I’m not going to write a whole lot tonight. I’m tired. I think it has something to do with the dreary weather. Driving to and from work today, the fog was so thick I worried I was going to run into a deer that got lost in the woods and wandered onto the mist-choked highway.
Marie Howe gets a little Emily Dickinson-esque . . .
Death, the Last Visit
by: Marie Howe
Hearing the low growl in your throat, you’ll know that it’s started.
It has nothing to ask you. It only has something to say, and
it will speak in your own tongue.
Locking its arm around you, it will hold you as long as you ever wanted.
Only this time it will be long enough. It will not let go.
Burying your face in its dark shoulder you’ll smell mud and hair and water.
You’ll taste your mother’s sour nipple, your favorite salty cock
and swallow a word you thought you’d spit out once and be done with.
Through half-closed eyes you’ll see that its shadow looks like yours,
a perfect fit. You could weep with gratefulness. It will take you
as you like it best, hard and fast as a slap across the face,
or so sweet and slow you’ll scream give it to me until it does.
Nothing will ever reach this deep. Nothing will ever clench this hard.
At last (the little girls are clapping, shouting) someone has pulled
the drawstring of your gym bag closed enough and tight. At last
someone has knotted the lace of your shoe so it won’t ever come undone.
Even as you turn into it, even as you begin to feel yourself stop,
you’ll whistle with amazement between your residual teeth oh jesus
oh sweetheart, oh holy mother, nothing nothing nothing ever felt this good.
It’s funny. I wrote a poem this evening about death, as well. Most poets are pretty obsessed with mortality. It’s one of the pitfalls of being a poet. Death kindly stops for you all the time.
Here is Saint Marty’s new poem . . .
Writing a Poem
by: Martin Achatz
Doesn’t it always start with a question,
like why is that snowman standing alone
in a field or how did Mom make perfect
pancakes every time or did my sister
feel my hand holding hers in those last
breath moments before her lungs went
to sleep and heart became a drumbeat
on a distant battlefield, when hearing
was all she had left, my voice entering
her ear canal, slowly drifting toward
the shores of her mind—a kid’s
inner tube blown across the lake by
a summer squall until it washes
ashore, finds a home in cattails where
it waits to be remembered, claimed
like a lost soul?
