The Truth the Dead Know

For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959


Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

--Anne Sexton (1928-1974), American Confessional poet and professor who struggled with mental illness and childhood abuse. She took her life at age 46.

"You Don't Know What Love Is"

For Rebecca Feldman and Brian Roessler

That's what the first line says
of the song I've been playing all summer
at the keyboard—trying to get my hands
around its dark, melancholy chords,
its story line of a melody that twists
up like snakes from melodic minor scales
that I've also been trying to learn, though
I'm no great shakes as a practicer of scales.

Come to think of it, neither am I much
when it comes to love—no great shakes, I mean.
Not that I haven't had my chances.
Twenty years married, I made a lousy husband,
half asleep, selfish, more like a big baby
than a grown man, the poet laureate
of the self-induced coma when it came to
doing anything for anybody but me.
"Now and then he took his thumb
out of his mouth to write an ode to
or a haiku about the thumb he sucked all day."

That's what I imagined my ex-wife said
to our therapist near the end. She did say:
"It's all about Bill." She was right.
And suddenly it frightens me, remembering
how, at our wedding, our poet friends
read poems of (mostly) utter depression
to salute us. I wondered if their griefs in love
had double-crossed our union, if strange
snakes in the grass of our blissful Eden
had hissed at us, and now I worry,
on your wedding day, if I'm not
doing the same damned thing . . . .

I haven't come to spring up and put my curse
on your bliss. Here's what I want to say:
You're young. You don’t know what love is.
And as the next line of the song goes, you won't
—"Until you know the meaning of the blues."
Darlings, the blues will come (though not
often, I hope) to raise their fiery swords
against your paradise. A little of that
you unwittingly got today, when it rained
and you couldn't be married outside under
the beautiful tree in Nan and Alan's yard.
But paradise doesn't have to be structured
so that we can never reenter it. After
you've kicked each other out of it
once or twice (I'm speaking metaphorically,
of course), teach yourself how to say
a few kind words to each other.
Don't stand there angry, stony.
Each of you let the other know
what you are feeling and thinking

and then it may be possible
to return to each other smiling,
hand in hand. For arm in arm,
you are your best Eden. Remember
the advice the old poet sang to you
on the afternoon of August 4, 2001,
the day you got married.
May you enjoy a good laugh
thinking of him and his silver thumb
now that you've turned the key
into your new life in the beautiful
Massachusetts rain and—hey, now—sun!

-- Bill Zavatsky (1943- ) poet, translator, musician, teacher, and editor, from Where X Marks the Spot

Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken
 It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
     If this be error and upon me proved,
     I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616), English dramatist and poet



Photo: Bill and myself at St. Martin's yesterday, the day before our 30th anniversary. Photo by Ruby Downs.