Wyrmes Mete 1.1d 1 title Wyrmes Mete a hypertext chapbook  by Bill Bly 2 Poogie for Poogie 3 WyrmesMete wyrmes mete [WEER-muhs MATE-uh] lit., worms' meat (i.e., food, meal). Middle English term for the body that the soul will leave behind after death. [Cf. the discussion of "meat" -- as opposed to the disembodied consciousness that roams cyberspace -- in William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984)]. The specific reference comes from a Latin sermon, delivered probably in Worcester about 1400, preached on the canticle text 'I am black, but comely'. The sermon contains some vernacular verses addressed to a 'Lady Everyman': Tell us, O lady de blackworth, what worth have worldly glory and the aforesaid vanities, of which men are wont to make boast. Once you were fair in body, gentle of blood, privileged with honours, abounding in houses and wealth. All these things you possessed, and now of all you can say thus -- Now all men mowe sen be me, That worldys joy is vanyté. I was a lady; now am I non. I hadde worchepes; now it is begon. I was fayr and gentil both. Now ich man wyle my body loth. My frendys, my godes me hav forsake. To wyrmes mete now am I take. Of al the world now haf I nozth bitt gode dedes that I wrogth. Only tho schuln abyde wit me. Al other thynges arć vanyte. -- A.M. Kinghorn, Medieval Drama (1968). Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984. Kinghorn, A.M. Medieval Drama (Literature in Perspective Series). London: Evans Brothers Limited, 1968, pp. 113-114. " 4 chapbook chap-book [f. chap in CHAPMAN + BOOK.] A modern name applied by book collectors and others to specimens of the popular literature which was formerly circulated by itinerant dealers or chapmen, consisting chiefly of small pamphlets of popular tales, ballads, tracts, etc. chap-man \'chap-m'n\ n [ME, fr. OE ceapman, fr. ceap trade + man -- more at CHEAP] (bef. 12c) 1 archaic : MERCHANT, TRADER 2 Brit : PEDDLER Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, Inc., 1993 The Oxford English Dictionary [Compact Edition]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971 5 epigraph The End and the Beginning From time to time someone still must dig up a rusted argument from underneath a bush and haul it off to the dump. Those who knew what this was all about must make way for those who know little. And less than that. And at last nothing less than nothing. -- Wislawa Szymborska (1993) Wislawa Szymborska was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature. This poem was taken from the article announcing the award in the New York Times, October 4, 1996. 6 preface Preface This chapbook is comprised of three lobes: € Golden Anniversary: A family album, containing stories of the poet's parents. William James Bly Jr. February 19, 1912 ­ May 24, 1991. Mary Jane Rex Bly September 26, 1914 ­ April 15, 1992. Married February 15, 1941. € Say Goodbye: Poems on the death of the poet's parents. € He Still Thinks: The poet's meditations upon death and necessity. 7 TOC Contents Preface € Golden Anniversary The Button Golden Anniversary 1935 March 22, 1954 If He Came Home When the Call Came She's Still MadŠ € Say Goodbye When They Died Father Died TOC Mother Died TOC Say Goodbye € He Still Thinks Elegy To Bring Rain on a Land Where No Man Is Lenten Meditation At the AIDS Concert This Is Where The Fish He Still Thinks  7.1 anniversaryTOC The Button Golden Anniversary 1935 March 22, 1954 If He Came Home When the Call Came She's Still Mad... 7.1.1 TheButton The Button The button pops ticks on the floor rolls into silence. The cloth falls away from the breast. In the sudden cold the flesh stills as if for flight. The nipple is a star. The old man my father who has forgotten every thing but my mother thrusts his hand inside her blouse. 7.1.2 GoldenAnniversary Golden Anniversary His hair's parted on the wrong side. One eye is swollen nearly shut from an unknown wound or irritation. He wears a bib. He's strapped in. Before him on a tray the best institutional meal: meatballs, mashed potatoes, stringbeans. A glass of orange juice with a straw. A vase of yellow silk roses. Outside the window, no color but snow and naked trees and rocks; Before the window and doubled in reflection, a two-tier cake crowned with white wreaths and golden ribbons, frosted the two colors of an egg. They stand against the portieres in her mother's house; they look right into their life: he'll be drafted in six months, then hired out to death for three whole years; seven years will pass before she conceives a child that will live, then another; then another war, but then home, the kids, & the grass, & the long slow years of the young family, though they're older than many; he takes the bus to work so she can drive with the kids to the store; then the kids take the bus to school & she drives to the store alone; they have friends, parties, clubs; he drinks a little, then more, then too much; she says she'll leave if he doesn't stop, and he does. Then they have two cars, the kids start to drive, then they're gone; he starts to drink again, but not too much, not at first; they still have fun, perhaps more now than ever; the store he owns is failing, he struggles, moves, then lets it fail; they sail out into the long slow years of retirement, they take trips, they play games, they spend their time together; he drinks because he drinks now, but never before five, all day he's hers, does what she wants, does