Is there any subject that has the reader more auto-matically on a poet’s side than the death of someone beloved? Not only is it a universal experience, it’s one that grows ever more common the older we get. The classic elegies are for the young—Ben Jonson on the death of his small son, Theodore Roethke’s “Elegy for Jane: My Student, Thrown by a Horse.” Now that we have more older women poets, widowhood is coming to its own as a subject. (A shoutout here to Molly Peacock’s marvelous book The Widow’s Crayon Box: Poems, recently out from W. W. Norton, which features several poems first published in LIBER.) And then there is the death of a longtime friend, which Hilde Weisert writes about in such a wry, deeply intelligent way.
In Weisert’s poems, the shock of grief has modulated into almost a kind of curiosity. The living and the dead exist in different time frames: “How can what I know now/that came as a shock then/feel like a secret I kept from you?” she writes in “Apprehension.” The title is a little subtle—to apprehend is to understand but also to anticipate with fear. The first meaning exists in the present-as-now, the second in the present-that-was—the past. “Would Have” also plays with tenses as, in a different way, does “Admission”: “You die, and I imagine/doing the things I used to—/And I do.” Lunch, bookstores, phone calls, listening to R & B—life goes on, at least
for now.
Alissa Quart’s “Ash November” also mourns the death of a friend, which blends with the death of (what’s left of) our seemingly rational human world and with its struggling Left in the era of Trump:
They are saying AI is a poet now, that you are ashes
now. That the drink killed you. They are saying
that the “working class” has united against itself.
In its sweeping, rageful satire of our unfortunate moment in history, “Ash November” places the death of one dear friend in a context of societal collapse. The consolation is “AI could not write this poem.” For now, that will have to do.
In “the art of becoming,” Diem Okoye offers a respite from gloomy thoughts of loss and ruin. Yes, death comes to all, but meanwhile, if we’re lucky, there is time for transformation—many transformations, including the one that is your best, real self:
How strange that it takes
half a lifetime to arrive
at your own door,
to knock and be answered
by the person you’ve been
becoming all along.
Here’s to the knock and the answer! May each of us become the person we were meant to be.
