Tag: grief

before

what birds know first

There are things the birds know first. The approach of a hurricane, a radiation leak, the poisoning of a river. You can tell that they know because they leave.

Sometimes a witness to their departure will not notice, until later. Looking back, they will remark how suddenly it occurred to them: there were no birds. Where did they go?

By then, the coming disaster had revealed itself. Before that, the birds disappeared quietly. For most would-be observers, their absence fails to register. It is a non-event. The catastrophic ones are often preceded by a series of non-events like this.

The birds know when to go. It is believed they also know when to return. On that count, those of us in the disaster zones look out and sigh, waiting. And we say to one another, “We’ll see.”

“Wait,” we say, “and see.” Like we know.

Sometimes, though, the birds don’t seem to know. Or if they do, are without other options. That’s when you get the dead bodies around the poisoned lake along a major flyway, or whole flocks falling from the sky. That’s when scientists arrive to collect the bodies.

“We don’t have enough evidence,” they say. In every official briefing they repeat this sentiment. We are in the middle of a non-event. In a time that has no other name, which is called ordinary time. One day we may call this time by another name: Before. But any before is nameless when you are inside it.

unspeakable

afters

when bird i dreamed i walked
upright like woman to fall
beneath tree under branch
after their singing stopped

& upright like her i braced back
into song to call her lost to calling
them
back beneath shade beneath branch
to revive her and rising she only

took up song again, with all words
wronged

upright, back braced, throwing
notes

to land gone from sense or syntax
to cries beyond

meaning, obscured shades beneath
that branch

she lost the lines between her limbs
now they are gone

from sense or syntax, losing herself
to loss beyond

the beyonds, as her grandmother had,
beyond hope,

becoming something else, enough
light to make shade

like the dead, leaving––leaves beneath
each living branch

each branch like a river she knew
when him once

before her body into dirt was enough
to carry the lost

song from beyond that ancient branch
from bird

to whatever gave her syntax sense,
from loss, to carry

from the last she knew, the song
no one sings anymore

to rest in shade, believing you can
still make a soul from dead
leaves if you leave
it all.

Cloudfaces

Metamorphoses

It may have been that fearful hope, moved by agony, that caused a slippage of the faces we had taken for protection, flimsy as they were. Then we became something cloudlike, breathing, and the sound of us was music. The music of us was made of what we had known in the time before we knew faces. We could hear much when we were nothing and no one.

Bird Signs

And what resists containment.

Careful to note the care of the thrush at her nest, and her attendant song, we were determined to find joy in witness. Its light would not shine except in grief, and a long record of bird notes reveals that we could scarcely see their winged grace without noting everywhere the flights and visitations of our dead friends. The substance of our trembling was never so vivid as when it flowed from us.

To Begin

With amazement.

Speak to me of ongoingness, of the atmospheric nature of objects, of astonishment; of the vertigo of finding yourself in an image with no context or memory of the moment. Let the speech of the hour open with Stop, let us weep. Let the ruins of the moment leave us pierced, undone with memory. Let the past cut a deluge into now, not to be consoled. That we remember. 

Where is the horse? And the rider. And that time. When we plunged into the cold sea, ready to lose ourselves.

The Sisters

In the late days of long wars.

We wanted to mend, so kept company with our mothers’ ghosts. Our yesterdays were wounded and came to us until every bed was full. 

O muse. Your song was bleeding out. 

We brought cloths and went to you. We wrapped you tight and held against the flow. It entered then.

We are still, holding. 

The Spectacle

Grief and costume.

Sometimes when my words are hiding in some corner refusing to come out when called, I wonder what is really going on, and then have to admit that I can’t blame them for being fed up with me. So much of the use of syllables in daily life involves costuming their original forms in these ridiculous get-ups, the sort we raged against as children, the sort I would never dream of inflicting on the cat.  

To even mention the appropriateness of abandoning sentences for a full-throated scream at a time like this is cliché by now, inviting memories of scolds: only dullards state the obvious, and with these, cringing recollections of times when I did not consider what was and was not obvious when speaking with––as the tired saying went, a full heart––because the whole point was to know what was new and raw, thrilling at the cut of it, the constant overflow, I could not keep my fingers from a scab and if someone had pressed me to define what this was, exactly, I might have gushed Everything!––and of course it was. 

It’s not like I didn’t know of death, not that I didn’t see it, dream it, smell it under the porch, only that I had yet to discover how I carried it in such devastating abundance, or why people costumed and embalmed it to such great lengths for ceremonial viewing. I had yet to understand why the truly devastated, those who have wept long enough to feel irritated by the uselessness of solemnity, will sometimes scream in wild laughter at a wake.