A Crow Looked At Me
P.W. Elverum & Sun
Real Death
Seaweed
Ravens
Forest Fire
Swims
My Chasm
When I Take Out The Garbage At Night
Emptiness, Pt. 2
Toothbrush/Trash
Soria Moria
Crow
Real Death
Death is real
Someone’s there and then they’re not
And it’s not for singing about
It’s not for making into art
When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb
When I walk in to the room where you were
And look into the emptiness instead, all fails
My knees fail
My brain fails
Words fail
Crusted with tears, catatonic and raw, I go downstairs and outside and you still get mail
A week after you died a package with your name on it came
And inside was a gift for our daughter you had ordered in secret
And collapsed there on the front steps
I wailed
A backpack for when she goes to school a couple years from now
You were thinking ahead to a future you must have known deep down
Would not include you though you clawed at the cliff you were sliding down,
Being swallowed into a silence that's bottomless and real
It’s dumb and I don’t want to learn anything from this
I love you
Seaweed
Our daughter is one and a half
You have been dead eleven days
I got on the boat and came to the place
Where the three of us were going to build our house if you had lived
You died though,
So I came here alone with our baby and the dust of your bones
I can't remember, were you into Canada geese?
Is it significant
These hundreds on the beach?
Or were they just hungry
For mid-migration seaweed?
What about foxgloves
Is that a flower you liked?
I can't remember
You did most of my remembering for me
And now I stand untethered
In a field full of wild foxgloves
Wondering if you're there
Or if a flower means anything
And what could anything mean
In this crushing absurdity
I brought a chair from home
I'm leaving it on the hill
Facing west and north
And I poured out your ashes on it
I guess so you can watch the sunset
But the truth is I don't think of that dust as you
You are the sunset
Ravens
In October 2015, I was out in the yard
I’d just finished splitting up the scrap 2x4s into kindling
I glanced up at the half moon, pink, chill refinery cloud light
Two big black birds flew over, their wings whooshing and low
Two ravens (but only two)
Their black feathers tinted in the sunset
I knew these birds were omens but of what, I wasn’t sure
They were flying out toward the island where we hoped to move
You were probably inside
You were probably aching, wanting not to die, your body transformed
I couldn’t bear to look, so I turned my head west like an early death
Now I can only see you on the fridge in lifeless pictures
And in every dream I have at night and in every room I walk into like here,
Where I sit the next October,
Still seeing your eyes, pleading and afraid, full of love
Calling out from another place because you’re not here
I watched you die in this room, then I gave your clothes away
I’m sorry
I had to
And now I’ll move
I will move with our daughter
We will ride over water with your ghost underneath the boat
What was you is now burnt bones and I cannot be at home
I’m running
Grief flailing
The second time I went to Haida Gwaii was just me and our daughter
Only one month after you died
My face was still contorted
Driving up and down, boots wet inside, aimless and weeping
I needed to return to the place where we discovered that childless,
We could blanket ourselves in the moss there for our long lives
But when we came home, you were pregnant
And then our life together was not long
You had cancer and you were killed and I’m left living like this
Crying on the logging roads with your ashes in a jar
Thinking about the things I’ll tell you
When you get back from wherever it is that you’ve gone
But then I remember death is real
And I’m still here in Masset
It’s August 12th, 2016
You’ve been dead for one month and three days and we are sleeping in the forest
There is sand still in the blankets from the beach where we released you from the jar
When we wake up all the clothes that we left out are cold and damp just from the air permeating
The ground opens up
Surrounded by growth
Nurse logs with layers of moss and life, young cedars, the sound of water,
Thick salal, and god-like huckleberries
The ground absorbs and remakes whatever falls
Nothing dies here
But here is where I came to grieve, to dive into it with you, with your absence
but I keep picking you berries
Forest Fire
The year moves on without you in it
Now it is fall without you
I had to close the windows and doors without you coming through
I kept them open for as long as I could
But the baby got cold
I watched the calendar bulldoze
This whole past summer was a lingering heat wave
And I remember late August, our open bedroom window
Going through your things with the fan blowing
And the sound of helicopters and the smell of smoke
From the forest fire that was growing, billowing just on the edge of town where we used to swim
They say a natural, cleansing devastation burning the understory, erasing trails
There is no end
But when I'm kneeling in the heat
Throwing out your underwear
The devastation is not natural or good
You do belong here
I reject nature, I disagree
In the hazy light of forest fire smoke
I looked across at the refineries
And thought that the world was actually constantly ending
And the smell and roar of the asphalt truck that was idling just out the window, tearing up our street
I missed you, of course
And I remember thinking the last time it rained here you were alive still
And that this same long heat that I was in contained you
And in this same heat, I open the window next to you
On your last morning
So you could breathe and then so you could ghost away
And now so the room will hopefully stop whispering
The grind of time I'm not keeping up with
The leaf on the ground pokes at my slumbering
Grief-walking around, severed lumbering
But slowly, sovereignty reasserts itself
I don't want it, though
And betrayal winds
Who and how could I live?
