Last Holy Fragrance

    In Memoriam James Wright

When by first light I went out
from the last house on the chemin de Riou
to start up the cistern pump, there he sat,
mumbling into his notebook at an upstairs window
while the valley awakened: a cock
called full force, a car’s gears
misshifted, a dog made some feeble yaps.
The next winter in Mount Sinai, voiceless,
tufted with the shavelessness that draggles
from chins on skid row in Saint Paul,
Minnesota, he handed me the poem
of that Vence morning. Many times since,
I have read it and each time I have heard
his voice saying it under my voice,
and in fact in those auditoriums
that don’t let you “hear yourself,” sometimes
I hear only his voice, edged, pitying,
surprising language with the mourning
that goes on inside it, for what it names
making my eyes “pop” a little, perhaps
showing the whites, as his used to,
when the poems were at their saddest.
But poetry sings past even the sadness
that begins it: the drone of poetry readings
or the mutterings coming from poets’ workrooms—
as oblivious to emotion as the printed page—
are only seeking that chant of the beginning,
older than any poem, that the song men
of Arnhem Land, who jolt their clapsticks
with a rebuking force like a spank, think
they summon, or the shaman in Point Barrow,
Alaska, having trance-learned it, translates,
or gopher frogs put to us in parallelismus membrorum,
or, now and then, a pure poem glories in.
As do those last, saddest poems of his,
which overtake the chant, suddenly synchronize
with its happiness, and, as when first light blooms
clouds of night, give us mourning’s morning.
“How am I ever going to be able to say this?
The truth is there is something terrible,
almost unspeakably terrible in our lives,
and it demands respect, and, for some reason
that seems to me quite insane, it doesn’t hate us.
There, you see? Every time I try
to write it down it comes out gibberish.”
When the song goes, silence replaces it
inside the bones. He lies back fast asleep
in the airplane seat. Under his eyelids
consciousness flickers. What’s happening?
A computation: the difference, figured
in a flash, between what has been lived
and what remains to be. He dreams perhaps
of whittling a root, transfiguring it
by subtraction—of whatever it is in roots
that makes them cling-perhaps into a smile,
which now passes his lips, or else into
a curled up, oriental death’s body
mummified into the memories of his last visitors.
Even fast asleep his face is a-sweat. SS
torturers start to work on Cagney. He knows
he will soon crack and spill the invasion plans.
When he hears the rumbling of the B-24’s
come to shut his mouth, he cracks a grin.
When the bombs start exploding about him,
he throws back his head and madly laughs.
Sitting up, he peers out the plane window
to see if we might be coming in too low,
ready himself to laugh among all the screams.
For this poet, the blessed moment
was not only at the end, in Fano, in spring,
where, with his beloved Annie, just before
returning home to die, he got well,
but also at first, forty years earlier,
by the Ohio, where he sat still and watched
the river flow, and flowed himself inside it,
humming and lulling first beginnings
that would heal not only his dumb—born self
but also the solitaries mute until death
who sprawl cast-down stupid on sidewalks
like dropped flowers waiting to be dirty-shoesoled
into first perfume or last stink, the same smell,
or squat in their own leakage on curbstones,
watching paper trash gyre and whirlwind
spellbound a block or so down East 12th Avenue
and fall back, trash again, or still stand
on a windy corner, gesticulating and talking
to nobody. The computation darkens.
Again and again it showed plenty of time.
Now, even on the abacus of the rosary,
or the petals, hushed to the tabletop, of roses,
which we mortal augurers figure and refigure
out on our incredulous infinity of times,
it comes out: a negative number. Fear,
the potion of death, is yet a love derivative,
and some terrible pinch of it must be added
to restore the clingingness the penknife
gouges off the root. Near where it first forms,
the Ohio stops in its bed and holy-waters under ice
all its creatures, even, in his anticipation,
the boy sitting soon in nobody’s memory
some days downriver. He went away,
three-quarters whittled root of silenus wood,
taking a path that, had it simply vanished,
we could imagine keeps going, toward a place
where he waits—in winding-cloth or swaddling-sheet,
death’s body but also fetus of new being—to rise again
into the religion of the idolatry of images
graven their moment into being-born-and-dying.
But the path ends there where a white rose
lies on top of its shadow in Martin’s Ferry,
Ohio, let drop on her way to church by a child
too stunned by dead bells pounding through sunlight
to hold it, or anything, or anyone, tight
that day, giving up its last holy fragrance
into this ending-time, when the earth
lets itself be shoveled open to take in a body.
It will be a long time before anyone comes
who can lull the words he will not now ever use
—words which, now he has left, turn this way and that—
hum and coax them to press up against,
shape themselves by, know, true-love, and idolize.