The Calm
About a blanket being held open
A hand on the hemstitch of that flap
About this feeling I will never feel again
About this feeling you never felt since
You held the blanket, your arm, the whiff
Of your armpit, the flesh of you who
Never wore clothes in bed, your nakedness
Felt all the way through my travel clothes
My purse and my suitcase dropped in the hall
And all the rushing, checkpoints, and rain
Flying into the night like pinpoint lights
Blinking off, off, off, a calmness closing
A calm I can never induce in myself
Only you could do it, no one else even
My mother (I was too tiny then
To feel the need for adult calm though
I yearn for it now as a child yearns)
Years of adulthood’s anxious doing and
Fixing and shouldering and talk-managing
Flung me so far away from myself
That I spun in an orbit of Outerness
A galaxy forlorn
So felt as that blanket flap opened
The mothering of a lover returning
A lost childhood to his beloved and
Down, down, down to a deep-sea calm, plumbed
Home Hall Bed In
To do this for myself now that you are gone eternally
Is so impossible
That my only recourse is to make it unnecessary
(Not that you, now burnt to ashes, are unnecessary)
But since I cannot provide for myself the shift
From Lost Without to Found Within,
I must stay . . . somewhat . . . calm,
And, as if on a blanket on sand, lie alone
Somewhat naked.
Cremation Room: Invited to Press the Button
Conveyor belt ov-
er trap door in the floor:
your coffin rises
it’s the box of you
lightly bumped onto the belt
I know it is you
mind and spirit flown
because I saw the white cloth
your nose and your cheeks
START button awaits
a big pearl on a column
two steps away: I press
room so cold, clean, and beige
my coat is on you are gone
and also going
the belt is moving
huge steel doors flush with the wall
open to the heat
my face feels the fire
eyes suddenly see inside
the brick chimney charred
scorched from scores of years
the color of horses’ hooves
and you go go IN
not into a blast
but a glow from a blaze below
its source I can’t see
steel doors sliding like
drapery in this room so cold
I can see my breath
