poetree

When I signed up for today, I had in mind some of the poems listed below. Then I reread them and realized most of them were about the dead people rather than directly to them. Memory is the devil, and so are prepositions.

Anyway, here are some poems about death that have either lingered in my memory or caught my attention when I went fishing in the inter-oceans on this topic.

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"Expired" by Denise Duhamel

This poem is not online, but I feel compelled to mention it anyway, because it's so striking: Duhamel narrates her attachment to her dead father's Albuterol inhaler, which she is using "until it runs out, / until I absolutely have to say goodbye." It's as vivid and powerful a poem about grief as I've ever read, printed in one of the most beautifully designed chapbooks I've encountered. The ordering information can be accessed at the book's page at Slapering Hol Press. [A more detailed review of the collection is at Galatea Resurrects.]

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"the rites for Cousin Vit" by Gwendolyn Brooks

A sonnet I encountered in grade school. Even though it's about a dead woman, it's bursting with life. The phrase "larger than life" embodied within fourteen lines. Marilyn Hacker wrote an appreciation of it soon after Brooks's own passing.

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"What the Living Do" by Marie Howe

I first met this poem in Michael Klein and Richard McCann's Things Shaped in Passing: More "Poets for Life" Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1997). The anthology also includes Donna Masini's "Beauty." These two poems are to dead people -- about seeing the world and the self anew through the prism of loss. Masini writes, "How much can the eye take in? / I think it must be the organ of feeling."

(Almost ten years ago, in an World AIDS Day post, I quoted from David Bergman's "The Care and Treatment of Pain," which is also in this anthology.)

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"What Came to Me" by Jane Kenyon
About a gravy boat. It's not coincidence that I'm moved by poems about possessions -- astrologically, I'm a Taurus (i.e., materialistic); historically, I've served as the executor of an estate, and I've helped sort things out elsewhere; in general, my friends and I are at the stage where more of us are having to deal with parents and friends passing away,and there frankly tends to be a lot to do when that happens, and interacting with the possessions (regardless of whether they're retained or sold or given away) is an intrinsic, intricate part of that. (My poem "A Stack of Cards" isn't autobiographical, but it does emerge from personal experience.)

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A Dialogue with My Daughter through the Window of Her Dollhouse by J. R. Solonche

Its opening line, quoting the daughter: "The days never end, but people end, right?" Oh, my heart.