Under the Crematorium: Poems in the Shadow of Death:

My wife did research at the Folger Library and stayed with a friend in DC in the early 1980s. I left the kids with their grandparents and visited her for a few days in a townhouse down the block from a tall-stacked crematorium. This poem was published in the journal Lips, 1986.

Under the Crematorium

On Capitol Hill, where one mower,

communal, suffices a block

of row houses, earth is remote

under paving, the dead are ready

to give their bodies to the air,

white smoke out of the stack

across the street from where I slept

with my wife after weeks apart.

If the funeral home's volcanic pillar,

towered, unlike mine, quiescent,

then she hinted of past eruptions

gentle as baking bread, a haze

like the heavening of uncaged soul

in flavors of pot roast, bone, and dung--

and at least a block around, a dust

sifting heavy with grease, clinging

to windshields, glasses, lungs.

Here the people (who breathe people)

walk through the rhythms of that stack.

They wipe glasses, allow Potomac

winds to remove the dust of flesh,

pretensions of bodily solidity--

leaving, at most, bones of religion,

white and powdery to the touch.

A communist girl, whose moral soul

has refined agape to economics,

murdered the myths of the father sky,

shuddered, breathing under that tower.

Distribution of goods, the dance of matter,

Means nothing. We need mythology here.

The Brooks-Hughes House in Phenix City, Alabama

In 1979, I was founding president of the Phenix City Historic Preservation Society. Our chief accomplishment was the 1983 listing of six historic districts on the National Register of Historic Places. I supervised and did much of the research, assisted by an intern, Susan Mahan, and the secretary, Lois Brooks, a retired store clerk about the age of my parents. Lois lived in a Victorian cottage that had been in her family for most of a century (https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/373505c2-cfed-4ba9-bc04-52814356c457). She reminded me strongly of my grandmother who died, demented by strokes, twenty years before while staying in my parent's front bedroom, just down the hall from my bedroom. 

          Soon after our success with the National Register, Lois was diagnosed with cancer and went into a rapid decline. Her death was a recapitulation--overlaying the death-awareness that comes with middle age--of that old teenage loss. It triggered, among other things, a sudden decline in interest in historic preservation.

The Lady House

1.

Seeing the half-pruned profusion

of flowered hedge, an out-of-town

friend told me, "An old lady

lives in that house, loves it."

Circle of roses, monkey-grass

borders, a lawn of fallen fruit

and mercury-arc false moonlight

under a pear tree and power pole--

fruit she offered that first night

he saw her home in case a rapist

waited in her closet. "I wish

you'd come in for a minute," she said. 

"I know I'm foolish" 

He let her lead

into the Queen Anne he'd watched for years,

whose Kodak image the Historic Preservation

Board had breathed over like wine tasters.

2.

Since her mother died, she hadn't

kept the yard like they used to--

only a  black man once a week

to help. She mentioned a husband

but always spelled out her maiden name

in full. There were no pictures

of the dead man in the lady house

where a grandmother in a domed-glass frame

smiled down from the nineteenth century,

young in hand-brushed colors.

Unarmed,

This new man was a poor bodyguard

against the rapist she searched for,

this trusted man who deferred to her

like her hand-wiped cups on display.

3.

What circles her memory-corpse

threshing out his straw chest

in a haunted forest. The ruby slippers

she donated the yard sale, too small,

she said, still in their tissued box.

She had become the keeper of

the childhood house he walks in dreams,

the house of an beloved grandmother

driven mad by strokes, her x-ray hands

writhing together, her skin loud,

the folds around her skull slack

as if the muscles had already melted. 

Her gravestone was dark with algae

years before he entered the lady's

Queen Anne of antiques and cups.

The ruby clots in a tissued casket

had melted. For him that gaunt

grandmother with pale, eternal hair

had becomes all before, all hopes of after,

like Bluebeard's wives in secret rooms.

                                4.

And so the new lady, her garden

became without his knowing, her guessing,

that pale death-witch incarnate--

became in a delicate cutting in

a spirit he courted in secret dance,

his partner mapping historic districts.

The cups in her glass-front cupboard

seemed eternally dusted, their keeper

returned from decay and as immune

at least as her old house from dying.

5.

Brackets and turnings, pilasters, medallions,

jigsaw panels cracked like pond beds.

She had taken estimates, she said,

and promised when her savings allowed

to scrape and paint her millwork burden,

the father wood, but she missed a meeting.

She was hospitalized, a friend said,

and in private whispered cancer.

6.

"Glad you could come this afternoon,"

her lips wavered, her salt flesh

dissolving as he and his young wife

sat by the bedside. 

                  "The paper called.

"I'm sick, I told him. I always subscribe,

I told him, but I'm sick. He called back.

It bothered me the way he talked.

They ought not to bother sick people,

don't you think? I told that young man.

Now I'll have to learn to do without

a newspaper."

                      And her grandmother's,

brush-blued silver nitrate eyes

stared down from her domed frame

at the folded newspaper on a quilt

her flat, unaging hands had stitched,

and from her nineteenth-century wall,

she smiled under antique glass, and

grandmothers smiled on other walls.

I'm a grandfather now--would be a great-grandfather if my offspring had bred as young as I did (I once met a 36-year-old grandmother who worked as a stripper). The dog on my lap and I have similar life expectancies, and he's my seventh. I used to imagine what a man just before his execution might say, what wisdom would flow from being nose-to-nose with doom. Of course, that was an empty fantasy. We're all always nose-to-nose. Some of us just have longer noses, like Pinocchio. 

There are few wise words from near-death, usually silence or absurdities like Lois fretting over her newspaper subscription, that or ritual formulas. In my limited experience, even those bleach out when the moment comes. Words evolved to express shared life. In the solitary approach of death, they reach their limits. When there's nothing to say, there is, I think, some good in being present. We need mythology, but we need presence even more.