what he does, when the sun goes down he too goes down, and down, until he cannot hear her calling him to bed, cannot hear a voice at all. But when the sun rises he too rises, and shines his love on her, they make more plans, pack, unpack, leave, arrive, play more games, spend more time together; their friends are dying one by one, perhaps he's communing with them in the dark, perhaps with the dark, each day he's no less here than the day before, but his nocturnal absence grows and grows. Then his left foot won't go down where he puts it down and he falls; his left hand goes weak, and he goes without it; he stops drinking, it doesn't help; his steps get shorter, he shuffles, then totters; he falls, and he falls, and he falls on his bottom, on his side, on his face; then nothing works except he eats and eats, will only stop when the food runs out or is taken away, still he wastes as if starving, soon weighs only a handful more than she does, but she cannot pick him up -- she can feed him, wash him, change him, get him in and out of bed, but she cannot pick him up, and he falls & falls & falls. It's the end now, there's no saving him, only waiting; they take him away from her, put him in a room in a building; some say that it's a mercy, and sometimes she agrees -- it's not impossible to love him now, she can come and go, he can stay their love regains its dignity, now that they both can rest. 7.1.3 22March1954 March 22, 1954 Unbelievably, it snowed during the night. Yesterday morning he'd unzipped the lining from his trenchcoat, but sundown brought a sharp wind; just after turning off his reading light, just before turning onto his right side his arm shoved beneath the bolster, he thought he might have seen flurries against the window but his eyes found no purchase on the dark sky so he turned them towards the back of his wife's head upon her own bolster in her own twin bed across the valley of the nightstand -- a game he played whenever she fell asleep before he did: to seek her while still blind from the reading light, to watch her form emerge from the gloom as his pupils dilated, to see if he'd aimed just right with his eyes. This morning a dusting (they called it on the radio) covered the red-dog lane that zigzagged down past the house then up to the bus stop, but in the field opposite only frost lay on the tendriled hummocks. The warm earth, he thought, the warm earthŠ the words felt so good in his mind's mouth that he spoke them aloud, walking through the smell of his breakfast into the dazzling kitchen where his eyes found at once the still frizzled back of his wife's head now bent over the stove at the far end of the room. He did not greet her, but she heard him somehow (above the sizzle of bacon underlaid by the sizzle of the radio that never quite came in clear out here except deep in the night and when it rained), for she laid down the fork and reached for the handle of the coffee pot. In that moment, he wanted to reach under her reaching arm and cover her lovely breast with his hand, but then she turned, her eyes all business -- he sat straight down, the good boy of the family. At the bus stop he rocked from foot to foot, shivering in the trenchcoat, briefcase banging knee. Above and behind him, the wooden sign began to steam. Across the little valley one light burned in a window. (In that light he now saw himself twenty minutes ago, jaws working sleepily, faced out across the little valley, barely able to see the bus stop or any other world at all.) As he watched, grinding his teeth and giggling with cold, all the windows ignited. 7.1.4 WhenCallCame When the Call Came When the call came, the best friends were over for lunch; but he was already soused, and she never could handle that big damn Cadillac. So when they offered to drive my mother said no: she hated him for being soused, for saying my father never drank that much, he swore, he never saw him drunk -- he, who was never otherwise -- and she hated the wife's helplessness, if not exactly the wife. So my mother sent the best friends away, and went to the neighbors two doors up, and they drove her; then while he parked the car, she went inside with my mother, walking beside, but a half step back. In the corridor my mother saw the charge nurse, and the look she saw she knew. They all stood around her, tears arisen in their eyes, because they hated this, because they loved her, because she was their center now, this had happened to her. And they now had the honor of being there, to touch her shoulder or her elbow, to ask the gentle questions -- "Do you wantŠ?" "Can I getŠ?" "Would you likeŠ?" and then to wait for the answers to form, to carry out her will, to witness, to behold, themselves chosen to be here, now, to be hers. She gave herself into their care, allowed herself to be borne up, to be detained until they got him ready, then to be guided into the presence of his absence. The nurse, who had stayed past the end of her shift for my mother to arrive, now said, "I'll leave you alone," and was gone silently. My mother looked and saw nothing. She went over beside, laid her hand on his arm, felt nothing. She leaned over and kissed him, said goodbye to the already gone. Then she left, taking his absence with her. The neighbor waited just outside the door, eyes wide and full. 7.1.5 StillMad She's Still Mad The cousins are gone, an hour ago, surely home by now. My sister also, exhausted by new love, gone