white in the

  black air. Later I remembered

  your birthday. You would have been ninety and getting

  roses from me. Are the dead there

  if we do not speak to them? When I came to see you

  you were always sitting quietly in the chair,

  not knitting, because of the arthritis,

  not reading, because of the blindness,

  just sitting. I never knew how you

  did it or what you were thinking. Now I

  sometimes sit on the porch, waiting,

  trying to feel you there like the color of the

  flowers in the dark.

  Of All the Dead That Have Come

  to Me, This Once

  I have never written against the dead. I would

  open my

  shirt to them and say yes, the white

  cones still making sugary milk,

  but when Grandfather’s gold pocketwatch

  came in by air over the Rockies,

  over the dark yellow of the fields

  and the black rivers, with Grandmother’s blank

  face pressed against his name in the back,

  I thought of how he put the empty

  plate in front of my sister, turned out

  the lights after supper, sat in the black

  room with the fire, the light of the flames

  flashing in his glass eye

  in that cabin where he taught my father

  how to do what he did to me, and I said

  No. I said Let this one be dead.

  Let the fall he made through that glass roof,

  splintering, turning, the great shanks and

  slices of glass in the air, be his last

  appearance here.

  Farewell Poem

  (for M. M. O., 1880–1974)

  The big, cut iceberg waits

  outside the harbor like a spaceship.

  Sends in emissaries: cold

  chopped fish, floating cakes,

  canoes of ice white as brides.

  Lurks just beyond the warm

  furred lip of the harbor, summer

  berries in the bushes, loud stink

  of fish drying on salty wooden

  slats. Waits. Hides nine

  tenths of its iron implacable

  bulk under the belt of the water,

  frigid as cods’ teeth, even

  now in July. The sea bathes

  her endless pale scarred hips.

  The berg sits, cute as a hat,

  snowy as egret feathers, waiting

  to call the next one out to the other

  world beyond the absolutely

  frozen vessel.

  She walks down

  to the water without her walker.

  With none of her three canes she was always

  losing, joking about, looking for,

  finding over her arm. She just

  had her hair done, silver curls

  obedient as ivy tendrils

  over her child’s brow. She wears

  the grey dress with a white collar,

  sensible shoes, white socks,

  diamond pin, sets her foot

  on the cloudy crystal of an ice floe

  and floats out to her mother, floats

  out to the white iceberg waiting

  ninety-three years for hot death

  to deliver his favorite daughter home to

  the cool white long room,

  lace curtains from the parlor flying

  like flags in the summer sky.

  The Winter After Your Death

  (for Katie Sheldon Brennan)

  The long bands of mellow light

  across the snow

  narrow slowly.

  The sun closes her gold fan

  and nothing is left but black and white—

  the quick steam of my breath, the dead

  accurate shapes of the weeds, still, as if

  pressed in an album.

  Deep in my body my green heart

  turns, and thinks of you. Deep in the

  pond, under the thick trap

  door of ice, the water moves,

  the carp hangs like a sun, its scarlet

  heart visible in its side.

  Miscarriage

  When I was a month pregnant, the great

  clots of blood appeared in the pale

  green swaying water of the toilet.

  Dark red like black in the salty

  translucent brine, like forms of life

  appearing, jelly-fish with the clear-cut

  shapes of fungi.

  That was the only appearance made by that

  child, the dark, scalloped shapes

  falling slowly. A month later

  our son was conceived, and I never went back

  to mourn the one who came as far as the

  sill with its information: that we could

  botch something, you and I. All wrapped in

  purple it floated away, like a messenger

  put to death for bearing bad news.

  The End

  We decided to have the abortion, became

  killers together. The period that came

  changed nothing. They were dead, that young couple

  who had been for life.

  As we talked of it in bed, the crash

  was not a surprise. We went to the window,

  looked at the crushed cars and the gleaming

  curved shears of glass as if we had

  done it. Cops pulled the bodies out

  bloody as births from the small, smoking

  aperture of the door, laid them

  on the hill, covered them with blankets that soaked

  through. Blood

  began to pour

  down my legs into my slippers. I stood

  where I was until they shot the bound

  form into the black hole

  of the ambulance and stood the other one

  up, a bandage covering its head,

  stained where the eyes had been.

