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IV. Beyond Sight
Go slow
Slower than you thought could be good for anything as if you had no goal no destination as if death were the destination so why rush when right now exists. —Michael Favala Goldman
Souvenir
This Is What I Want to Take
This is what I want to take the silhouette of a deer amongst the trees generations stately and silent so I have never felt alone on this earth Two young boys ‘ heads bowed as I knighted them solemn in the splendor of summer flowers in a small backyard The sea, the demanding sea, with its pounding fists Pink and white striped flowers in a tub in a dusty forsaken lot and the late May flax against the red poppy, like the sky dabbing hurting blood Your hair and laugh and the sound of you coming home and words, so many words to keep hold of I want them all this is what I want to take with me to eternity but if someone asks I ‘d probably not answer at all. —Susan Oleferuk
A Change in the Weather
The age of anxiety isn ‘t an historical age, but an individual one, an age to be repeated constantly through history. John Koethe, The Age of Anxiety
An eight-pound weight has been lifted, restoring clarity. Now to put the day right according to its splendors and woes. Is this truly the mercurial twenty-third year of the millennium?
Still present am I, far-vision excellent except for a flow of unwanted (damned) flashes of light entering the camera; still alert to undercurrents and wind currents; still resolved to explore more.
Lately, though it is the world which may be mellowing, it seems that I, too, am bending, easing up on scrutiny and analysis to focus on plain (but first-rate) ideas, wanting to be all-inclusive toward the end. May it be not a momentous end but an individual one, like a sudden (silent) change in the weather. —Irene Mitchell
The Sound of Water
—Susan Oleferuk
Between Stone Walls
Consummation
A shriveled plum accepts its pit. Mouse in a glue trap, why resist? Phantoms burn; limbs toss and turn; face mind ‘s mirror: who exists?
Silence is also communication. Expect nothing at all from death. God hasn ‘t sent you a postcard; Answer it! Answer it!
Nature ‘s unsigned letter is enough? Advanced age lacks consolation? It ‘s never too late to meditate; What joy it is to finally give up! —Thomas Dorsett
Homegoing
And what if dying is like that time I got out of school early because I had an appointment and I pushed open the heavy doors and walked out into the day and it was a beautiful spring day or a late winter day that smelled like spring and if it was fall it was early fall when it ‘s all but technically summer and there was a whole world going on out there and it had been going on out there the whole time that I was stuck inside with time and teachers and rules and equations and parsed sentences but now here I was among the tribe of the free and I could go this way or I could go that way or I could just sit down right here on this bench and look around at all the freedom that was mine and also the work crew ‘s breaking for lunch beneath their ladders and also the woman ‘s pushing her stroller along the sidewalk and also the man ‘s walking his small dog and smoking a cigarette and it belonged to the cars whooshing by with a sound like the wind in the trees and the wind in my hair and the wind all around me and inside me and also above me chasing the clouds running free and suddenly there was my mother looking somehow a little different in all her freedom and all my freedom until she roled down her window and waved to come--now--hurry because I had an appointment which felt like a real buzzkill and I briefly considered turning around and walking away from her and going off on my own somewhere to be alone and free for a little longer or maybe for forever but then I realized there was nowhere for me to go except home —Paul Hostovsky
Life after Death adapted from a lecture, “Life after Death,” by Simon Jacobson
Beyond repair, the broken refrigerator calls out to its electricity, “Where do you go when they pull out the plug?”
The electricity replies, “What do you mean? You ‘re just a box that refrigerates food. For a short while, you contained me and used my energy. Now I return to where I always was Beyond space and time as you know it.” —Ilana Attia
ON A THEME FROM LORCA TO A TUNE BY KEATS
Sería el guardian que en la noche de mi tránsito Prohibier en absolute la entrada a la luna (It would be the guard who on the night of my death Would block the entrance absolutely of the moon) —Federico Garcia Lorca Casida of the Impossible Hand (The Tamarit Divan)
No one was home the night he died. Unlocked windows may not invite cats but no moon could scare them off. No one came up the walk to edge his door wide. He lay there—no wound showed on his cold form. Those empty eyes stared to his left. An old picture—black and white— he saw that last: A woman ‘s silvered face. The man, stiff-backed, at her side. They can ‘t care for him now. A breeze down the long hall might close some cabinet, but this empty night won ‘t hear. He ‘s still under moonlight. Erased.
—Mark J. Mitchell
Voice from above: “You are always welcome in my home, my child.”
Home Away From Home Mac Autocorrect: gone/home
Passage
As a bargain for her life, bridled by demons she conjured, others she indulged, and all we bore witness to, I prayed only that my mother be accorded comfort and dignity in her death. She received neither. When they called for paddles, I left the room.
In the fifty-three minutes she lived after the surgery my mother raged. Refused. Blood ran down my brother ‘s arm as she tore at her IVs. Restraints were ordered. Nurses harried to stanch the catheter wounds in her legs. Technicians ministered whizzing pumps like mechanics trying to unchoke a seizing engine amid a cacophony of electronic alerts and urgent orders.
She cried out for dead people as if they were huddled there in the corner of the room hoping not to be seen. She quieted when she had their attention. Things were said. Some unspeakable things. She spoke them.
The compressions were violent, atavistic. Her body buckled. Ribs cracked like reedy bone being torn apart by a larger animal in a forest field. The cardiologist ‘s eyes said thank you when my sister called an end to it.
