A Modern Lament

I tremble at the edges of feeling, in grey cotton,

as the morning trains pass beyond,

shaking the factory smoke into bleak portraits

of your faces: the modern woman, the modern man.

Modernity, dissolving into air, swallowed up by soldiers

in white collars, catching the buses at 20 to 2:00.

“She always could blend time,”

they say as they settle by the hearth,

my witchcraft always the subject

of after dinner drinks.

They enjoy putting out

their cigarettes in the palms

of shabby mystics.

Yes, they know now I waste myself

building tomorrow out of ashes,

that I spent my summers tracing lifelines

of sailors lying cold beneath the waves.

“Always could summon the old souls,”

they whisper to one another,

casting away their tea leaves

with January eyes.

Oh, how I wish to tell them,

that from the basement I am blind

to the dawn of their vogue discipleship,

because Time swept me up into his brittle arms,

and broke at the hands when he carried me

up the hillsides; my immensity was

too much in the fog, my burden of atoms

could not be borne by the tide of land.

They fear the truth of rumors

that I was born in a casket,

and buried in a crimson womb.

I walk backwards, flame in hand,

down the corridors of the plantation,

the walls dripping in the wax and wane of a century’s moon;

whispering cacophonies of a sore wisdom.

This is where my mother died

in childbirth, on the eve of the winter solstice.

At the window now,

I look upon the field

where my father hung

in his adamantine chains,

marked by that gaping range of earth

where the corn forgets to grow.

Those ivory pillars in the distance linger,

fashioned from the remnants of my closest kin,

accompanied by flowers

of a gruesome morning.

Lupus where the dogs bled;

Poppies where the children fell. 

Friends, have you disremembered our relations?

You sit too comfortably by the electric fire,

while on the horizon loom

the clouds of Rome, harboring

the blood of bodies we went hiding

beneath our brains.

And we are left with deft hands to put pistols

to the ears of our horses,

to swathe the spoils of victory in the forests.

We lay upon the bones, desperate to rest our heads

upon something we ourselves have ended.

You gape collective at the advent

of our uncivil wars,

while I make the business of Orpheus,

dragging corpses up from Hades,

just beneath the parlor floor.

I must lead them, with no lyre in hand,

but instead by the dire music

of a battle drum,

beating,

in the cellars of

your understanding,

a modern lament

of a modern age.

A Eulogy

Late one night when I was staying with my grandmother last summer, I went exploring through her apartment after she fell asleep. I ended up in my grandfather’s study and found a collection of broken watches in one of the cabinets. One of the watches was a wind-up watch, missing a band. But strangely, though no one had wound it for years (and since I’ve had to wind it to start it working again) it was still ticking. I couldn’t change the time on it without opening the face, but somehow it was still keeping time, my grandfather’s time as I came to think of it. This is something I can’t explain, yet it resonated with me deeply.

I realized then and since that time, within the human heart, is not chronological, it is not synced with the minutes of daily life. The mind, our memory, is a time machine, blending the past with the present, and within it no one truly dies, no one truly ends. Loss is the thing that tears rifts in our lives the most. It brings about the melancholy that comes with the idea that it can never be regained. When my grandmother passed, the greatest tragedy was that I could no longer learn more of the person she was, the fathoms of spirit that made up her identity and the life she had led.

But what I remember is that legacy is not an empty word; that we are vessels of lives beyond ourselves, carrying within us the fragments of the people we have loved. Each of us possess the souls of those lost to us by death, and from each other we may continue to know them more deeply, to grow in our relationship with them. Through my mother, my aunts, through Nonnie’s family I can continue to love and know her. Through their stories and my stories, my children will know her, and so will my childen’s children. Death is frigid, unwavering, it always holds its gates. But the human spirit is fathomless and by it, by our legacies and the people we reach, we become eternal. My grandmother’s kindness, her dedication to other’s lives beyond her own, ensures her love beyond death. And feeling its effect within our own lives, to be able to become better people because of it, may lead us to one day forgive even time its unkindnesses.

Fragment From a Story I’m Writing: The Lament of Lorien Montgomery

            The day of the funeral service, Lorien had entered into St. James Cathedral, filtered through a dark haze of people all sweating in their summer black. The carvings on the walls—she had never noticed them before. They were intricate beings overlaid in bronze, arching over the living, holding arcane symbols, instruments and scales. She had been swept inside and had walked a lonely course down the aisle, in strange union with the whispers and turning heads, that vast mystique of death and that of being the one left behind. That is how she had come to feel, left behind. Of all the things she had thought she’d grasped within her small scope of clarity, all the realizations she had collected against her parents, the blatant ignorance of her father, the frailty of her mother, they still had this on her. They had come to die, to know something beyond her young immensity, even if it was to know the end of knowledge; still their heads would soon be growing flowers out in the countryside and she was what remained—she was herself. She had not changed, not experienced the shift of atoms, that great return to the ground, in which one’s flesh became the earth, and the earth continued to spin and gape into blackness. Her flesh still overlaid her bones and dressed her for that day so that it was impossible for her to become unseen amongst the crowds, their squinting eyes, those statues holding instruments up to the amber rays of light. They were drowning in it, all of them, in the amber light. From the preacher, stiff-collared and asthmatic to the children inhaling dust in the very back rows, all were overlaid with bronze. She had taken her seat, unsure of how to place her hands, and pinned her eyes to the navy flow of choir robes whose sleeves began to rise, pulled by aging arms into the air. And after a steady dawning, the great hall began to echo with sound, became a small humming box within the wild urge and strain of the city. How it had echoed so—with the sound of navy robes singing. 