  The next morning I had to kneel

  an hour on that floor, to clean up my blood,

  rubbing with wet cloths at those dark

  translucent spots, as one has to soak

  a long time to deglaze the pan

  when the feast is over.

  Best Friends

  (for Elizabeth Ewer, 1942–51)

  The day my daughter turned ten, I thought of the

  lank, glittering, greenish cap of your

  gold hair. The last week of

  your life, when I came each day after school,

  I’d study the path to your front door,

  the bricks laid close as your hairs. I’d try to

  read the pattern, frowning down

  for a sign.

  The last day—there was not

  a mark on that walk, not a stone out of place—

  the nurses would not let me in.

  We were nine. We had never mentioned death

  or growing up. I had no more imagined

  you dead

  than you imagined me

  a mother. But when I had a daughter

  I named her for you, as if pulling you back

  throu
gh a crack between the bricks.

  She is ten now, Liddy.

  She has outlived you, her dark hair gleaming like

  the earth into which the path was pressed,

  the path to you.

  Absent One

  (for Muriel Rukeyser)

  People keep seeing you and telling me

  how white you are, how thin you are.

  I have not seen you for a year, but slowly you are

  forming above my head, white as

  petals, white as milk, the dark

  narrow stems of your ankles and wrists,

  until you are always with me, a flowering

  branch suspended over my life.

  Part Two

  Poems for the Living

  I. The Family

  Possessed

  (for my parents)

  I have never left. Your bodies are before me

  at all times, in the dark I see

  the stars of your teeth in their fixed patterns

  wheeling over my bed, and the darkness

  is your hair, the fragrance of your two heads

  over my crib, your body-hairs

  which I count as God counts the feathers of the sparrows,

  one by one. And I never leave your sight,

  I can look in the eyes of any stranger and

  find you there, in the rich swimming

  bottom-of-the-barrel brown, or in the

  blue that reflects from the knife’s blade,

  and I smell you always, the dead cigars and

  Chanel in the mink, and I can hear you coming,

  the slow stopped bear tread and the

  quick fox, her nails on the ice,

  and I dream the inner parts of your bodies, the

  coils of your bowels like smoke, your hearts

  opening like jaws, drops from your glands

  clinging to my walls like pearls in the night.

  You think I left—I was the child

  who got away, thousands of miles,

  but not a day goes past that I am not

  turning someone into you.

  Never having had you, I cannot let you go, I

  turn now, in the fear of this moment,

  into your soft stained paw

  resting on her breast, into your breast trying to

  creep away from under his palm—

  your gooseflesh like the shells of a thousand tiny snails,

  your palm like a streambed gone dry in summer.

  The Victims

  When Mother divorced you, we were glad. She took it and

  took it, in silence, all those years and then

  kicked you out, suddenly, and her

  kids loved it. Then you were fired, and we

  grinned inside, the way people grinned when

  Nixon’s helicopter lifted off the South

  Lawn for the last time. We were tickled

  to think of your office taken away,

  your secretaries taken away,

  your lunches with three double bourbons,

  your pencils, your reams of paper. Would they take your

  suits back, too, those dark

  carcasses hung in your closet, and the black

  noses of your shoes with their large pores?

  She had taught us to take it, to hate you and take it

  until we pricked with her for your

  annihilation, Father. Now I

  pass the bums in doorways, the white

  slugs of their bodies gleaming through slits in their

  suits of compressed silt, the stained

  flippers of their hands, the underwater

  fire of their eyes, ships gone down with the

  lanterns lit, and I wonder who took it and

  took it from them in silence until they had

  given it all away and had nothing

  left but this.

  The Forms

  I always had the feeling my mother would

  die for us, jump into a fire

  to pull us out, her hair burning like

  a halo, jump into water, her white

  body going down and turning slowly,

  the astronaut whose hose is cut

  falling

  into

  blackness. She would have

  covered us with her body, thrust her

  breasts between our chests and the knife,

  slipped us into her coat pocket

  outside the showers. In disaster, an animal

  mother, she would have died for us,

  but in life as it was

  she had to put herself

  first.

