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a little while together then, serene
and afloat on the strange broad canopy
of the abandoned world.
The moment Gallagher describes is a poignant one: climbing into
bed with her dead husband. She describes the bed as the one "we'd
loved in and slept in, married / and unmarried"; now the two are
"unmarried" again, separated by death. She imagines "the body's
messages" going on after death, herself calling across the coldness.
The title could suggest not only the ritual of watching over a body
before burial, but also what the poet would call to her love across that
chill distance: "Wake!" For a short time she experiences the two of
them as being the same, both "dead," both at peace.
Here's another poem that directly addresses a loved one who died.
Poems of address often seek to convey a sense of intimacy; as a writer,
you need to remember that a reader needs to know enough about the
situation to feel that intimacy, and so feel the loss. Notice how Laurie
Duesing helps the reader see the circumstances of this person's
death, and how she uses the image of the stop watch an ironic
counterpoint to the tragic circumstances described.
PRECISION
for Brad Horrell, who died at Sears Point Raceway
on August 14, 1983
The day you flew in perfect arc
from your motorcycle was the same day
I broke the perfect formation of your women
at the railing, leaving behind
your grandmother and mother, to run
and jump the fence. The stop watch hanging
from my neck, suspended between gravity
and momentum, swung its perfect pendulum.
Death and Grief
43
All our motion was brought to conclusion
by your broken body at rest
on the ground. Your breath never rose
to the oxygen placed on your face
and your heart never rallied
to the arms pressing your chest.
You wore the perfect clothes:
the ashy grey of death.
At the hospital they said your failure to survive
was complete. Though I never saw
the neck you perfectly broke or your body
cleanly draped by a sheet, I did see
your dead face bruising up at me
and for lack of something moving to touch,
I clutched the stop watch
which had not died.
If any nurse or doctor had asked,
I could have told, exactly,
to the hundredths of seconds, how long
it had been since I'd seen you alive.
Many poets have found that writing about someone's death rarely
is finished in a single poem. Sharon Olds's The Father describes the
last days of a father and the immediate aftermath of his death. Brenda
Hillman's The Death Tractates is about the loss of a friend and men-
tor; Mark Doty's My Alexandria is imbued with the presence of
AIDS, as are Thorn Gunn's The Man With Night Sweats and Kenny
Fries's The Healing Notebooks. In Alice Jones's The Knot, several
poems deal with a former lover's death.
If you are writing about your own grief, don't try to get it all into
one poem, to make some single pronouncement. Though death is a
large subject, the way it enters our lives is often small: an object left
behind, the memory of an offhand gesture made one long-ago after-
noon, the smell of a T-shirt, the silly joke or absurd irony someone
would have appreciated. In your writing, try to capture those intimate
details that are the emblems of your particular loss.
44 THE POET'S COMPANION
IDEAS FOR WRITING
1. Write about the first experience with death that you can remem-
ber, whether it involved a person or an animal. Then write about
your most recent experience with death. Combine the two in a
poem.
2. Write a poem in which you speak after your own death. Imagine
what death looks and feels like, what your emotions are. What
advice can you give to the living?
3. Write a letter to someone who is dead. In it, make a confession.
4. In "Death, the Last Visit," Howe used the metaphor of a lover.
Invent your own metaphor for death, and write a poem about
what dying might feel like.
5. Who are your dead? Have them meet in a poem, even if they
never met in life, and describe how they interact.
6. Read the newspaper and, when you find an account of a
stranger's death that moves you, write an elegy for that person.
Find a way that your life and that person's death are related, and
talk about it in the poem.
7. Write a first-person poem in the voice of a public figure who is
dead.
8. What can the dead do: go through walls, see the future, move
objects? What are their powers and limitations? What are their
desires, fears, pleasures? Describe them in a poem. (See Susan
Mitchell's "The Dead" in Chapter 1.)
9. If you own some object that used to belong to someone who is
no longer alive, describe it in detail, along with your memories
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