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.