In the past month, two of my relatives and a neighbor from my hometown have died. Whoever said that deaths bundle themselves in threes has been pretty accurate in my experience.
Death might be the genesis and test of a religion, but it’s only one test of poetry, which has other important tests–love, sandwiches, cognition–to take. But, for me, without a functioning religious system to throw against death, I turn to a few poems. All fail to take death and break it over their poetical knees, but they fail with candor and style.
The poems tend to be blunt and short. Which is appropriate. Minced words hold little appeal, silence impends.
My Cup
They tell me I am going to die.
Why don’t I seem to care?
My cup is full. Let it spill.– Robert Friend, from Dancing with a Tiger
Bill Knott’s never chickenshit or mealymouthed. He has a lot of good poems about the westbound. Here’s one:
Poem
The only response
to a child’s grave is
to lie down before it and play dead– from The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans
Knott expresses a solidarity with the dead. A similar solidarity is expressed at the end of Robert Creeley’s great elegy for his mother, “For My Mother: Genevieve Jules Creeley,” a poem which comes in threes, tercets.
“Your head
shuddered,
it seemed, youreyes wanted,
I thought,
to seewho it was.
I am here,
and will follow.–from Selected Poems (1991)
“I am here,/ and will follow.” These lines seems to contain everything there is to say to the dead or the dying. You are present, love them, will miss them. Where they’re going, you will, too.