What posture should the heart take toward death? I asked

 

 

and the hand at the edge of my mind

began to draw overlapping 

and with dependence 

a sphere made of bands, 

and deeper into the bands 

where I couldn’t see 

there was a spiral

into which

our dying goes

like a ribbon falling 

from a woman’s unloosed hair.

 

No matter the agony of the dying,

nor the fearful thoughts of dying,

none of this will be

where the light ribbon falls.

 

 

*

 

 

This is the soul that does not contain the body. 

This is the body that does not contain the soul. 

 

A grounding rod

drives its steady quiver 

down through time 

like the first pin 

a seamstress presses in, 

toward which every other pin 

and thread refers. 

 

Which means 

no hurt is left unconnected

to the tip of that pin. 

 

And what constitutes the tip

constitutes you, and constitutes me. 

 

 

        *

 

The tip of the pin that is not a place 

is a dogged place. 

 

As humans blink in snowlight, moonlight, 

city light, through wind and fire,

in hospice light,

whether lucid or sleeping

wherever we go 

it is not wrong to think of ourselves

as full of fight, 

 

constituted as we are 

by the dogged place.

 

 

*

 

 

Two sisters with their dollhouse practiced 

the tiniest creations of living, 

the little marvel stove with its burner hob and hook 

in which fire needed tending 

as they listened for themselves. 

 

 

Time has no world behind it,

 

(and I am afraid of what image comes next)

 

but like a dollhouse with no back wall
floating in the place that is not a place, 

someday our time will be seen from afar 

as a mattering thing.

 

 

        *

 

 

We are made of time, 

if just for a while, 

having huddled under the line 

between ourselves and our earthy life

until something with pull raises the newborn 

up onto the timeline

as if by soft rope

that neither burns nor demands, 

pulling when our hands reach 

and then, through the dim film 

of infant eyes 

a mother, sister, father, brother, the window,

the Chinese elm, the sound of roads

and the sound of water –

 

nothing seems separate 

from us, we who reached 

for the horizon of our particular life

 

and let out a cry

torn from plain 

and common air.

 

 

*

 

But where am I?

               and how long is my time,

and how long my child’s,

and my child’s children, and theirs,

and the man in particular I love –

 

This is the first song.

 

Yet it won’t receive reply

since June rain, November fog,

the doldrum winds that strand sails

and the clear glass dawn

now tenfold off the glaciers

are presences, weathers

through which the human will moves, 

and chooses, and waits, 

and together

the atmosphere is made. 

 

Nothing can be foretold,

unless a trapdoor drops the present down

to where the future 

simply is 

and, for itself, lives. 

 

 

*

 

 

Earth is not for understanding,
it’s not here we are 

understood by ourselves and by each other, 

otherwise why the infinite songs,

each throttle of need on a voice of sound

returning to the far and fibrous place, 

unannihilated,

as vast as the privacies asleep 

in every bed. Me, we call it. Me. 

 

 

*

 

 

Farther and farther out, an infinity of suns live 

their lives, pulled up like us from below sight

but not with force –

 

existence is just one’s seen side, 

sensed now because our sun 

is the shade

of goldenrod held once in hand 

as a crayon tracing the letters that spell

s-u-n-s-h-i-n-e on paper,

the beginning of what thoughts might arrive

if we believe something can drop down and in – 

 

Perhaps earth’s the right place for notebooks 

given to children

the height of foxglove 

in July. 

 

Perhaps the foxglove

wants in. 

 

 

*

 

 

For some months, the spiral 

lessened my fear 

because the drawing 

fastened me to what

guided my hand. 

 

But where are the dead, 

where is my friend who didn’t want to die,

my grandmother who didn’t want to die,

my infant brother before me –

 

There is a song for this, 

an assignment of ache for this, 

not a song of skill upon a violin 

but that of the amateur, 

who, clutch to clutch, 

on one string passes some forebroken feeling 

and a buried bell 

in us shakes. 

 

And in that note a northward-pulling steed 

digs down and in.

