Elegy

A lament. It sets out the circumstances and character of a loss. It mourns for a
dead person, lists his or her virtues, and seeks consolation beyond the
momentary event. While elegy is not associated with any required pattern or
cadence or repetition, it is a crucial formal link with the history & tradition of

public poetry, serving notice that there was once a past where the corridor
between the public utterance of poetry and the cultural assumptions was both
charged and narrow. The elegy locates the cultural customs of death in
whichever society it occurs, adding greatly to its power. The best elegies will
always be sites of struggle between custom and decorum on the one hand, and
private feeling on the other. modified
from
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (Strand & Boland)

Elegaic conventions from The English Elegy Peter Sacks

�
Weaving � an act and an artifact; text = a woven fabric,
�
Vegetation deities � nature in a human form....
�
Sexual elements of myths and sexuality of the mourner
�
Repetition and refrain --continuity in the face of the greatest discontinuity
possible...exercising a control over grief while keeping the grieving going. By
repeating the name, we try to invoke the object/person,
�
Reiterated questions � to set free anger/frustration, by questioning
someone else, focus of mourner moves from lost object/self towards world
�
Emotional outbreak (anger, cursing, etc.)
�
Movement from grief to consolation
�
Traditional images of resurrection
�
Elements of contest, rewards, and inheritance: act of mourning includes act
of inheritance, ingesting (wafer & wine); in Greece right to mourn legally
connected to right to inherit. Contests over who can most legitimately
mourn...ancient law prohibited inheriting unless their was mourning.
�
Self-consciousness regarding the actual performance of work at
hand...elegists need to draw attention to own surviving powers and reluctant
submission to language.
Halley's Comet Stanley Kunitz Stanley Kunitz

Miss Murphy in first grade

wrote its name in chalk
across the board and told us
it was roaring down the storm tracks
of the Milky Way at frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course
and smashed into the earth
there'd be no school tomorrow.
A red-bearded preacher from the hills
with a wild look in his eyes
stood in the public square
at the playground's edge
proclaiming he was sent by God
to save every one of us,
even the little children.
"Repent, ye sinners!" he shouted,
waving his hand-lettered sign.
At supper I felt sad to think
that it was probably
the last meal I'd share
with my mother and my sisters;
but I felt excited too
and scarcely touched my plate.
So mother scolded me
and sent me early to my room.
The whole family's asleep
except for me. They never heard me steal
into the stairwell hall and climb
the ladder to the fresh night air.

Look for me, Father, on the roof

of the red brick building
at the foot of Green Street�
that's where we live, you know, on the top floor
I'm the boy in the white flannel gown
sprawled on this coarse gravel bed
searching the starry sky,
waiting for the world to end.

Chloe in Late January David Young

Midwinter here, a frozen pause, and now

some nineteen years since cancer took your life.

This month's old god, they say, faced opposite directions,

backward and forward. May I do that, too?

It's much the same. Deer come and go, as soft

as souls in Hades, glimpsed at wood's edge toward dusk;
their tracks in daylight show they come at night
to taste my neighbor's crab trees, last fall's fruit
shrunk down to sour puckered berries.

And where, in this arrested world,

might I expect to meet your cordial spirit?
You would not bother with that graveyard, smooth
below its gleaming cloak of snow. You'd want
to weave among the trees, beside the tiny kinglet,
gold head aglow, warming itself
with ingenuities, adapting, singing,
borne on the major currents of this life
like the creek that surprised me yesterday again,
running full tilt across its pebbled bottom
even in this deep cold.
LITTLE ELEGY

Even the stars wear out.

Their great engines fail.
The unapproachable roar
and heat subside.
And wind blows across
the hole in the sky
with a noise like a boy
playing on an empty bottle.
It is an owl, or a train.
You hear it underground.
Where the worms live
that can be cut in half
and start over
again and again.
Their heart must be
in two places at once, like mine.

Keith Althaus
The Dead BBiillllyy CCoolllliinnss

The dead are always looking down on us, they say,

while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,

and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent

and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes

Throwing Out the Flowers Gwendolyn Brooks

The duck fats rot in the roasting pan,

And it's over and over and all,
The fine fraught smiles, and spites that began

Before it was over and all.

The Thanksgiving praying's away with the silk.

It's over and over and all.
The broccoli, yams and the bead-buttermilk
Are dead with the hail in the hall,

All
Are dead with the hail in the hall.

