On the morning after the news,
like a nightmare,
a litany of tragedies, we will
call this the decade of grand
disappointments
and we will know who we are
by the accumulation of our silent
mourning, no one will
understand why we all wear
black, our women in black underthings,
their eyes shadowed with
regret, their bodies impatient,
their tongues sharper with resignation.
Only we will know how.
That morning
tears will come easy, why we
will take walks by the bodies
of water and weep.
On that day
no one will name the sorrow,
it will be like a fever
lingering with no name for it,
and a few will
ask themselves why this
sorrow, this kind
of sorrow that you always
knew was coming, but still
you were not ready for,
not in the way to be ready for death.
For others, it is the thing we have
waited for, held out
hearts for, not let
our bodies go for, not allowed
joy to come on us for. We
will not call it the
decade of mourning, for
that would puzzle to distraction
even the kindest soul.
Still, all we will need
to do is whisper the names,
the names: Don, Whitney, Etta,
Michael, Heavy, as if they are a
true lamentation of the
remarkable wrenching of all
we have gained. This is
the falsehood of death,
the myth of endings.
“They have only gone to the village,”
says the priest,
shaking out music
from the seeds in the bambooed
cylinder—and we are all
comforted by the thought
of crowded villages,
of bodiless light dancing
between the trees. There is,
though, no grace
in the sorrow after
the tally has been taken, and the tall
skin-headed man
with a bop who undoes his collar
twists open a bottle
of beer, drinks
deeply, lighting a cigarette
and inhaling hard,
the bitter relief
of loss.
The sorrow
of a gamble lost, the sorrow
of hope spilling away
from our fingers, spluttering
on the unforgiving floor,
the end of a season
of holding our breaths
in prayer, a season
of waiting for the shot
to ring out before the wife’s wail.
On the morning after, we will
be ordinary again,
unremarkable, again,
and able, at last, to speak the truth
again, to take flight
again, to sail again and
again, to be alien
again, to hurl stones from
the edge of the crowd
again, with no fear
of wounding ourselves,
again, and again and again.