The Anti-Grief. Marianne Boruch

dead living, a spot for reverent

      frolic and grief. The Ancients

      mourn, loving the lost off to their

      out-of-body nowhere or somewhere,

      eating with them one last time.

      The original church-basement lunch

      after the funeral, I suppose.

      And those ladies who

      toil among the fruit salad, ham spread,

      the muted voices—

      O long-robed muses of oldest days,

      (for Poetry lyric and epic and sacred,

      for Music, History, Dance, et al) come hither!

      Even you, wordless stricken one

      called Tragedy, the start over,

       dark forever thus

      in such places, that bright

      moth bitten-blind ring of leaves you wear.

      May Day

      The child, the miniature

      old person waiting in her was worry,

      all that sitting alone in a tree thinking the tree

      knew her thoughts.

      Walking home, just walking like that…

      A kind of radar. It does ache,

      scanning the waters Is

      turning to Was turned to who can recall

      the inch-by-inch days of school.

      What got learned piled up or it morphed

      to the next thing and left behind

      a little smoke.

      There are children with

      no child inside. But here’s a bird for you, says Spring,

      brought back from the dead of

      snow and ice. Plus flowers, the first blue (sweet

      low-to-the-ground vinca), first yellow

      (forsythia’s wild reach every which way).

      And those hearts in the garden again, their red

      and their white bleed so meticulously

      minting sorrow—classic, ridiculous, too many—

      one might think them fake, stamped out in some factory

      an ocean away, two continents. A good third of

      the workers underage, trying so hard.

      That Thing

      I have a lot of rue in me.

      A bicycle tire to fix.

      World peace to attend to.

      Bones in the x-ray not lighting up right.

      I have an ear

      for that scratching in the wall that

      keeps one awake in the short run,

      like: whether to tell you

      that thing or not.

      That thing. So many names for it but certain

      categories in the subset of

      small and dark include

      all the better to see you with, my dear, said the wolf

      in that bonnet swiped from

      the grandmother he ate. Try to figure a logic there

      if you come into the story midway. Which

      is every human’s condition.

      Case in point: my family’s ridiculous habit,

      showing up to movies halfway through. Then sitting

      the same mileage into the next run—

      theaters couldn’t care less, all day if you wanted—

      until scenes got familiar, a runaway train, a kitchen knife

      redropped. Until my mother, reduced

      to a whisper: this is where we came in meant

      finish your popcorn, we’re going.

      If I told you

      the screw-up, the backstory

      of that thing I should

      tell you… Ugh. Such earnestness in the world

      is exhausting. Consider the local Y, full up

      with the breathless on machines,

      persistent perfect shapes-to-be while

      the youngest among us sit poolside, stunned

      to a rivet by a crushing coach.

      Look at my nose! shouts the bellowed monster of the shallows.

      Their little heads turn.

      To sleep is to dream all the way. But too much

      of that thing went on today.

      I lower my head to the pillow for my brain

      to be washed all night—

      Because you said

      that happens, that’s the drill. Whatever fluids

      I had no part in making

      run ragtag and rivered over my

      bleak-in-there, for hours.

      A Rescue

      The whale might, she might vaguely recognize

      human cries of those drowning

      as some distant tribe of fin

      and blowhole. And the damaged

      submarine, her cousin once twice

      three times removed, huge and gray

      in the blood-let Atlantic’s notorious

      cold beyond cold lined at bottom with

      outrageous fish whose photos in a glossy

      seasick book could wide-eye you

      to some moon creature,

      their razors on stalks bright-blinking

      right off their heads to terrify or protect.

      So the great species of the planet

      unite underwater where we earth-stuck

      oxygen eaters rarely look or think to look.

      And on hearing those cries—

      Wait, doesn’t the whale have a massive

      mammal heart, a child could

      run through it. That sound, such a flood

      to the brain. (Brain curious as a calf in spring

      folded up, tangled, still wet

      from the going.) Do something! billows

      and bells through the hopeless

      slate-blue. The whale’s identical first

      cell of us too in that watery void before

      we turned sea creature here,

      land breather there, damned the same to

      archangel