  She had to do whatever he

  told her to do to the children, she had to

  protect herself. In war, she would have

  died for us, I tell you she would,

  and I know: I am a student of war,

  of gas ovens, smothering, knives,

  drowning, burning, all the forms

  in which I have experienced her love.

  The Departure

  (to my father)

  Did you weep like the Shah when you left? Did you forget

  the way you had had me tied to a chair, as

  he forgot the ones strapped to the grille

  in his name? You knew us no more than he knew them,

  his lowest subjects, his servants, and we were

  silent before you like that, bowing

  backwards, not speaking, not eating unless we were

  told to eat, the glass jammed to our

  teeth and tilted like a brass funnel in the

  soundproof cells of Teheran. Did you forget

  the blood, blinding lights, pounding on the door, as

  he forgot the wire, the goad,

  the stone table? Did you weep as you left

  as Reza Pahlevi wept when he rose

  over the gold plain of Iran, did you

  suddenly want to hear our voices, did you

  start to rethink the darkness of our hair,

  did you wonder if perhaps we had deserved to live,

  did you love us, then?

  Burn Center

  When my mother talks about the Burn Center

  she’s given to the local hospital

  my hair lifts and wavers like smoke

  in the air around my head. She speaks of the

  beds in her name, the suspension baths and

  square miles of lint, and I think of the

  years with her, as her child, as if

  without skin, walking around scalded

  raw, first degree burns over ninety

  percent of my body. I would stick to doorways I

  tried to walk through, stick to chairs as I

  tried to rise, pieces of my flesh

  tearing off easily as

  well-done pork, and no one gave me

  a strip of gauze, or a pat of butter to

  melt on my crackling side, but when I would

  cry out she would hold me to her

  hot griddle, when my scorched head stank she would

  draw me deeper into the burning

  room of her life. So when she talks about her

  Burn Center, I think of a child

  who will come there, float in water

  murky as tears, dangle suspended in a

  tub of ointment, suck ice while they

  put out all the tiny subsidiary

  flames in her hair near the brain, and I say

  Let her sleep as long as it takes, let her walk out

  without a scar, without a single mark to

  honor the power of fire.

  The Ideal Father

  When I dream you, Dad, you come into the dream

  clean, farouche, gesundheit, feral

  fresh face, physically exact—

  the ideal, the schemata, the blueprint, no mark of

  pain. You’re perfect as a textbook example:

  your hair like a definition of hair,
/>   the bulb with its pith which contains a little air,

  the root, the spear of horny substance, the

  mouth of the follicle, the filament which forms the

  coat of the mammal, the way the sheath

  glistens where the shaft opens its oil to the light;

  and your skin, the layers of the epidermis like

  clear water through which we see the

  subcutaneous fat, its pearls

  swimming in cross-section; and your teeth, their

  pork-white ceilings, enamel crowns,

  pulp hollows, necks and roots like

  squids’ legs, deep in the gum—not a

  cavity, no whiff of rot; and your

  body flawless, pink carnation

  boutonnières of the nipples; and your sex

  stiffening in textbook time,

  record time, everything about you

  exemplary. Where is the one who threw up?

  The one who passed out, the one who would not

  speak for a week, slapped the glasses off a

  small girl’s face, bloodied his head and

  sank through the water? I think he is dead.

  I think the ideal father would hardly

  let such a man live. After all he has

  daughters to protect, laying his perfect

  body over their sleep all night long.

  Fate

  Finally I just gave up and became my father,

  his greased, defeated face shining toward

  anyone I looked at, his mud-brown eyes

  in my face, glistening like wet ground that

  things you love have fallen onto

  and been lost for good. I stopped trying

  not to have his bad breath,

  his slumped posture of failure, his sad

  sex dangling on his thigh, his stomach

  swollen and empty. I gave in

  to my true self, I faced the world

  through his sour mash, his stained acrid

  vision, I floated out on his tears.

  I saw the whole world shining

  with the ecstasy of his grief, and I

  myself, he, I, shined,

  my oiled porous cheeks glaucous

  as tulips, the rich smear of the petal,