Tag: Death

The Day After My Death

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jeff Worley

Featured Image: Italian or Swiss Town by Frederic Edwin Church 1868

—after lines by Michael Van Walleghen

The moon, stars and weather
will happen as they always have,

though surely with my breath gone
the wind, in some slight measure,

will falter. Absent my footsteps
the earth will feel along its spine

a momentary shiver of abandonment.
And my friends? Won’t they gather

with me again, in whatever purple-
swagged room, for wine and stories,

some of them nearly impossibly true?
Meanwhile, the mailman, humming

like a bee in a blossom, will slip
my name into the metal box:

an unsigned note from The Paris Review
saying, simply, Sorry.

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House on the Lake

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Liz Robbins

Featured Image: Greenwood Lake by Jasper Francis Cropsey 1875

When Dad was dying, everyone wanted
to take care of him, no one
wanted to.

We sent flowered cards, everyone wanted
the easy parts.

His cancer was a quiet purple flower
that grew too familiar when it took
over the bed.

The purple wanted the easy parts,
the purple wanted the hard parts, the liver.

We all went one way, then another.
We were the roots, we scattered.

We couldn’t compete, that’s all we could
do. We wanted to sit around and stare
at the clouded sky and drink.

His IV was clear, the only thing.

He had ten months, ten years.

We walked around Lily-Pad Lake,
where hordes of trout wriggled
to breathe.

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Heroic

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lawrence Raab

“People who plan their own memorial services,”

my friend was saying, “don’t get the point of death.”

There’d been songs and prayers and ecumenical readings.

Then one of the children played the trumpet

and the brother told too many stories that weren’t

sad or funny. Now we were headed to the reception

to be sincere about how much he’d have appreciated it.

But I liked thinking you could say of someone,

He didn’t get the point of death, and make it sound

like a brave refusal. As we walked up the hill

on that stubbornly beautiful day, I liked that idea

a lot more than hearing about people battling their illnesses

when all they’re really doing is lying there with a chemo drip

in their arms, then stumbling off to throw up. I know, I

know it’s only a figure of speech, a way of granting

courage to those whose bodies can’t manage it,

but what I want is the strapping on of bright armor,

the hefting of great swords, then striding out

into the blinding plain, massed armies on either side.

Sure, the odds are against us. In fact, we’re doomed,

which is why the clarity of standing here

has become important. Not the battle itself, but these

few minutes of stillness—the ocean in the distance

brandishing its light, and the sea-birds inscribing

their invisible maps across the field of the sky,

and the colorful flags of our armies testing the wind.

Lawrence Raab is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently The History of Forgetting (Penguin, 2009). His collection What We Don’t Know About Each Other won the National Poetry Series and was a finalist for the 1993 National Book Award. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, a Junior Fellowship from the University of Michigan Society of Fellows, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts. He teaches literature and writing at Williams College, where he is the Morris Professor of Rhetoric.

Originally appeared in NOR 8.

Objective Correlative

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Ann Keniston

Featured Art: The Letter by Alice Pike Barney

All I could do was think of her face.
Or not think of it, the way
after receiving her letter I felt
relief, gratitude, and then
lost the actual note she wrote,
the tiny, lovely photograph
of her children I’d vowed to cherish.
And then I saw: my grief was
the objective correlative, a hook
on which I could hang all the scraps
of whatever other sadnesses
I was more frightened of. And the grief,
like a person, like her in her solicitude,
almost prevented me from seeing this

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Tool Box

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Maura Stanton

Under the rusting red metal lid we’re waiting for you—your father’s tools.
We always knew you weren’t going to build a doghouse or repair the stairs or
tighten a bibcock faucet, but we wanted to be of use as in the old days. Ah, the
old days! When we heard your father’s tread on the basement steps, we were
thrilled. The hammer clenched its head, the bubble trembled in the level, the
pliers stretched its jaws. But after your father died it was worse than we ex-
pected. You carted us out to your car, left us for months in the trunk, and then
stuck us on the floor of this hall closet next to the vacuum cleaner. Now the
hacksaw’s teeth are rusting, the file’s worn down, and the measuring tape sags
beside the plane. The poor jackscrew, no longer attached to a work bench, has
grown forgetful, and thinks it’s really a micrometer caliper. All you care about
is duct tape these days, tearing off flashy shreds to cover your botched work
while the tough little nails languish. So watch out! All of us in here are fed up
with your disregard for some of mankind’s oldest inventions, so if you ever do
open this lid you’re going to get hurt.

Outbound Fall River 1967

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By David Rivard

Well, you know how it is
when you’re thirteen, & deep
in the factory bosses’ graveyard—your hair
damp, atmospherically

violet in the August dusk—the children
you run with calling back
over gravestones & wrought-iron Grand
Army of the Republic

picket fences—in this cemetery
catty-corner
from the China Inn (Catholic chow mein
sandwiches

served there Fridays,
Wayne Yee’s family cooks them)—
you know all those
grassy family plots you walk over, strongholds

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Early Life

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Sydney Lea

All the pastor’s years of serving God
and humankind—they’re nothing now.
His congregation has long resigned itself
to anecdotal, meandering sermons.
But how forgive his mixing the liturgy
of welcome to a new church member
with the ceremony—however it may be related—
of baptism? The poor young parents

blush and fidget while veteran members feel
something between impatience and rage.

The minister and infant, robed and sleeping,
appear serene, above it all,
the one too young, even awake, to know
what’s going on and the other unable
to keep intact his thinking. Painful pauses.
Autumn rain on the roof like gunfire.

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The Meeting

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Catie Rosemurgy

They were deep in it and about to vote on what it was.
The leaves above them began to drip and blur
the proceedings. Thumper, Miss Peach, the yellow pile of wax
that was the Candlestick Maker, all of them
batted whatever lashes they had at the middle distance and recited
possible recipes for what was leaking out of their eyes.

The Black Coat read from The Official Complaint:
for years everything has been about itself, the music
about music, the light about light. In the small patch of woods
on the south end of town, someone played with a rock and a feather
and was never seen or heard from again.

3 parts: dirt thrown at the moon___1 part: other people’s bodies

Miss Peach straightened her lichen vest, lay down,
and pretended she was dead. Thumper sang a cappella about berries
and knowing what to do, the Black Coat swatted patchy bluebirds
from Miss Peach’s eyes. Everyone’s mouth craved the irritation of dirt,
but their faces, all mere surface damage and glow,
spoke of more. Of a time when things happened
and led quickly to other things. Of a place beyond the trunks of trees.

Soon they would lose the light filtering in from the big game down the road.
No matter. They could feel their faces
beginning to cave in and didn’t need to see.

3 parts: footsteps approaching your nest
1 part: your head held above the crowd on a satin pillow

1 part: wild mint___2 parts: your mother seeing you walk into a clearing
after you’ve been dead for so many years

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