Swims
I can't get the image out of my head
Of when I held you right there and watched you die
Upstairs in the back bedroom of our house,
Where we have lived for many years
Your last gasping breaths
I see it again and again
As the breeze blew in
The room I still don't go in at night
Because I see you
Your transformed, dying face will recede with time,
Is what our counselor said
Who we walked to every Monday holding hands
Slower every week, with your breathing
Until we had to drive
But then only two months after you died,
Our counselor died
All at once, her empty office with no light on,
As if her work was done
We are all always so close to not existing at all
Except in the confusion of our survived-bys grasping at the echoes
Today our daughter asked me if mama swims
I told her, "Yes, she does and that's probably all she does now."
What was you is now borne across waves
Evaporating
My Chasm
I am a container of stories about you
And I bring you up repeatedly, uninvited to
Do the people around me want to keep hearing about my dead wife?
Or does the room go silent when I mention you?
Shining alive, I live with your absence
And it's been two months since you died
I'll speak to your absence and carry our stories around my whole life
But when I'm in public, I don't know what's that look in their eyes
I now wield the power to transform a grocery store aisle into a canyon of pity and confusion
And mutual aching to leave
The loss in my life is a chasm I take into town
And I don't wanna close it
Look at me
Death is real
When I Take Out The Garbage At Night
When I take out the garbage at night
I'm not with you then, exactly
I'm with the universe
And with the lighting and thunder coming in over the mountains
But when I walk back into the house
Looking up at the window from the back step
The dark window of the room that you died in
The big empty room on the second floor
Cold because I won't close the window
Just in case something still needs to leave
I stand in the yard and look up
And the dark rectangle blares your face
All of our moments condensed into a thunderclap
When I take out the garbage at night
And then have to go back in and live on
Emptiness, Pt. 2
The feeling of being in the mountains is a dream of self-negation
To see the world without us,
How it churns and blossoms without anyone looking on
It's why I've gone on and on and why I've climbed up alone
But actual negation,
When your person is gone
And the bedroom door yawns
There is nothing to learn
Her absence is a scream saying nothing
Conceptual emptiness was cool to talk about
Back before I knew my way around these hospitals
I would like to forget and go back into imagining
That snow shining permanently alone
Could say something to me true and comforting
Toothbrush/Trash
Today I just felt it for the first time
Three months and one day after you died
I realized that these photographs we have of you
Are slowly replacing the subtle, familiar memory of what it's like to know you're in the other room
To hear you singing on the stairs
A movement, a pine cone, your squeaking chair
The quiet, untreasured, in-between times
The actual experience of you here
I can feel these memories escaping
Colonized by photos narrowed down and told my mind erasing
The echo of you in the house dies down
October wind blows
It makes a door close
I look over my shoulder to make sure, but there is nobody here
I finally took out the upstairs bathroom garbage that was sitting there forgotten since you were here
Wanting just to stay with us,
Just to stay living
I threw it away
Your dried out, bloody, end-of-life tissues
Your toothbrush and your trash
And the fly buzzing around the room
Could that possibly be you too?
