Requiem
This is my mass for the dead, sung into
a multitude of single-person dwellings
which at night, from an aerial perspective,
light up the landscape like an electrical fire.
Most pain is merely psychological, regardless,
and who needs excess when you have enough?
What was left to me: a portrait of the Madonna
and child in a crown, surrounded by impassive
art lovers, reflecting on the tempura or gold.
Look outside: what you see is propaganda.
It feels personal, which like any illusion,
cannot be. Elohim, Adonai, El Shaddai —
the only thing that hurts worse than loss
is losing you, progenitor of my dreams.
The dead wave, expecting a response.
But I too am waiting for an indication,
the night to which your voice belongs.
I have made peace with impermanence,
the dark-eyed juncos twittering in space:
who I’ll become when I’m no longer me.
If you inhabit the praises of your people,
I will praise you, not the mutilated world.
Who else can breathe into dust and create a body,
speak into nothing and make something appear?
Your word a new holy land, some long promise
I dredge forth letter by letter, until by that song,
a future untold by graves innumerable, I can see.
* * * * *
Breviary
At the time of her death, I was driving to see her.
When told, I pierced the air with primal screams.
Upon racing into the room, her skin barely sallow,
I laid across her body weeping, passage confirmed.
That’s not her, my brother said. And yet once it was.
He opened the window to let her spirit fly away free.
At the wake, her casket was coronated with flowers.
I read her Corinthians, Dickinson, Langston Hughes.
Her friend said, How can the dearest person be gone?
Another rejoined, Your mom always worried for you.
At the funeral mass, my father asked me to tie his tie.
A parishioner approached, and asked him who died.
My wife, he said, every word an elevation to climb.
Our beloved sister in Jesus, faithful servant of God,
murmured the priest, will, like Lazarus, rise again.
Six pallbearers carried her, anointed, to the hearse,
through grey skies, fog, an inscrutable veil of rain.
I’m so sorry for your loss, a knife prolonging pain,
blank leitmotif of grief, wrong arms embracing me:
the consoler and the inconsolable rudderless at sea,
watching unforeseen tragedies congeal into history.
Now I see funeral homes everywhere, lighthouses
recalling that all mortal flames will go to their rest.
Now I begin the day by saying her name, Theresa,
asking her what were her dreams, how she slept.
At noon I light a candle, editorialize my actions
so she knows she is within, more than memory.
I vow to preserve your peace, no further unease.
If you knew her, you’d know she could never die,
would never leave us here alone in a pit of despair.
Like a child asking existential questions, I call out
Can you hear me? Are you joyful? Are you there?
Do not believe these lies they are telling, mother.
They don’t know you are alive in every goodness,
every wink, every cell and atom dissolving in air.
* * * * *
Causa Sui
After my mother died, the truest thing
I could say was there are no words.
Yet words were all I, motherless
sack emptied of air, had, so I
used them, wielded them
with my dissociated mind
and slow bleed of a heart,
emitted from a tiny mouth,
to assure others I was alive.
It’s enough that she is gone,
I thought, and I have to go on
absent my source of life and joy,
her being replaced by phantoms —
now you want me to make words,
produce language like a machine?
Horror, I spat. Gut-wrenching pain.
Where’s that document I requested,
my boss had every right to demand,
and did. It’s coming, I said, and in
a very real way, it’s already here,
but she didn’t speak that tongue.
My words, spoken to my mother,
need no translation: we were one.
My words to her were freely given,
not wrested from me as a confession
of diminished ability to serve others
or continuing incapacity to survive.
But to refuse them is to refuse her,
due acknowledgment of a debt
forgiven, never to be repaid.
No matter if I abjure fluency —
with these words I carry her,
my world, beyond the grave.