to bed. Between us like a continent the kitchen table bent by the years to slope away from me in my father's chair down toward my tiny mother in hers. She says she's still mad at him for not fighting this thing, whatever it was. "I've been a widow for three years," she says. "He just gave up!" She's still yelling at him, as she did when he messed himself, or when he himself yelled because some neuron, shooting its last spark, had tripped the yell reflex. But she was talking to herself, to him-in-her, to her beloved. We're groggy, as if with cold. It's late. I think, a story, Momma. Bring him back. 7.1.6 YouChoose Choose a story: 1935 If He Came Home 7.1.7 1935 1935 Well, he was twenty-three, so I was twenty-one. He was making thirty-five a week at the Sun-Tele, I'd just got a raise to twenty-nine. I broke off the engagement because he wasn't saving any money. Both our mothers came to me but I wouldn't change my mind. So when he took off across the country with his best friend Bus -- and they ran out of money and gas at the Grand Canyon, and his mother had to bail them out, Western Union -- I went out every night with another guy. This guy had plans, was talking dates, making lists; his bank account was serious. But when Billy Bly came back, I never saw that guy again, and I never told him why. " 7.1.8 IfHeCameHome If He Came Home "If he came home by eleven, it was OK. He'd be tight, even sentimental, but he'd stayed with us, quit while he was still himself, or at least human, or that part of human that stays with us, that comes home. "One night it was twelve, then one, then later. He finally rolled in, all shame. This time I didn't scold, implore, forgive. I went into the other bedroom and shut the door. In a while -- long enough for him to make and down another drink -- there was a knock. I said, 'Get away from me, don't come near me when you're like this.' He said, 'I'm afraid of you.' Can you imagine?" I can. I stand there, in him. Another moment, then the floorboards creak as he gets away from her, nodding, confirmed in his worthlessness, awash in remorse as voluptuous as drink itself. 7.2 thinksTOC Elegy To Bring Rain on a Land Where No Man Is Lenten Meditation At the AIDS Concert This Is Where The Fish He Still Thinks  7.2.1 Elegy Elegy I'm told that the symptoms of falling in love Are the same as those that come from grief Loss of appetite; abstraction; The air is almost too rich to breathe Yet you can't stop sighing; Moving at all feels foolish If not dangerous -- You turn a corner and almost leave your bones behind; Weeping because the sky's so blue Or because a tiny baby's neck is too skinny and weak To hold up its head But its eyes drink in the world just the same The heart's great gain Batters the body as fiercely As the heart's great loss A hole in the heart Is a hole in the heart Whether it comes from bursting or breaking But the wind of love can only sing Through an open pipe 7.2.2 ToBringRain To Bring Rain On A Land Where No Man Is Job 38:26 One does not seek calamity. Even when it cleaves in twain the man next to me, splits him from pate to parts so that his half-body bumps against me before it drops behind where it may or may not catch on my heel -- even then, it doesn't happen to me: it doesn't happen. Justice is a human word; it is neither uttered nor heard in the land where no man is. When I be brought there, Pray God bring the rain also. 7.2.3 LentenMeditation Lenten Meditation In Trinity Church at the head of old Wall Street Ash Wednesday is a busy day. From before dawn until after dark the line goes out to the street -- every shape and size of human being appears, moves like a corpuscle crowded fore and aft through a tiny vein in the lung, arms full of its quotidian gear or else empty, hanging awkwardly like a scolded kid's, nothing, for the moment, to do but shuffle ahead toward a figure in severe black who bears in one hand a tiny pot and on the other a grimed thumb. At the interface of the world and the world that thumb bestows upon the forehead a kiss of death with the words, "Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return." The corpuscle then returns to the world bearing, for a day at least, the reminder of that larger return: the mark of Adam, which means, of course, dirt. The priests change, the people change, no one comes back; the choir comes and sings, then goes away; daylight creeps in, floods the room, ebbs and creeps back out; even the dirt is only last year's palms burnt: this year's dirt will take its place. The smudgepot is maybe a century old, the church itself has stood five generations; the dirt beneath has borne up three churches and before that trees and before that nothing but the sky. The labelled dust in the boneyard has been just dust for centuries having whirled briefly at the interface of being dust and being dust. This spasm of matter is only a mystery to dust whirling in the breeze that also blows the stars about the heavens: dust in the ground knows what it is. 7.2.4 AIDSConcert At the AIDS Concert So many so young so familiar with death. Several skeletons are in attendance, one is one of the composers. He speaks winningly of his virus, whom he has portrayed in the piece we are about to hear in the voice of the clarinet, that elusive, most protean of voices, and whom he defeats in this musical fiction with a toy piano: charmed laughter, which he acknowledges, a boyish grin -- he cannot be thirty -- and rallies us with his conviction that the virus will be defeated, if not this way, then another, and that he will survive. And everyone smiles, tears stand in eyes all around the room, it is a sentimental moment. But the virus is not a character, not a villain but a messenger with vital information: The door to the last room has been opened. That door is in this room. 7.2.5 ThisIsWhere This Is Where They Leave Us Another damn funeral. The spirit of my dead friend whispers like a tuning fork: You don't matter very much. I, less, existing only in you. You can only be reminded of me in someone else's -- or else your own -- arc of phrase, cadential gesture. I, made of memory, remember nothing but what you may recall. You will go a long journey, or a short one, or will stay at home. You will love, be loved. If nothing else, will suffer. If not now, later. If not then, then at the end. You will come apart, taking that much of me with you. They will gather for you then go their ways long, short, alone; you will come apart again. This is where things die. This is the only place where that matters. Death makes sense of everything. This is where we leave you when we go. That's what this is. ' 7.2.6 TheFish The Fish At the weigh-in I was under, He was half a pound too much. For the next hour he sucked his gums and spat over and over into a dixie cup, sitting on the crapper, pushing, pushing, his coach murmuring above him. He finally made weight by smiling on the scale. I loved to wear the red tank top that buttoned snugly under the crotch, I loved the tights with padded knees, the square white shorts, the thick white socks, but most of all the high black shoes, light as gloves, only allowed to be worn for the match. I was a rookie, him they called Gramps -- I was fourteen, he was twenty -- my mouth was full of braces, his was full of stumps. My coach said, Just go after him. He's starved so long he's weak as a girl. All you have to do is last. I had wind and strength to spare, I had youth, I had brains, even a kind of virtue: this was manly, this was fun, this was healthy, a boy used this to grow on, mens sana in corpore sano. What Coach didn't say was this: He's poor, he's dumb, he hates you. He wants to kill you, and he's going to try. But I saw it in his eyes above the center of the mat, and it took me down and pinned me under him, wriggling and twitching like I had no arms or legs. 7.2.7 HeStillThinks He Still Thinks He still thinks this is about something. He still thinks this will work. He still thinks it's about words, and their throw-weight. He still thinks it's about dance. He still thinks words work. He still thinks thinking works. He still thinks. He still thinks he will go on. He knows this is wrong, but he still goes on thinking it anyway. He knows being nice doesn't make him right. He knows being right doesn't make him win. He knows being right doesn't matter a damn. He knows nothing matters a damn. He knows it doesn't matter a damn that it doesn't. He does not want to have lived in vain. He expects to die in vain. Otherwise, he expects nothing. It's against his religion. Otherwise, he has no religion. He feels he cannot bear the mendacity of his fellow creatures. This is his mendacity. He can bear it. He can bear all of it. Because he can bear it, he lets it live. Because he can bear it, he brings it home to live in his house. Because he can't bear it that he can bear it he doesn't give it a room. It lives in all the rooms. He still thinks he's a terminal. 7.3 goodbyeTOC When They Died Father Died TOC Mother Died TOC Say Goodbye 7.3.1 WhenTheyDied When They Died When his father died, it was his father who died: clear, clean, contained. He wrote poems about it -- even essays, for chrissakes -- because he could see it because he could contemplate it describe it describe his contemplation of it. Because he could. When his mother died he saw the death of everything including him. That shut him up. Or so he thought. 7.3.2 FatherDiedTOC Poems Mortality, Thy Name Is Daddy  My Father Loved His Death Ashes  (Feeding My Son,) My Father Behind Me His Portrait Speaks Essays The Impatience of the Living Peopling Heaven 1950 7.3.2.1 MortalityTOC Three Versions: Old Mortality (1990) Mortality in '91 Mortality In Progress...  [Three Versions note] "Old Mortality (1990)" was written maybe six months before his father died. "Mortality in 91" some three months after. "Mortality In Progress" was taken up about a year later, a few months after his mother died. He still doesn't think it's finished; it may be unfinishable. Mortality, Thy Name is Daddy (1990) At the beginning of each month this summer a photograph was taken of William James Bly. In the June one, the first, my father sits in a wheelchair, lightly grasping with his good right hand the brim of the golf hat we'd brought so we could take him outside. It is a meaningless gesture, not, therefore, even a gesture: put the hat on his head, he will take it off then replace it, then take it off againŠ Showing the photo, I can say -- have said -- "Big Bill tips his hat on his way out." This jaunty interpretation pleases me, makes the picture, hides everything with the truth. He looks right at the camera. It is the look of a man already gone, in spirit at least, back into the ground. It is the stare of a stone. In the middle one, a headshot of sorts taken at a 4th of July picnic, another Bill Bly strikes a characteristic expression: head cocked down to one side so that I can peer over my glasses, give the camera the eye -- my look says, "You know better than that," whatever the that happens to be. An indispensable look for a teacher: jokey, smart, superior. In the know, but wearing it lightly. Ironic, but not unsympathetic. A look my father never had, or lost, and now does not need. The third developed just a few days ago. My son Billy, brain damaged, retarded, spastic, but still twelve years old, is flopped against the side of the monstrous stroller he has to have -- rather, I have to have. While I was hunting up the camera because he looked so great in the Yankee cap I knew he also had to have, he'd torn it off by the back, and now clutches the thing, white-knuckled, in his good left hand; the bill is clamped between his teeth. His eyes are pointed at me, crossed in concentration: This is how you do it, right, Dad? There's another picture in my memory. Twelve years before this August portrait was taken -- likely to the day, come to think of it -- the three Bills Bly were together in a small room of the nursery at the hospital. The new baby had just been moved from Intensive Care, and his vigorous, impatient grandfather could hold him for the first time. He sat on the bed with the boy on his lap, the head with its two black eyes upon the closed knees. The man laid his right hand against the side of the baby's face and said, "Oh. Oh. Oh." His eyes poured love and sorrow in a steady stream upon that tiny body; his touch was so tender I could feel it in my own hand, on my own face. In the air beside that hand, a little one waved, clenching and releasing, promising more than it could ever fulfill, not knowing any better. Mortality, Thy Name is Daddy (1991) In the June photograph, my father sits in a wheelchair, lightly grasping with his good right hand the brim of the golf hat we'd just put on his head -- a meaningless gesture, not, therefore, even a gesture: he will take it off, then replace it, then take it off againŠ Showing the photo, I say, "Big Bill tips his hat on his way out," which makes the picture, hides everything with the truth. He looks right at the camera. It is the stare of a stone. In the August Polaroid My spastic son Billy, twelve years old, is flopped against the side of the monstrous stroller I have to have for him. The Yankee cap I knew he had to have he's torn off by the back, and now clutches the thing, white-knuckled, in his good left hand; the bill is clamped between his teeth. His eyes are pointed at me, crossed in concentration: This is how you do it, right, Dad? In a headshot of sorts from a 4th of July picnic, another Bill Bly peers from under no hat, over his glasses, seeing the camera, making a face for it: the son and father for the moment able-bodied, able-minded, able eyed, says to the camera that he knows this. It is a look his son and father never had, or lost, and now do not need. There's another picture in my memory. Twelve years before, the three Bills Bly are together in a small room of the nursery at the hospital. The new baby has just been moved from Intensive Care, and his vigorous, impatient grandfather can hold him for the first time. He sits on the bed with the boy laid on his lap, the head with its two bruised eyes upon the closed knees. The man puts his right hand against the side of the baby's face and says, "Oh. Oh. Oh." His eyes pour love and sorrow in a steady stream upon that tiny body; his touch is so tender I can feel it in my own hand, on my own face. In the air beside that hand, a little one waves, clenching and releasing, promising more than it can ever fulfill, not knowing any better. Mortality, Thy Name Is Daddy (in progress) In the June photograph, my father sits in a wheelchair, lightly grasping with his good right hand the brim of the golf hat just put on his head: a meaningless gesture -- not, therefore, even a gesture -- he will take it off, then replace it, then take it off againŠ Showing the photo, I say, "Big Bill tips his hat on his way out," which makes the picture; hides everything with the truth. He looks right at the camera. It is the stare of a stone. In the August Polaroid My spastic son Billy, twelve years old, is flopped against the side of the monstrous stroller I have to have for him. The Yankee cap I put on him a minute ago he's torn off by the back, clutches the thing, white-knuckled, in his good left hand; the bill is clamped between his teeth. His eyes are pointed at me, crossed in concentration. In a headshot of sorts from a 4th of July picnic, another Bill Bly peers from under no hat, over his glasses, seeing the camera, making a face for it, a wise-guy look: the son and father, for the moment able-bodied, able-minded, able-eyed, says to the camera that he knows this. It is a look his son nor father ever had, or lost, and now do not need. Twelve years before, the three Bills Bly are together in a small room of the hospital. The new baby has just been moved from Intensive Care; the vigorous, impatient grandfather can now hold him for the first time. He sits on the bed with the boy laid on his lap, the little head with its two bruised eyes upon the big closed knees. He lays his right hand along the side of the baby's face. I feel it in my own hand, on my own face. He says, "Oh. Oh. Oh." Beside that strong square hand, a tiny thin one dances, clenches and releases the air of the room, promising, fulfilling, not