The three yellow 'mums and the one white 'mum

Bear to such brusque burial
With pity for little encomium
Since it's over and over and all.

Forgotten and stinking they stick in the can.

And the vase breath's better and all, and all.
And so for the end of our life to a man,
Just over, just over and all.
On the Skeleton of a Hound James Wright
Nightfall, that saw the morning-glories float
Tendril and string against the crumbling wall,
Nurses him now, his skeleton for grief,
His locks for comfort curled among the leaf.
Shuttles of moonlight wave his shadow tall,
Milkweed and dew flow upward to his throat.
Now catbird feathers plume the apple mound,
And starlings drowse to winter up the ground.
Thickened away from speech by fear, I move
Around the body. Over his forepaws, steep
Declivities darken down the moonlight now,
And the long throat that bayed a year ago
Declines from summer. Flies would love to leap
Between his eyes and hum away the space
Between the ears, the hollow where a hare
Could hide; another jealous dog would tumble
The bones apart, angry, the shining crumble
Of a great body gleaming in the air;
Quivering pigeons foul his broken face.
I can imagine men who search the earth
For handy resurrections, overturn
The body of a beetle in its grave;
Whispering men digging for gods might delve
A pocket for the bones, then slowly burn
Twigs in the leaves, pray for another birth.
But I will turn my face away from this
Ruin of summer, collapse of fur and bone.
For once a white hare huddled up the grass,
The sparrows flocked away to see the race.
I stood on darkness, clinging to a stone,
I saw the two leaping alive on ice,
On earth, on leaf, humus and withered vine:
The rabbit splendid in a shroud of shade,
The dog carved on the sunlight, on the air,
Fierce and magnificent his rippled hair,
The cockleburs shaking around his head.
Then, suddenly, the hare leaped beyond pain
Out of the open meadow, and the hound
Followed the voiceless dancer to the moon,
To dark, to death, to other meadows where
Singing young women dance around a fire,
Where love reveres the living.
I alone
Scatter this hulk about the dampened ground;
And while the moon rises beyond me, throw
The ribs and spine out of their perfect shape.
For a last charm to the dead, I lift the skull
And toss it over the maples like a ball.
Strewn to the woods, now may that spirit sleep
That flamed over the ground a year ago.
I know the mole will heave a shinbone over,
The earthworm snuggle for a nap on paws,
The honest bees build honey in the head;
The earth knows how to handle the great dead
Who lived the body out, and broke its laws,
Knocked down a fence, tore up a field of clover.
Catherine Barnett

The Return

For a long time there were no signs though we looked wildly for them.
Of course there were lawyers, they came to the house,
lawyers might have been a sign�

And the birds in the park, circling us�

And the DNA, which Aristotle

would have called the fourth kind of recognition,
not what we invent (oh the girls come to us in dreams)
or what we remember, on waking, but�

Someone resembling me has come:

No one resembles me but them:
Therefore they have come.

Nits

It was their father's weekend to take them

and he packed their bags without thinking
last anything. They can't go, my sister said.
They've still got lice.

But they did go and while they were gone

she boiled their brushes until like rice the nits
rose to the surface, vanished, then
reappeared as flecks of pale ash in the soapy water.

With a slotted spoon she lifted the brushes

from their bath and left them bristle-down to dry.
Around each one she twisted the glittery bands
her girls loved to braid through their hair and carried them
all fine and clean upstairs to the beds she'd vacuumed and remade
with fresh flannel sheets for the last day of January
when her girls would be coming back to her
and find nothing changed but all the nits gone
and the dust gone and even the smells of their own
bodies washed away.
Site

The dirty sand everyone said was beautiful

wasn't�it was dirty, or oily,
something turning it to hardness.
It was ugly when we were told
beautiful, shattering when it was
supposed to make us whole, cold
when it should have been warm
and all of us dressed in wrong clothes

because everything was wrong.

We walked the beach early,

lay down in the sand, and tried to sleep
there in the dune hardly a dune it was so low,
but away from the wind�

The locals told us not much ever

washes up on the beach.

How cold it got down by the water.

The water was cold.
The windsurfer wore a wet suit and sailed
back and forth like the birds.

Site, II

We were all she's there�

sister, sister, sister, mother, friend, friend�
and by then we knew.

We sat on the floor in the mortuary looking as if for beauty

at a plate of jewelry and a room full of urns.
One urn pale wood,

one urn with two cloisonn� cranes,

one urn blue steel with four bolts underneath.
My sister took a small brass cube from the velvet plate
and two hollow stars and a screw-top heart

she's to fill with ash and hang from chains

around her neck. What was she thinking?