I let it go out the window
It does not feel good
Soria Moria
Slow pulsing red tower lights
Across a distance, refuge in the dust
All my life I can remember longing
Looking across the water and seeing lights
When I was five or six, we were camping in the islands in July
The tall yellow grass and the rose hips fragrant
After sunset, island beyond island
Undulating and familiar, not far from home
With my fragrant, whittled, cedar drift wood dagger in the mildew canvas tent
I saw fireworks many miles away but didn't hear them
And I felt a longing, a childish melancholy
And then I went to sleep
And the aching was buried, dreaming, aging, reaching for an idea of somewhere other than this place
That could fold me in clouded yearning
For nowhere actually reachable, the distance was the point
And then when I was twenty-four
I followed this ache to an Arctic Norwegian cabin
Where I said "fuck the world" in a finally satisfying way
I stayed through the winter and emerged as an adult
Holding a letter from you, an invitation
So I flew back and drove back
And when we met in person it was instant
It didn't matter where we lived as long as we were together
And that was really true for thirteen years
And the whole time still
Slow pulsing red tower lights
Across a distance, refuge in the dust
In January, you were alive still
But chemo had ravaged and transformed your porcelain into some other thing
Something jaundiced and fucked
They put you in the hospital in Everett
So I gave the baby away and drove up and down I-5 every night
Like a satellite bringing you food that you wanted
Returning at night to sleep in our bed, cold
I went back to feel alone there
All past selves and future possibilities on hold
Well I tore through the dark on the freeway
The old yearning burning in me
I knew exactly where the road bent around
Where the trees opened up and I could see
Way above the horizon, beyond enumerable islands
The towers on top of the mountain lit up slowly, silently beaconing,
As if to say "Just keep going
There is a place where a wind could erase this for you
And the branches could white noise you back awake"
So I went back to feel alone there but cradled you in me
In the National Gallery in Oslo
There's a painting called Soria Moria
A kid looks across a deep canyon of fog at a lit up inhuman castle or something
I have not stopped looking across the water from the few difficult spots where you can see
That the distance from this haunted house where I lived to Soria Moria is a real traversable space
I'm an arrow now, mid-air
Slow pulsing red tower lights
Across a distance, refuge in the dust
Crow
Sweet kid, what is this world we're giving you?
Smoldering and fascist, with no mother
Are you dreaming about a crow?
In the middle of November we went back into the woods
Right after breakfast to see if we could see this past August's forest fire zone
On the hill above the lake, the sky was low and the wind cold
The trail was closed
At the barricade I stood listening
In my backpack you were sleeping with her hat pulled low
All the usual birds were gone or freezing
It was all silent except the sound of one crow
Following us as we wove through the cedar grove
I walked and you bobbed and dozed
Sweet kid, we were watched and followed and I thought of Genevieve
Sweet kid, I heard you murmur in your sleep
"Crow," you said, "Crow"
And I asked, "Are you dreaming about a crow?"
And there she was
Real Death
Seaweed
Ravens
Forest Fire
Swims
My Chasm
When I Take Out The Garbage At Night
Emptiness, Pt. 2
Toothbrush/Trash
Soria Moria
Crow
Real Death
Death is real
Someone’s there and then they’re not
And it’s not for singing about
It’s not for making into art
When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb
When I walk in to the room where you were
And look into the emptiness instead, all fails
My knees fail
My brain fails
Words fail
Crusted with tears, catatonic and raw, I go downstairs and outside and you still get mail
A week after you died a package with your name on it came
And inside was a gift for our daughter you had ordered in secret
And collapsed there on the front steps
I wailed
A backpack for when she goes to school a couple years from now
You were thinking ahead to a future you must have known deep down
Would not include you though you clawed at the cliff you were sliding down,
Being swallowed into a silence that's bottomless and real
It’s dumb and I don’t want to learn anything from this
I love you
Seaweed
Our daughter is one and a half
You have been dead eleven days
I got on the boat and came to the place
Where the three of us were going to build our house if you had lived
You died though,
So I came here alone with our baby and the dust of your bones
I can't remember, were you into Canada geese?
Is it significant
These hundreds on the beach?
Or were they just hungry
For mid-migration seaweed?
What about foxgloves
Is that a flower you liked?