knowing any better. His eyes pour love and sorrow in a steady stream upon that tiny bodyŠ [unfinished] 7.3.2.3 FatherLovedDeath My Father Loved His Death 1. At first he loved its distance the way he loved my mother sitting, reading, in the white frame house in Pittsburgh while he slithered, pop-eyed and reeking, through the Philippine jungle. Later, sitting on the sunset porch, he loved the way the sky like a rag soaked up dark from the earth; the moon and stars fell into it, the birds went quiet one by one. Then he would turn his chair to face the window into the golden rooms, and look, only look. At last he loved its coming, the rounding mouth, the dark, inside, downness of it; he fell away, peripeteia, in every direction, my mother could not catch him, no one could catch him; his eyes now sought the dark as they had once sought the light when first he fell face-first down into his life. 2. On a ship pitching west across the Pacific, toward tomorrow, toward Hell, he retched and retched into his helmet. Behind him his wife and me and his baby girl; behind him the house he had just built, abandoned now to strangers; behind him his return from the real war six years before, the shirt pocket ripped off by shrapnel washed and folded in the bottom of his kit. Ahead lay Korea, where he would fight, and freeze, and endure, things he didn't know yet. But it wasn't what he didn't know that made him heave and roar into that overturned metal skull, staining the canvas ligaments the color of brains. 3. I imagine him on the golf course when he sees his death for the first time. It's a blind par five; his drive has hit the crest and gone over. The other three have scattered their shots across the face of the hill; he refuses the cart for the straight walk to his ball. Coming down off the tee, his left foot goes funny and he staggers, but goes into a little trot and pulls out of it. His partner, still close, asks, but he's fine, fine, and he is. The carts hum away; quiet flows around him like rising water, except for his spikes combing through the long grass of the rough, a sound that reminds him of his Janie's fingernails on his scalp as they lay in the narrow bed, eyes inches apart. Then he's on the fairway, and the earth spreads out around him, the real world, the one that bears us up, that bears us, and tears take him, for he loves to love. At last he tops the rise. "Oh!" he says. "There you are." 7.3.2.5 Ashes Ashes 1. We cannot find it till we give up hope; I'm already at the turnaround, certain that we're lost, when my wife says, "That's it" -- the cemetery can only be seen when you get there. "This waste," she says inside the gate, seeking further words, "This wasteŠ" the city child marvels but approves: "We need it." We're early. We don't speak of him. My father's been everywhere for days. In the slim shade of a spruce, we sit on the ground, cropping clover with our fingers; looking over each other's shoulders, we squint against the baking glare. 2. When it's time, a man in a suit comes to us, a box like a trophy base in one arm, easy as a melon. He speaks before I can; we are pulled into his wake, in a moment we're in the parking lot, calling over the roofs of cars. Alone, up front, he drives ahead. Not alone, we realize. "That's him," my wife observes. Our cars float down the drive like two skimming birds; we alight at an open place between groves of trees. The man gets out, shifts the box, extends an arm -- "This way," he says, and starts. "That's him," I say; he stops. "I'll carry him." He hesitates, then passes me the box. I pull it against my side, rest it near the hip, the place one perches the straddling kid who cannot walk any farther. My wife comes up, eyes big on me, I smile: so far, so good. The grave is a two-foot square hole in the ground; down in there, a black metal case with a lid. We look. I bounce the box once. At no signal I can see, the digger kneels, seems to dive into the hole, tips off the case-lid. Two sticks of gum slip out of his shirt, smack on the bottom of the vault. He snatches them back. I say, "Maybe you should leave one thereŠ" the digger's face, when he gets up straight, is red as any drunk's. They all look at me: "Well, old guy," I say to the box, now holding it between my hands like a baby's face. There's really nothing else to do, really nothing else. I gaze around, to see where he will be -- it looks like a fairway: that is well. I give my father over, give him away, give him up; let the ashes take their weight, go down, stay under. 3. We cannot go right back, we have to stop; for neutral ground we choose a fast food joint. I want nothing; go, stop, stand, sit, here, there, all the same. I stare out over the cluttered street, but see only that spread of quiet grass with its attendant trees respectfully apart; what makes the tears rise is leaving him alone. He wanted this the way I'd wanted to run away from him, from home, from everything that never worked; now I abandon him to that desire, and cannot have him any more. My wife takes my face between her hands, weeps for my weeping. We wonder if there is a heaven; I think not: not elsewhere, here if anywhere; not where the angels live, not a place at all, but what they guard: each of us the locus and the substance of love. The unbroken cannot be cherished, only feared or adored. We must be able to perish. 