Don Draper is Falling

I am too afraid for myself now, climbing subway

stairs and getting lost in people’s hair, the sleek of their grinning

parts.

A swift epoch of summer got placed between my ears

and slanted frames, and I’ll wait for time

to leave Manhattan in a mist, with all its doormen and smoky

twenty year olds leaning in sailing shirts, flirting

downwind.

All down 14^th street there are shopping bags tagged with hands, brushing

up against shallow ties and clouted men.

It’s their multitude!

and my gasping,

when I see them carrying around their humanness in square chest pockets;

with it dropping out whenever they bend down

for a New York Times.

I keep clicking my lighter at men in lonely hats,

while waiting for the 6 up to 68^th st,

and trying not to worry about the doors cutting us up with glass;

how they make me watch people grow small

through branches of shirt-sleeves

and long cylinders for eyes.

I’ve spent so much time trying to be mysterious

to someone in Grand Central; dressing in worn

leather suitcases, only to find myself

undone at another

woman’s finer seams.

Nor is there anyone sipping on the other side of my Marlboro.

I had thought we could share stories and our fragments

and kiss at the end,

outside the brick buildings of afternoon.

All this,

how it catches on the edges of me;

         to return in rain and find the hall paintings

brownly dreaming.

But every night in the TV room,

Don Draper is falling

faceless along

razored legs, falling

the length

of skyscrapers, through

plaid families

and bourbon drinks;

into a glossy void

of Rosetta ads

for picture babies,

for starlets in winking 

green.

And yet

every time,

with Lucky Strike

in hand, his back

to me in pleats, he always ends up

          sitting in a chair.

To Knowing a Man (from Jacksonville) Pt. 1

You sang in your sleep last night, dear,

about Jacksonville and the snows

that were to come from over  

the Adirondacks, peeking

out from under crows’ wings,

before the Indian summer folded up.

Last night when you were singing,

I made a cabin room for you in the walls

of my own shadowy brain, in the smoke

of a chanting moon. The beams held,

even under weight of my autumn hair

dewy with the swoon of dusk.

The windows fogged up with my thoughts

of you and of winter stretching

across the skin of the fruited earth,

drying out the trees and blowing

stories with a powdery mouth.

The record player caught up

old winter’s tales and weaved them,

while I watched the pictures playing

on the RCA, blackly, whitely,

a mist of us that descended

on the beaches of Alki,

on the branches of Ontario’s sallow

woods; that crept like Civil War ghosts

whistling Dixie in the corridors

of our old haunts; plantation

dreams of an old feeling.

Your chair was creaking, dear,

without person, in a certain dust;

The rounded glass of scotch tipping

off, sweating all its liquid out.

It went on dripping, making the bear

rug drunk so that it snored loudly

all through the night, dreaming,

exhaling whole forests

and the rifled arms of hunters, red

in mangled plaid, until

the paperboy came

wrinkled up and dressed in morning.

I cooked brown eggs

as the front page read:

Snowstorm Descends on Jacksonville—and I

was thinking, I wish I’d known.

To Knowing a Man Pt. 2

I am aware that I am losing particles, I thought I had already told you that. I feel them sliding down like small rivulets from my wagging head. All that is left are freckle spots clinging and scattered like a constellation God was too punched to do right. I am aware that I am losing time, losing space, losing fabric dynamos of my wonderings. Maybe that is why the sky dies down early in the fall. Maybe that is why the purple hills have dimmed themselves again, making headstones while the trains go by. Maybe that is why you keep losing your watch in the cottonwoods and tripping over soldiers growing birch trees in unmarked graves.

When People Come Knocking With Words to Say

Even the roads are silent at the stoplights

in the husk of dark. And I am doomed to my

own strange foliage inside my head, kicking

up the dirt with shoes, wondering what other

names were buried there. And the oceans that

        I swim,

hearing bells across the land. People stand

at the shores in new fashions, in red winter

coats and fine gloves; their tuned silence, in wooly

hordes, ushers me further out, further out to be 
alone with the gory foams. Down Avondale Road,

backyard fires rent, like gunsmoke, gorges in the air.

And I,

what do I do but drive past signposts telling me

to slow down, while bells crash symbols across

the land. The bells! The bells! ringing through the radio

while he tells me that “all the trees of the field will clap

their hands” and the sky will shudder like a moose in the

grey dawn

of day. And I am doomed to wander the strange

foliage inside my head, and sneak off into

wide-eyed shadows when people come knocking

with bread in their arms and words to say.