"Time Eaters": Poems on Living with the Remembered Dead

Somewhere in middle age, we suddenly notice that the folks with gray hair when we were little are dead. This part of my midlife crisis, facing the throngs vanished from the world, provoked some memorable poetry. Here is a favorite from the 1980s, recalling dinners on the grounds outside country churches, a dream or photograph of the dead gesturing through a window into eternity.

Time Eaters

At covered-dish suppers in Kodak twilight,

we eat time. The old people--

institutions of my first years

bankrupt suddenly to corpses

boxed for burial--load paper plates,

chew half smiling, blink a bovine

wisdom I frighten myself to find

growing in me like a cancer.

I sit with them.

          On slab benches

outside a clapboard country church

in coolness of oaks that do not move

in the no wind, this evening as one

living and dead lift Dixie plates

mounded with plant and animal corpses

and eat  time.

       We say nothing.

The plain words and magnanimity

of good old people humoring children,

cryptic, transcendent, words of hands

finding nickels behind young ears,

lift plastic forks and eyes like cattle,

and even my eyes (and of the living

others sharing that windless table

with the dead) mimic the hovering

eloquence of an absolute moment

unfrozen like birdsong in Kodak leaves.

A motionless scene like a yellowed black-and-white photo becomes birdsong. Either the dead are returning to life or I am becoming one of them. This poem in early middle-age was only the beginning. My parents died, and the Eternal Footman called out, "Next." 

In the 80s, I played bass for years behind Al Trammel's Sing-Along, a duo that sang every Friday at nursing homes. We led sing-along hymns, a preponderance of them about dying--songs like "When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder" and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." I reflected at the time that for much of our audience, rolled into the hall in wheelchairs, the prospect was not remote. At the time, Al had hearing and heart trouble (as I do now), and he and the woman on piano were at least twenty years older than me, so odds are that they have joined the wheelchair occupants in the great beyond, and all the staff at our old shows must be retired by now (if they're lucky).

Here's another poem from the period, recalling the farming community Mother grew up in, the place of my earliest memories that I visited long weeks in the 40s and 50s.

Abercrombie, Alabama

You were not there. For me alone

lines of ants worked in and out

of the shell-corpse of a living beetle,

its legs moving after all hope

was eaten from it. Before you came,

a plank boat leaned on a tree

at the lane's foot, paint scaled

cracks between the dry boards

wide as my scout knife's big blade

tar caulking shrunken pocked

like fried fish batter.

         My grandmother

at night sat, her back to the door

in an eyelet chemise before a basin,

brushing her waist-long colorless hair,

not gray with age but always white

like my uncle's (the pale boat-maker),

and all are dead now.

          And as her arms,

wrinkled and spotted, shuttled vaguely

in the lamplight, her long hair shown.

Since I wrote these poems, the children at the covered dish meals, the ones with nickels behind their ears, have been dying. My cousin Randy, whose house I stayed at when we visited Daddy's family--the kid  I fought over the blanket with when we shared a bed--died two years ago. We used to wrestle on the lawn until one summer his growth spurt hit, and it was like wrestling an ox--a big hearty fellow when I last saw him ten years ago. I learned of his death from a morbid habit of searching online for people I recall, and half the time I get an obit. It's unnerving to recall a hot young chick and read she died of Alzheimer's. My first wife died in 1971, but it's easy to bracket dying young as something avoidable--not like these elderly children dropping like pears in the fall, going the way of grandparents, these kids becoming ancestors. 

Enough prose. The last poem from that hilltop of thirty years ago is a fantasy on a my nocturnal theme of old houses--residue (or cause) of my work in historic preservation. It recalls a house we moved to when I was three, one of a pair close together on brick pillars.

Here's a photo of my fourth birthday there, when I was so small that the houses seemed to stand on stilts. Kiki MacCall (1942-2011) is a tiny girl in the photo, the tall one my brother Paul (1939-2020).

Ghost Town

Tonight I meet the old people

in alleys of clapboard. Broken lattice

undersides of huge-beamed houses

on brick pillars like centipede legs

darken around us, tall enough

to dance under if we danced,

but cats live there, panther shapes

with pumpkin heads and lantern eyes,

carnivorous.

    It is a good thing

we have no flesh, that I left mine

locked in the trunk with my luggage.

So long-toothed cats, vine sinewed,

can pad out into the gray sun,

the backyards of empty clotheslines,

and pass us dark as south winds

on summer nights when damp sheets

held our bodies. We are safe.

If we wanted, we could mount

these velvet leopards tall as cattle,

ride them as chubby sun-eyed children

ride strange uncles.

              We migrate together

between two-story frames as drab

and delicate as abandoned webs

dusty in corners. One human lust

could flatten these tall fabrics

of termites and dry rot, any stirring

except these cats we could ride

like nicotine uncles who ask to take us

home but cannot.

           The broken sidewalks

blistered with roots of oaks now stumps,

the slanting shutters, canebrake shrubbery,

fish pool cracked, gapped gingerbread,

gray wood, the smell of dust

on the face of the demiurge sleeping,

his smile curled like roofing tin--

On July nights when the heat pooled

under board ceilings and sun burned

to arctic hours, children played out

in the cool grass, now weeds and dust

in the cavities of the town.

                         The dead

play in their dusk and, tiring, rise

up stepless stringers into the houses,

up staircases where pads of cats

rattle cupped boards. And halls

lead to familiar rooms and endings,

chifforobes, beds, vanities.

I doubt I could write a poem about death today. When your nose is too close to the blackboard, you can't read the writing. But I like the way the last poem ends, with mystery, which is next of kin to truth here. Clear, assured, and reassuring beliefs--and there are dozens of them shouting at each other on every steepled corner--come from folks who are still alive. If there's anything to shout about, only the dead know for sure, and they aren't telling.

Coda: I took a walk this afternoon, and saw the moon pale above stick trees.

"Abercrombie, Alabama" appeared in the Spring, 1989, Kentucky Poetry Review.

"Ghost Town" appeared in the Spring, 1990, Bellingham Review.

There's a note that "Time Eaters" appeared in Riverside Quarterly, but I can't find a copy.