The Language of Loss. Barbara Abercrombie
eating, and drink from the bottle
being passed back and forth; I can lighten up, can’t I,
Christ, can’t I? There is another subject, in a minute
I’ll think of it. I will. And if you know it, help me.
Help me. Remind me why I’m here.
—KIM ADDONIZIO
What is so pure as grief ? A wreck
set sail just to be wrecked again.
To lose what’s lost—it’s all born lost
and we just fetch it for a little while,
a dandelion span, a quarter-note.
Each day an envelope gummed shut
with honey and mud. Foolish
to think you can build a house
from suffering. Even the hinges will be
bitter. There will be no books
in that house, only transfusions.
And all the lemon and cedar
in the world won’t rid the walls
of that hospital smell.
—MELISSA STEIN
The role of elegy is
To put a mask on tragedy,
A drape on the mirror.
To bow to the cultural
Debate over the anesthetization of sorrow,
Of loss, of the unbearable
Afterimage of the once material.
To look for an imagined
Consolidation of grief
So we can all be finished
Once and for all and genuinely shut up
The cabinet of genuine particulars.
Instead there’s the endless refrain
One hears replayed repeatedly
Through the just ajar door:
Some terrible mistake has been made.
What is elegy but the attempt
To rebreathe life
Into what the gone one once was
Before he grew to enormity.
Come on stage and be yourself,
The elegist says to the dead. Show them
Now—after the fact—
What you were meant to be:
The performer of a live song.
A shoe. Now bow.
What is left is this:
The compulsion to tell.
The transient distraction of ink on cloth
One scrubbed and scrubbed
But couldn’t make less
Not then, not soon.
Each day, a new caption on the cartoon
Ending that simply cannot be.
One hears repeatedly, the role of elegy is.
—MARY JO BANG
Spell to Bring a Dead Husband Back
Come back to me and fetch your busted heart.
Come back to me and take the medications
the doctors said would make you well
Come back to me and save me from
this guilt over not saving you
Come back to me and call your mother—
she’s lonely for the sound
of your voice
Come back to me and read me your
poems—I can read them
but it’s better if you read them
because you wrote them
and I’m only a spectator
Come back to me and take your place
in this bed that I’ve filled
with books and clothes and
condolence cards, as if
their weight could replicate yours
their heft not resembling
the bones and body I slept beside
Come back to me and fight me
for the remote
Come back—let me feed you
Come back—let me rub your sore
shoulder with CBD
in the hope it would loosen
and you could start another day
put on another blue shirt
from your closet of blue shirts
Come back, come back, come back
with your glasses precariously
on your nose; you’d push them
back with fingers you called
stubby
Come back and find your wedding ring
your pocket change
your heavy fist of office keys
your money under the welcome mat
your pens in a secret drawer
Come back, come back, come back,
I say, as I rock my body
into that cursed sleep
Come back through the flames and the urns
the platitudes and the eulogies
Come back and we will all
the pleasures prove,
stopping the clocks and
the calendars
Come back, come back, come back—damn it—come back.
—ALLISON JOSEPH
I did already know that only the old words would do: death, grief, sorrow, sadness, heartbreak. Nothing modernly evasive or medicalising. Grief is a human, not a medical, condition, and while there are pills to help us forget it—and everything else—there are no pills to cure it. The griefstruck are not depressed, just properly, appropriately, mathematically (“it hurts exactly as much as it is worth”) sad. One euphemistic verb I especially loathed was “pass.” “I’m sorry to hear your wife has passed” (as in “passed water”? “passed blood”?). You do not have to force the word “die” on others, even if you always use it yourself. There is a midpoint. At