And one other poem that's kin to that in some way.
I thought this was a good poem because, at times, I
tried to write into the center of what seems very obvious to me
but which people seem to deny.
And the thing that seems obvious here is that when people die,
they break up into little bits, as Philip Larkin says.
And some parts actually fuel these slow fountains of trees
and other parts may harden and be studied in the future
by children who read Ranger Rick in a different fashion.
But to me, that's a transcendent thing.
I don't feel the oversoul so much, I just
I feel that's the way it would be.
Well, that should be a comfort to somebody in grief,
but I don't think it is.
So I started to write this for a friend who
had lost his wife from breast cancer
and then I realized, uh-oh, that doesn't do it.
This doesn't do it either.
Because I've known many women who are dead,
I try to think of fields as holy places.
Whether we plow them or let them to weeds and sunlight,
those are the best places for grief.
If only that they performed the peace we come to,
the feeling without fingers, the hearing
without ears, the seeing without eyes.
Isn't heaven just this unbearable presence
under leaves?
I had thought so.
I had believed, at times, in a meadow.
And at other times in a wood where we'd emerge,
no longer ourselves, but reduced to many small things
that we could not presume to know.
Except as my friend's wife begins to disappear,
he feels no solvent in all the Earth.
And me, far off, still amateur at grief,
walking the creek behind the house
across to the old home place, find
a scattering of chimney rocks.
The seeds my grandmother watered, the human lifetime
of middle-aged trees.