Boyer Rickel
Last Things
Music that made me tremble—
keyboard suites by Handel (my lover’s dying),
The Willow Song (my father’s tenderness when I was just a child)—
I hear now, moved, if at all, only
by the architecture.
As time passes, we lament that we can’t recall the faces of our beloved dead.
The features fade, like photos left in weather.
And when the pain of absence also fades?
We call that healing.
*
Their faces, soon after dying, were beatified.
Louisa May Alcott, tending wounded soldiers in the Civil War.
The marks of pain had been replaced, she said.
Of one she wrote: I longed for those who loved him best
to see him when half an hour’s acquaintance with Death
had made them friends.
*
I need to understand something.
I cry almost every night.
Not thinking of dead loved ones, or reading about
all the strange and terrible things that happen to people.
And I laugh, out loud in sudden bursts.
Watching TV dramas.
What’s that about?
At first it was grief; the need to feel him near.
The shows we watched, a form of memory.
Choking up, or whooping, as we had, together, at familiar moments in the stories.
When I finished our favorites, I searched for others.
Just for myself.
The best with many episodes over many seasons.
Each episode like a dream I live through
alone in bed at night.
Stabs of feeling.
And after, the dreamless sleep.
What would the Stoics say about that?
*
Papa loved to burn the grass around the trees.
More than any other, the story my mother told, all my life.
(Her voice, dead four years; just a memory now of the crackly weak one at the end.)
That day he came into the house every so often to cool off.
We’d sit at the kitchen table. I’d pour him some lemonade.
Her eyes gone flat; somewhere inside herself.
A moment alone with her father—maybe that’s why she told it.
(Where there’s a wound, there’s a subject, writes a philosopher.)
I could see, in her telling, his large calloused fingers wrapped around the glass.
Feel the cool, the wet of the condensation.
Mama hated the burning. Yelled at him every time to stop it.
A wry smile in her tone at this point in the story.
A sadness.
Her mother’s screams she heard from the kitchen.
Her father, beside the blackened grass.
The flames pounded to submission.
The scorched gloves on his hands.
He was sixty, my mother wrote in a memoir, thirty-five years before her death.
Then, My age now as I write this. And I feel my life is just beginning.
*
At the exhibit, A World of Emotions: Ancient Greece, 700 BC–200 AD.
A naked idealized youth in white marble.
Himeros, the longing for something yet to happen, Socrates tells us in the catalog.
As distinguished from his brother, Pothos.
The yearning for something lost, something far away in space and time; a yearning
especially for someone lost.
Brothers (or children) of Eros.
(Scholars disagree, the catalog explains.)
Desire for the one who’s absent, I repeat to myself;
the one who’s yet to come.
The household deities.
*
It, or on it.
The words on shields Spartan mothers gave their sons, heading into battle.
Meaning: bring this back, victorious,
or may it bear your body.
A judgment about the world?
A judgment.
*
Tears when the music swells as the pink-cheeked boy hands the frazzled waitress a Coke in a Christmas ad.
Tears when the mother slaps her teenage son, a street thug, in the HBO drama.
Slaps him hard for being soft.
Not like your father, she snarls.
With your dad in prison, you gotta step up!
Is it my wiring?
Worn fragile by the years?
(My father’s eyes,
moist, in his eighties,
with every Hello, every Goodbye.)
Not just pain, pleasure too—a swelling, at the sternum.
At what’s left out.
The crystal cognac bottle thrown through the plate glass window.
How the shards fly from the mind with the fade to the lovers reconciled,
their slick bodies heaving on satin sheets.
Or just last night, three bloody shooting deaths outside a cabin.
Cut to black, then we see the killers, our anti-heroes, looking serious in their kitchen,
before they call their children down from their rooms for dinner.
The bodies? Buried in a hole on the wooded hillside?
The couple asks the kids about their day at school.
The victims’ families, the calls to cells, the missing person reports, the frantic searches. . .
I find the gaps—time lost—thrilling.
Erasures of all the clutter of living.
A space where one is emptied.
The mask without the face.
That feeling.
*
Sobbed as my brother danced the father-daughter dance.
The salt air through the open ballroom doors: Coronado Island.
Thinking, If only our mother were alive to see him so fulfilled.
Sobbed, wondering, Why did our mother in her last year say about my niece,
She’ll never marry?
After, her voice had brightened, almost a song,
recounting my niece’s recent visit to the care center.
Then, She’ll never get married.
Like a curse.
She was old, and dying. Was this supposed to make her wise? I was furious.
Thought, as I looked out the window of the cab to the airport,
I’ll probably never be here again.
This will be the last time I walk the Silver Strand.
So what? would best describe how I felt, which surprised me.
If emotions embody judgments about the world, as Stoics believed,
what does a lack of feeling say? Or fury?
from What Happened to the Inca Doves?, winner of the Wishing Jewel Prize, forthcoming from Green Linden Press
