for Mike, July 2016
After Dale’s sudden cancer,
his body wasting swiftly to death,
I didn’t believe in love or beauty, or my ability
to write poems.
And my grieving turned into a sequence of writing
little hostile elegies
in solitary sittings. Elegies ceased being an elegant poetic form.
I guess I was trying to understand
the shape of a new sorrow in its deep
recognizance;
how easily it’s foraged for my marginalized hungers that
felt
legitimately nullified.
With it, figurative language estranged itself
from crafting mutable metaphors,
of the natural world standing
in its place within adjectival phrases.
Landscape, though permissible, seemed to only swell around
retaining rivers beneath my feet with a grave distance.
Bodies ensued to ashes now,
and I didn’t utter dust to dust.
Only after losing many months and time
I did (slowly) begin to notice a greener (faint) tint to the
sunlight.
This felt like a small divinity.
***
Finding you was this too,
after such importunate feelings of
abandonment.
I said this is a remarkable lightness I feel, I couldn’t imagine it
before I felt it.
You told me to look at the moon. I did.
That’s what you did after Marie died.
You believed all moons in the sky to be
elegiac in a nonfigurative sense,
real to the eye,
therefore, you represented its steadfast truth.
I proposed then a drive to Glacier National
Park
thinking of a fine faultless finery—the firs, pines, and
stillness.
We drove up—higher than I expected—
skyward up the steepest corners and edges
and I looked out at spring’s sustenance,
an earthwork
of forest trees scored in majestic columns, bedded
and wooded,
coated with needles, fully medicinal,
their similes shedding: of giving over the live
forested body
to its eminence. Of the mountain’s height,
its splendor-drop because of its scare
quality.
I felt hesitant to look out.
But for descriptors: the rounded grass tufts
near the car grates then a hell-drop,
a belt of green.
Stones and gravel and gray peeking
though.
This driving with you is a climb of faith,
I think,
and I feel it along with a helpless irritation of lust
in my throat
and gut, and a pair of callous and ashen calves and feet I seem
to have earned.
You helped me through a dry summer, fall, winter
and now summer.
Ten months after he died. He and I, all these years,
had never gone to Glacier,
only near it to Flathead or Whitefish, to fireplace lodges
tucked away.
I brought you to the Weeping
Walls,
where we turned around, because you drove still further
until I threatened fear of heights.
I don’t know how to celebrate 100 years
this high up but you do.
This winding high-up national park with me:
your glasses cocked on your head,
a strange visor of blackish hair,
camera chest-centered,
erect lens outward but modest
two circles looking above my direction
at the field of Beargrass, with its white stalks
and awkward loomed light.
I was unable to get out of the car at Heaven’s Peak,
because the sublime was frightening
but I crawled around the side and peered over, and I knew
I would never use the word Heaven
to describe anything I saw of death, but I saw beauty
in a scrap of its light
I was not afraid
of it taking me with it, the way I had seen him disappear
into illness,
its extinguishing erasure.
***
I hold you in Glacier
where I see you clearly.
I will plow the hard-won truth of pitching death
and flinging its burden into spaces.
No treason I feel now (because)
the eros of the natural world lingers in sentience,
flooding with its central question of what (life and death)
collectively crushes.
I held onto the silver bumper of your car gripping your
hand
because it was your hand and you, too, were
silvery
behind frank light and squinting
to see into a camera’s moon,
a lasting present tense
we just gave ourselves over to, lifted to
case
its blue course: a formal sky of imperturbable
clouds,
of unambiguous secularity.
We take a simple walk around the car
now.
Copyright © 2016 by Prageeta Sharma. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 17, 2016, this poem was commissioned by the Academy of American Poets and funded by a National Endowment for the Arts Imagine Your Parks grant.
Besides the Autumn poets sing, A few prosaic days A little this side of the snow And that side of the Haze - A few incisive mornings - A few Ascetic eves - Gone - Mr Bryant’s “Golden Rod” - And Mr Thomson’s “sheaves.” Still, is the bustle in the brook - Sealed are the spicy valves - Mesmeric fingers softly touch The eyes of many Elves - Perhaps a squirrel may remain - My sentiments to share - Grant me, Oh Lord, a sunny mind - Thy windy will to bear!
This poem is in the public domain.