The Anti-Grief
Pieces on the Ground
I gave up the pencil, the walk in woods, the fog
at dawn, a keyhole I lost an eye to.
And the habit of early, of acorn into oak—
bent tangled choked because of ache or greed,
or lousy light deemed it so.
So what. Give up that so what.
O fellow addicts of the arch and the tragic, give up
the thousand-pound if and when too.
Give up whatever made the bed or unmade it.
Give up the know thing that shatters into other things
and takes the remember fork in the road.
The remember isn’t a road.
At noon, the fog has no memory of fog, the trees I walked
or wanted to. Like the pencil never recalls its least
little mark, the dash loved, the comma that can’t,
can not dig down what its own brief nothing
means on the page. I don’t understand death either.
By afternoon, the brain is box, is breath let go, a kind of
mood music agog, half emptied by the usual
who am I, who are you, who’s anyone.
Truth is, I listen all night for morning, all day
for night in the trees draped like a sound I never quite
get how it goes. There’s a phantom self, nerved-up
as any missing arm or leg.
Of course I was. Of course I stared from the yard,
my mother at the window
rinsing knife and spoon and the middle of her life.
In drawing class, all eyes fix on the figure gone
imaginary, thinning to paper. Not the wind or a cry
how the hand makes, our bent to it
—pause and rush, rush and pause—
small animals heard only at night, spooked in the leaves.
Salmon
How salmon love
sex enough to fight uphill in waters blasting
brilliant, some
one hundred mph (fact-checkers,
forget it, I’m close). How we stood, old inkling
of such exhausting omg, Darwin
would have… (the difference, same-
thingness, animal hungers and fury and persistence,
some amazing something next)
exploded!—his head
on a pillow most afternoons in the parlor, wrapped
in her quiet concern. Emma, the perfect nurse, they say,
who married the perfect patient,
Victorian fable, velvet-striped wallpaper even
on the ceiling would be my guess.
Because that trip he took in youth is
everlasting youth, island of
huge tortoises and the tiny cactus finch
plus his other
green spot in the sea, its DNA trace
of the grand extinct dodo
too trusting to run from sailors with their clubs, too weird
and bigger, certainly more
feathered and blank-eyed than one impossible
irreplaceable Great Uncle Cedric
I heard of, just wanting a little honest-to-god
barbecue at the wedding.
The forces of life
are mysterious. But thrilling
and painful, August in Alaska near
Seward, gone up in a firestorm during
the quake, 1964, any year in a fade next to our
stunned standing at the salmon weir,
a patch of woods, sunlit river
raging, those bright muscle-creatures blown back
at it at it leaping, failing spectacular
upstarts all over again
human. What it means to
love is speechless.
The Museum of Silence
Those Poor Clares must wonder why the racket
louder than usual, three-euros-a-pop
tourists queueing up outside,
weekends the convent on pause.
It’s the noise in their heads, the old nun
might say with what’s left
in her head, the girlhood part: war,
a low-flying plane, the loud, hoarse agony
of cows shattered from above into petal by
red petal, garish sprays in grass
north of these olive groves.
(Museum of Silence as secret or
scent, day of misjudgment,
Italy, the baffling website, our
stop-start train to Fara Sabina.)
Quiet is what’s after, the old nun
tells the young nun who has
an edge, that eye thing, she has a look.
This too I invent: is it vanity or just
the old woman in wonder, going on
so vividly the long-ago boy in that cockpit
can’t even have a thought, he’s so scared.
And the younger nun: So now it’s
forgive us their trespasses?
Not out loud. In her head. Belief can narrow
for good like that. What’s left is
a lever, a simple jack of amazement to
pry open the very first museum on earth,
a sanctuary for the muses.
Of course. From the Greek mουσεῖον,
part cemetery. Latin’s closer,
mūsēum, its small banquet