Tag Archives: death

#FullMoonSocial // (No) Reflection, by Mary Winifred Hood Schwaner

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(No) Reflection

When you die it’s the dark moon
that keeps you company in the eternal evening.
No reflection — just deep space
rippling and bending around you.
No light can find you here
where the moon is a black stone
in a black pocket.
No increase, no decrease,
no connection to the flow of tides and time.
No time has ever passed. No illusion of light, illumination
or radiance. Not here among the dying stars
where memory spills its last drop
into the night and vanishes.
No vanishing. No dying. Only being.
Free of form. No form. Free.

Conditions Being What They Are

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Conditions Being What They Are

 

Warm March morning. The sky dropped a foot
of snow on us a week ago and now it rises

in the warm air as fog in the hollows and foothills
disappear as I drive through it. Tonight it’s coming

back down as rain which will be snow before it ends
and I’ll be bending my back to shovel it away

from my car. Three times I will have passed through
it in a week, this same stuff, reconfigured, recycled.

When they buried my uncle a few days ago I knew
if there is a soul it’s like this snow, form a phase only

with respect to specific conditions and maybe
for all that, still surviving, no memory, none,

recognition only a scent like snow before it snows.

After the Black Crow Comes to Take Me Away, I Compose These Lines

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crow

Artwork by Mary Winifred Hood Schwaner

 

Note: This poem is not a translation but was created by free-associating with the traditional Chinese characters found one of Mei Yao-ch'en's last poems, written over 960 years ago. What's below is more a round of poetic archaeology--like digging up the characters that made up the poem but not knowing how they fit together, and piecing together something entirely different from them. I hope to actually translate this poem properly one day soon, but thought I would share this curious first stage of the work with you. ----JS

After The Black Spirit Comes to Take Me Away, I Compose These Lines

Dark winged spirit, in the olden days even I had compassion for you! I’d tell folks
who’d just as soon spit on you and curse you if fate came their way on your wings

that Oh! the hour could not contain you, you’d overturn your own nest to shoot out
like sound from a plucked string, even to banishment from your old landlord, time.

Well, the history books are wrong! And here you are, stranded as well, so do not be so quick to reproach these days, too, which the master apprehends, like a bullet flicked across the mind,

a thought just passing, now detached. Sure, you can eat till you’re plump in Taicang,
buy a new nest in Kaoshu township, daybreak’s rooster’s not crying for you,

hundreds of birds will argue who can admire it best
but you cannot approach that phoenix, that emperor, or peep down into its celestial fire.

At this moment, to no avail across the warp of the sky your spirit flies north and south—
Its shadow falls on the cunning rabbit but cannot peck its eyes, or separate the thief from his base.

It’s more complex now that I’m dead, detesting the person with noble aspirations is not the same as becoming fond of this tiny bird that’s come around. I know I’m not either kind,

contrary to who I am, as if I flourished in the Qin or Han dynasties, brave and chivalrous!
Want some advice? Distance yourself from your reputation, Crow. I’ll just carry on on foot. I’ve got

something final to look after.

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The Morning After the Ice Storm On the Day After the Snow Storm

My children walk on the foot-high snow leaving no prints
I remember doing that the feeling of not falling through

of being lighter than snow I remember the days I was sure
I would never leave any prints that I could walk

on the surface of the world and leave no trace
then are the days where you feel you are nothing but prints

Nothing but traces and paths and trails and then the days
you wake up to another death and your son

is reading how it took two hundred million years
for trees to develop leaves and

then you are back to leaving no prints

Early Morning, January, Outside

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Early Morning, January, Outside

 

I have seen crows measure themselves against a hawk
to secure territory.  A single crow settles into a branch

a few limbs away from a red tailed hawk, hopping awkwardly
closer then gawping its recognition and the echoes

of recognition bring more crows as if the crows
themselves were the echoes coming back. We know

how this ends, with the hawk taking flight and shrugging
them off, literally–with a few flicks of its shoulder

it is gone. But stronger or not, in the end it leaves.
This morning the crows behind my house

were raising a racket but nothing was rising
over the treeline. They hopped agitated from

tree to tree but kept to the lower branches.
Overhead like staples in the gray sky a hundred vultures

circled and swerved, like figure skaters
freed of all pretension of looking human

but they did look human, these angels
of death, or maybe turning to go back inside

I caught their reflection in the kitchen window
as if they were already inside the house,

waiting for me there, a semblance of the thing
that has crows giving ground without lifting

a wing. That after all there’s no owned territory,
that there’s something recognition alone won’t harry.

A Day at the Beach

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A Day at the Beach

We foresee our deaths

sacrifice the days one after the other to a slow motion panic
believing if we are senseless in a consistent and calm manner

that we can’t be blamed for not being ready for the only thing
we knew was coming

If time moves in a wave then behind us
foams a wake of wasted moments wasted the moment

we look back given up to the future day that never asked for sacrifice
and that never arrives

and if it did would never be any longer than a wasted day

How is it that giving up on a dream translates always
in any language into not doing something we could do

today in the wakeful world right now instead
we plant the sharp end and open slowly the gorgeous umbrella

of panic beneath the sun of death

Nobscusset Burial Ground, Dennis MA

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Nobscusset Burial Ground, Dennis MA

 

The path off the two-lane road is as quiet and straight as an unread sentence.
There are no accidental visits to this ground. You have to ask around

at the lakeside potter for directions, itself a place you have to ask
around to find, and even then you miss the entrance because it’s

nothing more than a shadow between high shrubs and a fence,
and you have to get out of your car and cross the street

to find it, grassy area surrounded by trees and houses yet secluded
just up a rise from the edge of Scargo Lake, whose waves are the soft

clap of a hand on a familiar shoulder. There are no markers of any kind
but everywhere offerings—nickels, beads, feathers woven into star shape,

a wreath of sticks hung atop one of the granite border stones, things made
by hands left at the foot of a tree or placed on a branch, and underneath

the skin of the earth the force of something still vibrating at blood
frequency. Almost four centuries since their sachem, their sagamore,

Mashatampaine, walked over this ground when everyone knew
death was larger than life but here you feel it, there are more

signs of it than there are letters in the spelling of his name, he’s
in the pulse of the pottery made on the other side of the small lake,

the vibration that shivers the calm water just before sunset viewed
from Scargo Tower, the twitch of the fox through the scrub oak

under the cover of dusk and wild blueberry. For a person used
to tombstones and crypts there is something naked here in the pine

needles and piles of coins and cigarettes and offerings. It’s the living
speaking to the living, and the dead are listening, they listen.

ScargoSunset

After a Moment of Silence for a Sudden Death

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After a Moment of Silence for a Sudden Death

Who are these birds gathering the empty branches
outside my window into a tree again?

Thirty feet above the roofs of a hundred mourning cars
they wick out patterns of mid-afternoon orange and black

that amplify the slanting sun then come back to settle,
at ease, as if already new green leaves protected them.

As if all our thoughts about our departed colleague
had gathered outside to look back at us, prepare

as memory does for flight, disperse to the future
wherever winter thoughts fly to in spring beyond sight