ABECEDARIAN WHILE CONJUGATING VERBS AT THE CEMETERY
At the cemetery where my mother is buried, I lean
back against the rain-slicked granite and close my eyes, starlings
circling overhead. This is as close to her as I can feel, my hair splayed like
deciduous branches across the letters of her name, the dark
etching that shows what years she lived. Her gravestone is her
face, cold and wet with tears. On nice days, when the sun
goes behind a cloud, I imagine she is shutting her eyes to whiff
heliotropes, almond-scented and white—one of her favorites if
I remember correctly. Or hyacinth. Or hollyhock. It’s unfair that I can’t
just ask her, though I have learned to open sadness like a wet umbrella—
katydids singing asynchronously, iron gates, rain boots mud-caked, grief
like a cloak with a neck-hole I can’t fit my head through. I was prepared for
misfortune—not for how hard it would be to convert the verbs to past tense.
Nobody taught me to say lived, not live. Loved, not love. At her funeral, I wanted to
open her casket and fill it with verbs in the present tense, a thousand
pieces of paper: make, think, say, feel, want, give, stay, stay, stay. As if the
quantity would make them true. Instead, I’m left with blank pages, words
resting in peace, a mother who isn’t returning to discuss the parts of
speech. My life is a sentence that can’t be diagrammed and I’m gritting
teeth. Dirt caked in my fingernails. I want. I wanted. I asked the
undertaker to make my face like hers. I lipsticked and eyeshadowed. I action
verbed. I disappeared behind a cloud, heliotroped and hyacinthed.
We hollyhocked. I read her name backward and it spelled
xiphoid—I could feel each letter swell in my chest as if I’d inhaled it.
Your mother loved you, said my dad, burying himself in whiskey. I funeraled a
zillion verbs, buried them so deep—I’ve already forgotten what they were.
GHAZAL FOR LONGING
From my bedroom ceiling, I would display my longing—
my heart, suspended, a knotted macramé of longing.
In my dream, we slow-dance to a fast song in a cemetery.
Eternal, he calls me—though my sobriquet is Longing.
The radiologist places a heavy shield over me and says
stay still, then reads the results of my x-ray: longing.
I press dried forget-me-nots into a book of love poems
and leave it on his doorstep—a bouquet of longing.
On the phone, my words tremble like telephone wires
in the wind—I am afraid of this faraway longing.
He removes the cutlass from its sheath, steel glimmering,
my tears glittering—oh—this swordplay of longing.
I go out with a lantern searching for him, but he eludes me.
Amorphous—a spine with no vertebrae, longing.
I follow Red Giants, Pulsars, Carbon Stars, Luminous
Blue Variables—but tonight, I am led astray by longing.
How sweet he is, like a hotel pillow chocolate. (Sigh!)
Thoughts of him give me tooth decay—longing.
As a scholar of heartache, I know how to obey longing—
I wrote for weeks, then titled my essay Longing.
He calls my name—Sarah—but I can’t see him. He is down
on the landing, and I am forever up the stairway, longing.
BEGINNING
It was there in the bathroom sink, my tears cupped in its porcelain palm. Bubbling up in the suds. There, drowning in the saturated cornfields. Flying like a wandering albatross through a bottle-green sky. I said my dead friend’s name and it turned to vapor inside my mouth. It was there in my fourth-grade journal, where I drew a green circle and wrote: everyone belongs inside. There, in the red dust when the rover circled and circled and found no evidence of life. I circled and circled, my pointer finger extended as if I were scrolling down a list of words in the dictionary, looking for the right one. Absence—no. Emptiness—no. Ghost—no. Grief—no. Not quite. I blew into an empty wine bottle so I could hear the ocean. I wanted to find my dead friend buried in the sand like an abalone shell. I circled and circled, holding a stick, lashing at the air like a piñata, expecting my sadness to spill all over the ground. And there it was: sweet jelly inside a strawberry candy. Hydrangeas like fat, purple storm clouds. There it was. The sky opened like a casket and out flew the birds, singing.
WHEN YOU RETURN FROM THE DEAD, I ASK YOU FOR INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT CLOUDS
*
Lawnmowers clip your words like blades of grass. What did you say? I yell over the noise. Purple irises bloom inside your mouth. Cirrus, cumulus, stratus: each word a wet petal falling from your tongue.