I can't remember
You did most of my remembering for me
And now I stand untethered
In a field full of wild foxgloves
Wondering if you're there
Or if a flower means anything
And what could anything mean
In this crushing absurdity
I brought a chair from home
I'm leaving it on the hill
Facing west and north
And I poured out your ashes on it
I guess so you can watch the sunset
But the truth is I don't think of that dust as you
You are the sunset
Ravens
In October 2015, I was out in the yard
I’d just finished splitting up the scrap 2x4s into kindling
I glanced up at the half moon, pink, chill refinery cloud light
Two big black birds flew over, their wings whooshing and low
Two ravens (but only two)
Their black feathers tinted in the sunset
I knew these birds were omens but of what, I wasn’t sure
They were flying out toward the island where we hoped to move
You were probably inside
You were probably aching, wanting not to die, your body transformed
I couldn’t bear to look, so I turned my head west like an early death
Now I can only see you on the fridge in lifeless pictures
And in every dream I have at night and in every room I walk into like here,
Where I sit the next October,
Still seeing your eyes, pleading and afraid, full of love
Calling out from another place because you’re not here
I watched you die in this room, then I gave your clothes away
I’m sorry
I had to
And now I’ll move
I will move with our daughter
We will ride over water with your ghost underneath the boat
What was you is now burnt bones and I cannot be at home
I’m running
Grief flailing
The second time I went to Haida Gwaii was just me and our daughter
Only one month after you died
My face was still contorted
Driving up and down, boots wet inside, aimless and weeping
I needed to return to the place where we discovered that childless,
We could blanket ourselves in the moss there for our long lives
But when we came home, you were pregnant
And then our life together was not long
You had cancer and you were killed and I’m left living like this
Crying on the logging roads with your ashes in a jar
Thinking about the things I’ll tell you
When you get back from wherever it is that you’ve gone
But then I remember death is real
And I’m still here in Masset
It’s August 12th, 2016
You’ve been dead for one month and three days and we are sleeping in the forest
There is sand still in the blankets from the beach where we released you from the jar
When we wake up all the clothes that we left out are cold and damp just from the air permeating
The ground opens up
Surrounded by growth
Nurse logs with layers of moss and life, young cedars, the sound of water,
Thick salal, and god-like huckleberries
The ground absorbs and remakes whatever falls
Nothing dies here
But here is where I came to grieve, to dive into it with you, with your absence
but I keep picking you berries
Forest Fire
The year moves on without you in it
Now it is fall without you
I had to close the windows and doors without you coming through
I kept them open for as long as I could
But the baby got cold
I watched the calendar bulldoze
This whole past summer was a lingering heat wave
And I remember late August, our open bedroom window
Going through your things with the fan blowing
And the sound of helicopters and the smell of smoke
From the forest fire that was growing, billowing just on the edge of town where we used to swim
They say a natural, cleansing devastation burning the understory, erasing trails
There is no end
But when I'm kneeling in the heat
Throwing out your underwear
The devastation is not natural or good
You do belong here
I reject nature, I disagree
In the hazy light of forest fire smoke
I looked across at the refineries
And thought that the world was actually constantly ending
And the smell and roar of the asphalt truck that was idling just out the window, tearing up our street
I missed you, of course
And I remember thinking the last time it rained here you were alive still
And that this same long heat that I was in contained you
And in this same heat, I open the window next to you
On your last morning
So you could breathe and then so you could ghost away
And now so the room will hopefully stop whispering
The grind of time I'm not keeping up with
The leaf on the ground pokes at my slumbering
Grief-walking around, severed lumbering
But slowly, sovereignty reasserts itself
I don't want it, though
And betrayal winds
Who and how could I live?
Swims
I can't get the image out of my head
Of when I held you right there and watched you die
Upstairs in the back bedroom of our house,
Where we have lived for many years
Your last gasping breaths
I see it again and again
As the breeze blew in
The room I still don't go in at night
Because I see you
Your transformed, dying face will recede with time,
Is what our counselor said
Who we walked to every Monday holding hands
Slower every week, with your breathing
Until we had to drive
But then only two months after you died,
Our counselor died
All at once, her empty office with no light on,
As if her work was done
We are all always so close to not existing at all
Except in the confusion of our survived-bys grasping at the echoes
Today our daughter asked me if mama swims
I told her, "Yes, she does and that's probably all she does now."
What was you is now borne across waves
Evaporating
My Chasm
I am a container of stories about you
And I bring you up repeatedly, uninvited to
Do the people around me want to keep hearing about my dead wife?
Or does the room go silent when I mention you?
