More on: death

Every time my father dies, I write a poem.

What is heaven but the immortal fulfillment of a mortal longing? What is it but the most sublime synthesis of memory and dream?

I give you my thanks. Perhaps
you see that in my eyes, although
the only words I have left
are no doubt cruel.

First we cry.
Then the tears turn to stone.
Then we remember just one thing:
The death of a son.

The nurses took off the sterile white net,
tied your hair back from your beautiful face,
and detached the machines to let you die.

Doesn’t a fire, good and hot, burn back into a wound until there’s nothing left for it to do but heal?

What’s death? Horizon kept moving by time & denial? Hank of water hung in air where love once stood, naked among stones? His hand there. By which I mean here? Ink-steeped wolf, boar, fox bristles lineate feet, mons, breast, heart in conjuring vista: the fist itching opens. A graveyard, too, a cosmos of parts; platitude…

Krzysztof Kieślowski (1993) DO YOU FEEL ABLE TO TALK? is the first full line in Three Colors: Blue, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s masterpiece of a meditation on grief and liberation. “Were you conscious during the….” is the next. The doctor is unable to finish the question he poses to a woman who has just lost her husband…

Lord, here I am again at the graveyard where I’ll be buried, but for now where I rest before walking back home. I like to lie with my back on the grass and study the clouds, a Constable imposter, or sit on my gravesite and look at this little village— the cemetery, seven old houses…

I strive to live as if I were going to die tomorrow. The steady breathing of my sleeping wife, the taste of gherkin, the odor of soil and of dill, of smoke suspended over the fields, the sight of a couple necking on the dunes —that’s too much. They say that every day brings us…