*
I read you every poem I’ve written since you left. You smoke—death hasn’t cured your addiction. We lie in the cut grass, but now you can see through the sky. Tell me something interesting about clouds, I say. You think it over, and then: Do you regret letting your phone go to voicemail?
*
Your voice sounds different, like a recording of your voice. I read you my poems about grief. You say grief is not about what’s lost, but what’s left behind.
*
The irises in your mouth are rust-colored. I store your cigarette smoke in glass jars.
*
The rain may never end. And why would it want to? Why would it choose to fall to its death?
Grief reinvents itself. Like rain.
*
Today, the sky is cloudless and I am filled with dread.
Pareidolia: seeing familiar images in random things. Like animals in clouds.
You blow a smoke ring. It looks more like your face than your real face.
*
I try to lift your suitcase but it’s too heavy. I open it and a single cloud escapes. Clouds are surprisingly heavy, you say.
*
bleeding heart * red-winged blackbird * hyacinth * fistfuls of onion grass * rhododendron * pistachio ice cream * sturgeon moon * nimbostratus * cirrocumulus * New and Collected Works * tiger swallowtail * sleepy orange * hibiscus tea * Japanese maple * cumulonimbus * sky as metaphor * goodbye in eight languages * ocean as metaphor * death as metaphor * goodbye as cloudless sky * goodbye as white noise * goodbye as sugar cube * goodbye as goodbye * goodbye
*
What will I do with myself, now that grief is no longer the heaviest thing I’ve held?
ABECEDARIAN WHILE TRAPPED INSIDE THE HAUNTED MANSION RIDE
Anxiety’s gloved hands were already on my throat
by the time I was 16, so when mechanical issues forced the
cart to a halt on the second floor of the haunted mansion ride, the
darkness didn’t faze me. Nor did the dangling skeletons, vampires
emerging from coffins, or the disembodied hand crawling across the
floor—what scared me was the mirror on the wall opposite me. It was
gilded, slightly crooked, and housed my reflection: young, uncertain of what
hung just around the figurative and literal corner. Someone
in the cart behind me—whom I couldn’t see—started screaming:
Just get me out of here! My reflection in the mirror laughed: who are you
kidding? You’re never getting out. Even then, I knew it was a metaphor. As the
lights flickered on, I considered how comfortable I felt, how I might be
more afraid of leaving than staying. That would become a theme—the
novelty of fear stroking my hair with its long claws. The strobe lights were my
obsessions, my heartbeats; the audio of sinister laughter and screaming
people was my life’s soundtrack. I thought: that coffin would make a fine bed. A
quixotic plan, I now realize, but at the time I was possessed with a
rare combination of adolescent idealism and dread that made the idea
seem rational. The ride restarted and the cart made its way outside, where
the ride attendant informed us where to go for a refund. Next time,
use your voice, I imagined him whispering to me. I will, my imaginary self
vowed—it’s not that I was afraid to scream. I was afraid no one
would hear me if I did. The attendant smiled, reassuringly, revealing
xanthic teeth that reminded me of a row of gravestones that have
yellowed with age. This was long before the era of hopping on
Zoom to tell my therapist: I’m lost again, it’s dark, I can’t find my way through.
THE ANATOMY OF GRIEF
I keep forgetting to close the doors of my poems.
You keep sneaking in.
There’s always a radio playing. Sometimes you’re bopping your head to static.
The way you sing my name so sweetly, now.
Like you’ve drilled holes through the letters to extract their sap.
You hand me a flashlight. We search for the lost fragments of Sappho’s lyrics but find only single words on scraps of papyrus: desire, fire, immortal.
You tell me this is how you died: by eating words that weren’t for you.
Black ink staining your lips.
When I return from the underworld each night, I know things I didn’t know before.
About the anatomy of a bell—crown, mouth, lip, shoulder, waist.
About the anatomy of a book—head, spine, joints.
About the anatomy of love—crushed mint, forsythia.
I ask what you do when you can’t sleep. You say:
Sometimes, late at night, I let the radio listen to me.
_________________________________________
Note: This poem is from a series in which I am using my own found poems as the endings of new poems. The final line, “Sometimes, late at night, I let the radio listen to me” is a found poem I wrote using the 2009 Dial Press Edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (page 9).