7.3.2.7 FatherBehindMe (Feeding My Son,) My Father Behind Me Behind me is a portrait of my father when he was maybe fifteen years older than I am now one of those charcoal boardwalk sketches from an empty-nest vacation. The left half of the face is him all right, but the right eye seems too big or it's open too wide whatever that ice-blue eye's looking at has it frozen, perhaps with fright. Or, from another angle, that of time -- of time to come, for the man sitting for this portrait -- that eye is a mere window, perfectly clear, itself seeing nothing. My back is mostly turned to that framed antiquity. I feel him watching, from time to time, but not from behind -- rather from within, through the eyes he half made, made of the stuff of the most potent form of what's left of him. I'm feeding his grandson, his quadroon, whose crossed brown eyes can only speak, not hear, but all his fathers are listening. [default: Father Died TOC]" 7.3.2.8 HisPortraitSpeaks [False Starts] [Provisional Start] Everyone's saying he looks like meŠ What worries me, and what should worry himŠ And now he's lost the coreŠ Everyone's saying he looks like me. Even he says it, catching a glimpse of some strange stout man with silver hair just catching a glimpse of him in the mirror. But I don't look like that. I never looked like that even when I looked like that. What worries me, and what should worry him is the way he is like me down underneath where no one can see it -- and I mean no one -- but him and me. That preference for sulking instead of fighting back, that fundamental furtiveness, that mean streak he'd like to call his righteousness. And now he's lost the core, or rather found it empty as I did at his age: There was a bad man in our midst, and I was head of the "authorities." We drove this bad man out, but I wasn't satisfied: I had him followed, and when he tried to settle in a distant place, I tipped off my fellow guardians of decency, and they drove him out as well. Who would have expected such a man to turn at bay and attack me? Who would have believed that he would press his doomed case so hard, so desperately, that I would have to sue for peace to him? Who but the lawyers would have known that virtue is not absolute in the eyes of the law, that right must be negotiated, not merely recognized. And who would have thought the world to be such a place? That's what knocked me down, a vigorous man in the prime of life, whose only thought was to protect his children from such palpable evil as this man embodied. That such a man existed at all made my skin crawl -- how could it be that he wasn't spewed forth into the outer darkness for what he was and what he did? Because there is no outer darkness -- the sun shines on the like and unlike alike; there is no justice in this world. The only darkness is within: our selves like the galaxies center on a black hole just behind and just beneath the heart; its work is done by density aloneŠ 7.3.2.2 ImpatienceoftheLiving The Impatience of the Living [August 1991] My father died at 79 last May, after a fairly rapid decline. The diagnosis was Binswanger's disease, or hardening of the arteries of the brain. Had you asked my mother, however, and the fire would kindle in her eyes. "I was a widow for three years before he died," she'd say. "He just gave up!" For her the three years were anything but rapid or fair. She nursed him through the first two, but when his falls became a matter for the EMS, the hospital refused to give him back. She spent the year of their 50th anniversary visiting him at the county health center, formerly the poor house. He spent his last year on earth forgetting everything, though she was the last thing he forgot. My sister was mad at him too, in part for abandoning our mother, but also because she feels that in her growing-up disasters, he was always more interested in how much it hurt him than he was in supporting her.Š* Even my wife agrees. She tells the story of finding him on the porch all alone one night, staring at us through the picture window, as if he were already on the Other Side. I heard all this in the days just after his death, as we gathered around the kitchen table. At first I was puzzled by the fact that everything that was said about my father seemed to fall into one of two categories: the pattern of his drinking, or the progress of his deterioration. For days this went on, as relatives and neighbors came in and out, nodding and clucking, adding their own examples to one or both refrains. I awoke one morning filled with shame, the echo of women's voices, flattened in disapproval, still ringing in my mind. I realized I'd been rehashing the talk of the last few days in my dreams, and had somehow become the object of their censure, had become, in effect, my father. The reason was not far to seek: I was the only man in the house with my mother, my sister, my wife, and my daughter, and all that we talked about was how my father had let them down. And I thought, wait a minute. The man worked hard all his life, loved his family, loved to have fun and to give it as well. Is this all that's to be remembered of his life -- his drinking, his falling apart? His "giving up"? I felt I must defend him from these grieving, angry women, because I could see what they could not: through the eyes of the son, the brother, the husband, the father I am. When I look backwards through my own life, I can see into his -- the years of being counted on, expected of, hoped for; bobbing in a sea of women's hearts, upheld