 

 

*

 

 

Still, I feared the spiral meant

some abyss-feeling, some cavern-ache,

something foreign and homesick 

will suck us from our known world –

 

So I asked fear to draw 

and its drawing spoke –

 

that as we pass through the outer spiral, 

part of our human, earthbound course 

travels behind and before us, 

 

the soil your feet once felt in the yard, 

the boat you stole before dawn, 

rowing to the middle of the lake and back, 

the peacock blue you loved most on earth

you will see as solace and signposts 

of known feeling. 

 

There, each time

you thought you weren’t answered

you will be shown how you were,

its language arriving with a fluency

that on earth you knew 

only by a handful of words.

 

 

*

 

 

And the spiral will let you out –

you can come out –

 

passing back through yourself, 

what you made and what you thought, 

all you passed freely going in, but more: 

the last traversing loop will be through 

your human heart, and suddenly you 

will remember – Yes, 

that is what I called “myself” –

 

before you knew

whatever gentleness you felt in life 

is just one sentence 

from a wide and coursing scroll 

of what is gentle. 

 

 

*

 

 

Here in the body, the self 

looks like a net on the beach;

we try to walk toward it,

to reach, to pick it up,

to say what it is,

to see it clearly.

 

But it’s dense with knots

long in the salt deposits, 

and in our hands 

it would crack like a fossil 

of depth at rest. 

 

It is easy to think death breaks such a design. 

 

 

*

 

 

But death stands patient as a guest 

not yet told where to set her things, 

wet with rain and cold only 

because of where we’ve left her.

 

 

*

 

 

Like a woman by a man turned away

to where she could despise herself alone,

it was dark as she walked to her car, 

but then a firework shot 

from the alley 

and descended in the shape of a hook

doubled over with light. 

 

Like weeping. 

Like light that bends at the waist and weeps.

 

 

*

 

 

One October, near night, 

a woman cried into her hands.

She went outside and beside 

her front window

she wiped her wet hands into the soil, 

having heard the earth, when asked, 

will take in 

what on earth was cried out.

 

Now she and that centimeter of earth

know their worth.

 

This is not magic,

this is earth.         

 

 

*

 

 

Sometimes you can see snow flutter down the eyes

of one lost in thought toward a window, 

not to retrace a grief but to feel, again, the depths

spent between two lives. See the snow-bright 

spots on a home movie reel? See the mind 

where it oftenmost drifts.

 

Some say it’s damaged where

the story won’t stay gone, 

this living, 

homesick snow. Damage? 

 

Find me a homesickness

that can’t find 

its ancestor is birth.

 

 

*

 

 

Can snow 

as it happens 

help us feel 

what happens

when we die?

 

 

*

 

 

Its beginning startles the beginning, not its end. 

 

 

*

 

 

And what of the stone world 

is there to say but that each rock contains no less

than the human. And animals, whose bodies know 

to disappear and stir the thicket with sound

exactly when and not past the need of when –

 

to sit an hour with no voice reaching my ear, 

to move throughout the house and settle 

aside the stillness with looking and not-looking, 

then to hear the small voice of Olive 

in the yard, saying goodnight to the mint 

her mother helped her plant. 

 

And the lilac stretching up

from its dormancy has the sound of knowing

it has outwintered winter by keeping 

its own counsel. 

 

 

*

 

 

It was Maryam who said it’s the stones, not humans, 

who do as they ought to do, 

and the animals. Which is to say their illumination

is a settled matter.

 

Theirs is the death of what can’t be said. 

 

 

*

 

Far back, in a past not open to sight, a fabric

of knowing was woven of physical pain, of psyche

and injury, a warped cup

at once too full and too empty. 

 

Yet in this mean body too

I have been reached with feeling,
and with the feeling of being reached.

 

Despite my chaos and my wall, 
a channel is given, vibrations
at the core that radiate. 

Although hindered so often

by the complex human body, 

looking with the smallest flashlight now 

at the violet inkeepings 
of that concentrated good, despite 
how often here it disperses,
 

it is not nothing to feel
the field to which we will return.