Shining alive, I live with your absence
And it's been two months since you died
I'll speak to your absence and carry our stories around my whole life
But when I'm in public, I don't know what's that look in their eyes
I now wield the power to transform a grocery store aisle into a canyon of pity and confusion
And mutual aching to leave
The loss in my life is a chasm I take into town
And I don't wanna close it
Look at me
Death is real
When I Take Out The Garbage At Night
When I take out the garbage at night
I'm not with you then, exactly
I'm with the universe
And with the lighting and thunder coming in over the mountains
But when I walk back into the house
Looking up at the window from the back step
The dark window of the room that you died in
The big empty room on the second floor
Cold because I won't close the window
Just in case something still needs to leave
I stand in the yard and look up
And the dark rectangle blares your face
All of our moments condensed into a thunderclap
When I take out the garbage at night
And then have to go back in and live on
Emptiness, Pt. 2
The feeling of being in the mountains is a dream of self-negation
To see the world without us,
How it churns and blossoms without anyone looking on
It's why I've gone on and on and why I've climbed up alone
But actual negation,
When your person is gone
And the bedroom door yawns
There is nothing to learn
Her absence is a scream saying nothing
Conceptual emptiness was cool to talk about
Back before I knew my way around these hospitals
I would like to forget and go back into imagining
That snow shining permanently alone
Could say something to me true and comforting
Toothbrush/Trash
Today I just felt it for the first time
Three months and one day after you died
I realized that these photographs we have of you
Are slowly replacing the subtle, familiar memory of what it's like to know you're in the other room
To hear you singing on the stairs
A movement, a pine cone, your squeaking chair
The quiet, untreasured, in-between times
The actual experience of you here
I can feel these memories escaping
Colonized by photos narrowed down and told my mind erasing
The echo of you in the house dies down
October wind blows
It makes a door close
I look over my shoulder to make sure, but there is nobody here
I finally took out the upstairs bathroom garbage that was sitting there forgotten since you were here
Wanting just to stay with us,
Just to stay living
I threw it away
Your dried out, bloody, end-of-life tissues
Your toothbrush and your trash
And the fly buzzing around the room
Could that possibly be you too?
I let it go out the window
It does not feel good
Soria Moria
Slow pulsing red tower lights
Across a distance, refuge in the dust
All my life I can remember longing
Looking across the water and seeing lights
When I was five or six, we were camping in the islands in July
The tall yellow grass and the rose hips fragrant
After sunset, island beyond island
Undulating and familiar, not far from home
With my fragrant, whittled, cedar drift wood dagger in the mildew canvas tent
I saw fireworks many miles away but didn't hear them
And I felt a longing, a childish melancholy
And then I went to sleep
And the aching was buried, dreaming, aging, reaching for an idea of somewhere other than this place
That could fold me in clouded yearning
For nowhere actually reachable, the distance was the point
And then when I was twenty-four
I followed this ache to an Arctic Norwegian cabin
Where I said "fuck the world" in a finally satisfying way
I stayed through the winter and emerged as an adult
Holding a letter from you, an invitation
So I flew back and drove back
And when we met in person it was instant
It didn't matter where we lived as long as we were together
And that was really true for thirteen years
And the whole time still
Slow pulsing red tower lights
Across a distance, refuge in the dust
In January, you were alive still
But chemo had ravaged and transformed your porcelain into some other thing
Something jaundiced and fucked
They put you in the hospital in Everett
So I gave the baby away and drove up and down I-5 every night
Like a satellite bringing you food that you wanted
Returning at night to sleep in our bed, cold
I went back to feel alone there
All past selves and future possibilities on hold
Well I tore through the dark on the freeway
The old yearning burning in me
I knew exactly where the road bent around
Where the trees opened up and I could see
Way above the horizon, beyond enumerable islands
The towers on top of the mountain lit up slowly, silently beaconing,
As if to say "Just keep going
There is a place where a wind could erase this for you
And the branches could white noise you back awake"
So I went back to feel alone there but cradled you in me
In the National Gallery in Oslo
There's a painting called Soria Moria
A kid looks across a deep canyon of fog at a lit up inhuman castle or something
I have not stopped looking across the water from the few difficult spots where you can see
That the distance from this haunted house where I lived to Soria Moria is a real traversable space
I'm an arrow now, mid-air
Slow pulsing red tower lights
Across a distance, refuge in the dust
Crow
Sweet kid, what is this world we're giving you?
Smoldering and fascist, with no mother
Are you dreaming about a crow?
In the middle of November we went back into the woods
Right after breakfast to see if we could see this past August's forest fire zone
On the hill above the lake, the sky was low and the wind cold
The trail was closed
At the barricade I stood listening
In my backpack you were sleeping with her hat pulled low
All the usual birds were gone or freezing
It was all silent except the sound of one crow
Following us as we wove through the cedar grove
I walked and you bobbed and dozed
Sweet kid, we were watched and followed and I thought of Genevieve
Sweet kid, I heard you murmur in your sleep
"Crow," you said, "Crow"
And I asked, "Are you dreaming about a crow?"
And there she was