The Anti-Grief. Marianne Boruch

       Acknowledgments

       Copyright

       Special thanks

      The Anti-Grief

      Pieces on the Ground

      I gave up the pencil, the walk in woods, the fog

      at dawn, a keyhole I lost an eye to.

      And the habit of early, of acorn into oak—

      bent tangled choked because of ache or greed,

      or lousy light deemed it so.

      So what. Give up that so what.

      O fellow addicts of the arch and the tragic, give up

      the thousand-pound if and when too.

      Give up whatever made the bed or unmade it.

      Give up the know thing that shatters into other things

      and takes the remember fork in the road.

      The remember isn’t a road.

      At noon, the fog has no memory of fog, the trees I walked

      or wanted to. Like the pencil never recalls its least

      little mark, the dash loved, the comma that can’t,

      can not dig down what its own brief nothing

      means on the page. I don’t understand death either.

      By afternoon, the brain is box, is breath let go, a kind of

      mood music agog, half emptied by the usual

      who am I, who are you, who’s anyone.

      Truth is, I listen all night for morning, all day

      for night in the trees draped like a sound I never quite

      get how it goes. There’s a phantom self, nerved-up

      as any missing arm or leg.

      Of course I was. Of course I stared from the yard,

      my mother at the window

      rinsing knife and spoon and the middle of her life.

      In drawing class, all eyes fix on the figure gone

      imaginary, thinning to paper. Not the wind or a cry

      how the hand makes, our bent to it

       —pause and rush, rush and pause—

      small animals heard only at night, spooked in the leaves.

      Salmon

      How salmon love

      sex enough to fight uphill in waters blasting

      brilliant, some

      one hundred mph (fact-checkers,

      forget it, I’m close). How we stood, old inkling

      of such exhausting omg, Darwin

      would have… (the difference, same-

      thingness, animal hungers and fury and persistence,

      some amazing something next)

      exploded!—his head

      on a pillow most afternoons in the parlor, wrapped

      in her quiet concern. Emma, the perfect nurse, they say,

      who married the perfect patient,

      Victorian fable, velvet-striped wallpaper even

      on the ceiling would be my guess.

      Because that trip he took in youth is

      everlasting youth, island of

      huge tortoises and the tiny cactus finch

      plus his other

      green spot in the sea, its DNA trace

      of the grand extinct dodo

      too trusting to run from sailors with their clubs, too weird

      and bigger, certainly more

      feathered and blank-eyed than one impossible

      irreplaceable Great Uncle Cedric

      I heard of, just wanting a little honest-to-god

      barbecue at the wedding.

      The forces of life

      are mysterious. But thrilling

      and painful, August in Alaska near

      Seward, gone up in a firestorm during

      the quake, 1964, any year in a fade next to our

      stunned standing at the salmon weir,

      a patch of woods, sunlit river

      raging, those bright muscle-creatures blown back

      at it at it leaping, failing spectacular

      upstarts all over again

      human. What it means to

      love is speechless.

      The Museum of Silence

      Those Poor Clares must wonder why the racket

      louder than usual, three-euros-a-pop

      tourists queueing up outside,

      weekends the convent on pause.

      It’s the noise in their heads, the old nun

      might say with what’s left

      in her head, the girlhood part: war,

      a low-flying plane, the loud, hoarse agony

      of cows shattered from above into petal by

      red petal, garish sprays in grass

      north of these olive groves.

      (Museum of Silence as secret or

      scent, day of misjudgment,

      Italy, the baffling website, our

      stop-start train to Fara Sabina.)

      Quiet is what’s after, the old nun

      tells the young nun who has

      an edge, that eye thing, she has a look.

      This too I invent: is it vanity or just

      the old woman in wonder, going on

      so vividly the long-ago boy in that cockpit

      can’t even have a thought, he’s so scared.

      And the younger nun: So now it’s

      forgive us their trespasses?

      Not out loud. In her head. Belief can narrow

      for good like that. What’s left is

      a lever, a simple jack of amazement to

      pry open the very first museum on earth,

      a sanctuary for the muses.

      Of course. From the Greek mουσεῖον,

      part cemetery. Latin’s closer,

      mūsēum, its small banquet