A milquetoast chaplain arrived at the bedside and read a generic poem for the dead from his iPhone. My sister dismissed him. I quarried what I could from Psalm 23 from memory, searching the room for clues. Through a slit window, two tugs drew a cargo ship into Long Beach Harbor. To still waters he leads me.
There was no nimbus in the HEPA-filtered, re-circulated air. No ether hovering in the ballast of the fluorescents. No index of an accouchement of a soul released. No thread from which we could stitch hopeful revisions in the narrative of the fifty-three minutes bookending my mother ‘s life. Whatever it was, she would not share it.
Willingly at least. The thin, plastered smirk she wore most of her waking years was missing. My mother died with her mouth open. For a woman whose life was scraping of flint against ragged rock, here it was: a perfect oval. The shape of wonder at what only she could see. —Christopher Stewart
follow the veins
on the back of my hands they are my mother ‘s trace past the forearms, the elbows, the neck, kiss the little indent beneath her locket lift up your cheek, press it into the shoulder take one finger and trace along the eyebrow touch your own thumb wet your pinky and dab just behind the ear its there you might hear her heart calling —Kelley Jean White
Legacy
My mother and I bruise easily, our skin holding the imprints of pain, our hearts even longer. Encounters that went poorly, all the scolding replayed in our brains, wishing we ‘d been stronger.
She has more courage. She looked fear in the face each time she got on a plane; I came up with excuses not to fly, made it clear I hadn ‘t what it took to slip free from the chain.
The skin beneath my eyes looks like fingers pressed in and held, a legacy from her side of the family, along with memory that lingers and stuns with its recall. We have tried
and failed to forget the names of unkind former friends, ones who closed the door, walked away, never once looking behind to see the harm inflicted, souls left sore.
On a cassette tape there ‘s a lullaby and bedtime stories she recorded for my sister and me, to help us try to fall asleep without the comfort afforded
by her presence. It was a thing so rare for her to be away a whole night long, we could not imagine her not there; it made our entire world feel wrong.
What we leave behind, the loving touch on cheek or chin, the stroking of the head when we were young and thought there was so much time before us, before the pages of our book were read.
—Carole Greenfield
Span of Earth
Unraveling
Your favorite team was winning, so I watched although I ‘m not a fan in general; it ‘s just a voice I cling to. Lost so young, you never left too many footprints, and
the tides erase what ‘s left until I cling to teams, hair, T-shirts, any accident the moths of time neglect. I dream of you, but then you die there too -- repeatedly,
my one great failure -- whereas lucky me, I go on living. And I ‘m eager to, except at times like this, when living still feels more like habit, and the years unroll,
years that you had no part in, till my soul, only my soul says no. —Kathryn Jacobs
Lag
When you realize, Please return the library books They ‘re on the table As her last words Balances every I love you she ‘d given
Instead of goodbye The incessant, familiarity of instruction the sum of my mother
—Allison Whittenberg
IM ABENDROT
Near dusk, near a path, near a creek, we stopped, I in disquiet and dismay for the sudden death of a friend, the doe in her always incipient terror.
All that moved was her pivoting ear that the reddening sun shining through transformed into a carnate rose that made the world more beautiful.
Nothing else stirred, not a leaf, not the air, until she startled and bolted away from me into the crackling brush.
That part of pain which lies less deep clung to her and fled; the rest, in the silence of the late light, stayed.
—Constance Rowell Mastores
“Movement”
—Suzanne Musin
Requiem without a Score
Below black umbrellas
Beating the worn shoes of
Those grieving on hallowed dirt
With the rain
Dyed roses wait
To again be beautiful, true
Behind a stone marker
Scored just for us
A purpose searching endlessly
For a title
Like a lone note longing for its
Song
In a world without inked lines
Our lives relinquished
Air flows freely through
All vessels equally
Petals color the earth
A sweet jazz composition
Boundaryless
A place where no keys go
Unplayed
—Louis Efron
Shore Rocks at Corea from “Earthwake”
Pegmatites. Over this edge: ice-cataracts, then as now unheard.
Under our feet, exposed, the granules, the quartzes, the feldspars, grown to eye-size, stopped against sight. Sea urchins ‘ bequeathed fragilities, gull-strewn, blanched from their patterns. The tide-pools: green algae glares to the cloud.
Tidings, O tiny far-traveled tsunami, here curl to simile, die in the unrecorded surf-gardens: a mind, stranded and stemmed against absence, beats in itself.
Cross-currents, there, the times race through each other, kanntet ihr mich—
—Esther Cameron summer 1970
VISITATION IN AUTUMN
Through you things unforeseen and unregarded are touched with speech. Of a sudden it is not the dark rainwater shuddering in the roadbed between the rusting rails, but you who say I am here. You have become a patron of embankments, of older ways still slanting through the grid we travel on. Of momentary freedoms, glimpses not possessory but of that which still can wrest itself out of our grip and free us, for that instant, from ourselves— never more. What remains cannot name itself except in the recollection of an image, say, of rainwater riffling between rails, that is, again, no more than what it was. —Esther Cameron 1991 (?)
The Vision
I saw you a few days ago. I was making dinner. The boys were sprawled on the floor playing with Legos and arguing mildly. You were there in the corner watching your own children, my mother and uncles, and also watching mine. We were watching them all together. —Louise Kantro
Mama
Strong coffee and the Faint scent of rose perfume Signs that you are near That quickly vanish Into the beckoning ether Yet, remain just long enough To let me know That somewhere, somehow Your essence still exists And will never be truly gone —Dawn McCormack
Balloon Release
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