Who could pour ash into such tiny shapes?

And whose ash?
For one child we had a penny bag,
for the other not a thing.
Site, III

There was so much wind as we walked

we had to bend forward
like the whitecaps in the harbor
that was no harbor just a piece of ocean
where the ocean was a grave with no flowers
even after we threw the wrong-colored roses
down to the waves

And there was still the walk back,

Back out of all this now too much for us�

the birds diving into the high hard water

then coming up for air some distance away, how far away
or how long it took we don't know.

One of us measured longitude,

then latitude, and we saw that what looked like two
was really one island, a true shore,
the one we couldn't get to on account of the wind.

Site, IV

At the bottom of the ocean�

even there�
the bones are picked clean.
I suppose this must be common,
this relentless cleaning,
and the tiny sequin
tossed into the bin of dirty water
and our eyes gouged out with
looking.
Oh.
Child.
When did the child die?
And how white are the whale's bones.
There, down there.
How did you wait for me this
morning.
Oh sequin.
Eye.

Our hearts evolved

from our throats�
Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced

We unstrung necklaces into two glass bowls

and passed them round to the mourners.
The beads were onyx, agate, quartz, all manner

of stone. Everyone was to take two

and at the end of the service
put one back in my sister's hands.

What could she do but collect

the round weights all night?
She has not restrung them,

not wanting to be finished yet with death.

As by Giving or Letting Go

How to tend to their belongings�

Mend them?

Spend them?
Send them to us who still have children

though we try not to speak of them,

frightened as we are.

Lent to my son and me

four cartoon plates, a box for lost teeth,

and a homemade board game

with a sack of markers and dice.

For a child of six and a child of eight

it must have been ecstasy to count so high!

What my sister can't give away

let her break, remake,

take out of the closet the red velvet dress

her eldest wore one Thanksgiving in high fever
when we pressed our hands to her forehead
to cool her, fool the child to sleep.
Memento Mori

Why trust this world�

this one here with just the two peaches

and the watch leaning on its side

and the flashlight showing like an x-ray my bones

and the shale split into pieces like it never belonged together

and the drum of the boy's hand against his body

and the coals still warm from last night's fire

and no birds in the birdhouse

and the arms of the trees stretching upwards

and the match held, the tiny flame crawling,

and the boat inside my body filled with useless debris,

the boat upending and turning face down,

and the words carved into my wedding ring faded

and the wanting what can't be had

and the tick on my son's neck that won't let go

and the worms inside his body, open field his body is,

and the door that gives and the door that takes away

and last night's fortune, nothing is beyond all repair,

and the mother in me all tied up in a fine white line,

line we burn the edges of to keep from unraveling,

and the tiny narrative for tying knots

and the child I thought I might once again carry

and grief, the sheen we bring to wood

when with repetitive gestures we polish the raw thing.

"He will be greatly missed, both on and off the screen."

Transcript

1.
You can read one version in the newspaper and another in the courts
and a third in my sister's face, in my sister's sisters' faces,
in my mother's face�
in the candles burned down to their jars�
2.
How can there be no whole bodies?
You never told me�

We hid the newspapers, the tv, the radio,

the record, the report, the story, the letter, the transcript,
the black box, the irrefutable, the true, the wrong,
the doorbell, the singing, the sky.

3.
And their voices gone, too�
4.
Not just quiet,
not just sleeping past the hour of waking up,
past the sun rising, the alarm, the schedule of rushing,
the falling of leaves, the freezing river, the thawing,
the and then the later and later setting of the sun
until it's almost day all night
and still the girls don't wake
but my sister keeps waiting
and there's enough for her to do until they do wake, she can tidy up, dust,
cut the crust off every piece of bread
and turn the lust for them
into some impossible having,
some impossession
shutting down her ears and mouth
so she takes nothing in but grows larger and larger as if
into her body she could take and hold them

not just the story of them

5.
not just the story of them
before the jackscrew and rust slipped
and the plane came to fly upside down
and the pilots, jesus, flew it upside down
and said, in private, only
here we go, here we go.
To Go to Lvov AAddaamm ZZaaggaajjeewwsskkii

