Another death followed me around over the girls’ weekend. Again, it was kind of nice. My friends and I stayed at my at my in-law’s home in Florida, a home my dear father-in-law, who died two years ago, loved to share with his family. Certainly he’s still around the place. I kept expecting to hear his booming welcome every time I opened the door. I wore his hat all weekend and that was nice too.
I had anticipated feeling the absence of these two beloved folks, so along with my sandals I packed a few poems about death. But I felt presence more than absence. The poems, dark and anguished, express emotions heavier than what I felt.
I left two poems by Jane Kenyon, one of my favorite poets. She’s a reluctant expert on loss, having suffered debilitating depression and then living with and dying from leukemia in her forties. Both poems concern losing a parent.
The first,”What Came to Me,” I threaded through some sea grass looped around one of the remaining beach stairs.
The drop of gravy is a heartbreaker.
The second Kenyon poem, “How Like the Sound,” I attached to a downed pole.
Here she is once-removed from grief. With a poet’s eye and a wife’s warm heart, she observes her husband mourning his mother: “Not since childhood/had you wept this way, head back, throat/ open like a hound”:
“Oceans” by Marie Ponsot I poked through a root exposed by the cratered sand dune.
“Taste like talk fades from a stiffening tongue” is horrifying.
Finally, in memory of Christine and Big Joe, I stuck H.D.’s “Never More the Wind” on a sea grape branch.
Sometimes the simplest words speak of the most difficult truths: “Like a light out of our heart/you are gone.”