To go to Lvov. Which station

for Lvov, if not in a dream, at dawn, when dew
gleams on a suitcase, when express
trains and bullet trains are being born. To leave
in haste for Lvov, night or day, in September
or in March. But only if Lvov exists,
if it is to be found within the frontiers and not just
in my new passport, if lances of trees
�of poplar and ash�still breathe aloud
like Indians, and if streams mumble
their dark Esperanto, and grass snakes like soft signs
in the Russian language disappear
into thickets. To pack and set off, to leave
without a trace, at noon, to vanish
like fainting maidens. And burdocks, green
armies of burdocks, and below, under the canvas
of a Venetian caf�, the snails converse
about eternity. But the cathedral rises,
you remember, so straight, as straight
as Sunday and white napkins and a bucket
full of raspberries standing on the floor, and
my desire which wasn�t born yet,
only gardens and weeds and the amber
of Queen Anne cherries, and indecent Fredro.
There was always too much of Lvov, no one could
comprehend its boroughs, hear
the murmur of each stone scorched
by the sun, at night the Orthodox church�s silence was unlike
that of the cathedral, the Jesuits
baptized plants, leaf by leaf, but they grew,
grew so mindlessly, and joy hovered
everywhere, in hallways and in coffee mills
revolving by themselves, in blue
teapots, in starch, which was the first
formalist, in drops of rain and in the thorns
of roses. Frozen forsythia yellowed by the window.
The bells pealed and the air vibrated, the cornets
of nuns sailed like schooners near
the theater, there was so much of the world that
it had to do encores over and over,
the audience was in frenzy and didn�t want
to leave the house. My aunts couldn�t have known
yet that I�d resurrect them,
and lived so trustfully; so singly;
servants, clean and ironed, ran for
fresh cream, inside the houses
a bit of anger and great expectation, Brzozowski
came as a visiting lecturer, one of my
uncles kept writing a poem entitled Why,
dedicated to the Almighty, and there was too much
of Lvov, it brimmed the container,
it burst glasses, overflowed
each pond, lake, smoked through every
chimney, turned into fire, storm,
laughed with lightning, grew meek,
returned home, read the New Testament,
slept on a sofa beside the Carpathian rug,
there was too much of Lvov, and now
there isn�t any, it grew relentlessly
and the scissors cut it, chilly gardeners
as always in May, without mercy,
without love, ah, wait till warm June
comes with soft ferns, boundless
fields of summer, i.e., the reality.
But scissors cut it, along the line and through
the fiber, tailors, gardeners, censors
cut the body and the wreaths, pruning shears worked
diligently, as in a child�s cutout
along the dotted line of a roe deer or a swan.
Scissors, penknives, and razor blades scratched,
cut, and shortened the voluptuous dresses
of prelates, of squares and houses, and trees
fell soundlessly, as in a jungle,
and the cathedral trembled, people bade goodbye
without handkerchiefs, no tears, such a dry
mouth, I won�t see you anymore, so much death
awaits you, why must every city
become Jerusalem and every man a Jew,
and now in a hurry just
pack, always, each day,
and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all
it exists, quiet and pure as
a peach. It is everywhere.
and lived so trustfully; so singly;
servants, clean and ironed, ran for
fresh cream, inside the houses
a bit of anger and great expectation, Brzozowski
came as a visiting lecturer, one of my
uncles kept writing a poem entitled Why,
dedicated to the Almighty, and there was too much
of Lvov, it brimmed the container,
it burst glasses, overflowed
each pond, lake, smoked through every
chimney, turned into fire, storm,
laughed with lightning, grew meek,
returned home, read the New Testament,
slept on a sofa beside the Carpathian rug,
there was too much of Lvov, and now
there isn�t any, it grew relentlessly
and the scissors cut it, chilly gardeners
as always in May, without mercy,
without love, ah, wait till warm June
comes with soft ferns, boundless
fields of summer, i.e., the reality.
But scissors cut it, along the line and through
the fiber, tailors, gardeners, censors
cut the body and the wreaths, pruning shears worked
diligently, as in a child�s cutout
along the dotted line of a roe deer or a swan.
Scissors, penknives, and razor blades scratched,
cut, and shortened the voluptuous dresses
of prelates, of squares and houses, and trees
fell soundlessly, as in a jungle,
and the cathedral trembled, people bade goodbye
without handkerchiefs, no tears, such a dry
mouth, I won�t see you anymore, so much death
awaits you, why must every city
become Jerusalem and every man a Jew,
and now in a hurry just
pack, always, each day,
and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all
it exists, quiet and pure as
a peach. It is everywhere.

Translated by Clare Cavanagh