but not always understood, held onto but never quite acceptable. To be loved by women was an honor my father lived to deserve; it was also a tyrrany he had no desire to escape, except, perhaps, through drink. I knew what they seemingly didn't: how important they really were to him, and how much more important must have been whatever it was that made him "just give up." If that's what happened. I think what he saw three years ago was his own death. Not his absence -- that he'd imagined many times -- no: death's presence. The death that was his. The death that was him. So I said, maybe when he saw the end, that was the end: it knocked him down, and he stayed there. They think he should have bounced back up, fought this thing, raged against the dying of the light. I don't. I think that's when the light went out. I think there are things we can't talk back to, fight with, even answer; things that take us, merely, whether we kick and scream or not. The question was moot, of course. If he cares any more whether we understand him or not, we'll never find out, not until we follow him. If that's what happens. What bothered me most about those gripe sessions was that understanding was assumed -- "Well, he was an alcoholicŠ" "He just gave up!" These glib phrases explained nothing, they merely tagged with a name something that he did or said or failed to do, so that it could be put away and we could move on. But we didn't move on -- the same stale stories, over and over, the same refrains, like kids spinning and spinning in the yard until they fall down, like a drunk who drinks because he drinks. Finally, the night before the service, someone said something -- I don't remember what -- that nudged my mother out of the groove, and she started on a story I'd never heard before, her voice rising, musical, almost girlish. And there among the women at the table, my father -- charming, willing, fun-loving Bill Bly -- came to life again. [dingbat] At the house among the relatives, my mother was almost giddy as she talked about the service at the church, during which rain poured down and lightning snapped, dimming the lights a couple of times. Her favorite part was the thunder. "When I heard that crash," she said, "the thought just popped into my mind: 'That's Bill Bly, pounding on the gates of heaven!' I almost laughed out loud!" She said she was horrified, but now she could laugh, and we join her, because that's just the sort of thing that does pop into your mind when you're trying your best to behave, to do what's expected, to play the part you've seen others play with such dignity before. She was laughing with relief, because for her that play-acting was finally over. She didn't go to the interment the next day: after three years' dreading it, then fighting it, then just waiting for it, she'd had enough of my father's death. And in one of those ironic juxtapositions that give life its often brutal charm, my sister was in love, so she had no time for death or its ceremonies, beyond the absolute minimum required. So my wife and I went by ourselves, because someone was needed to say goodbye. The man from the funeral home shook hands, his manner breezy but not disrespectful. At first I was content to let him lead -- he knew where we were going, he knew what to do. But he took the box of ashes in his car when we drove to the site, and by the time we got there I knew I had to ask if I could carry it to the grave. It was about the size and shape of a trophy base, and heavier than it looked. I carried it against my side, where I carried my kids when I picked them up, where my father carried me. I'd imagined this moment, but never like this -- so simple, so bare, so quick. I should have planned a speech; it was happening too fast. I also felt I was holding something up, wasting time, that I should get this over, get on with my life, let these others get on with theirs. I never could stand to wait for anyone, now everyone was waiting for me. Everything there was to be done for him had been done, all but this last thing. And I didn't know how to do it. I thought, maybe I should have stayed home. Then I wouldn't have had to worry about how to say goodbye to my father -- I just wouldn't say goodbye. Some would say those ashes are not him, but of course they are, or else it wouldn't matter where they ended up; the cemetery, with its expanse of grass and quiet trees would not be there, this awkward ceremony would not have taken place. What we carry in our hearts is us, not him; what's left of him is in that box, the rest went up some chimney miles away. When I gave it to the digger, when he dropped it gently into the earth, when I walked away to the car, I knew I was leaving him alone. And that's when I wept, because this is what our life is, being left behind, then leaving. _____________________________ In an earlier draft, the following paragraph appears approximately here: A person who has decided to die is already beyond our reach. When that person is a husband or a father, it makes for something worse than grief, it's insulting: our professions of love are thrown back in our face; it destroys our sense of ourselves as competent human beings, who not only want to care for one another, we can. My mother and my sister obviously didn't matter enough to make Dad want to stay; is there any way he could have hurt them more deeply? No wonder they're mad. 7.3.2.4 PeoplingHeaven Peopling Heaven [Autumn 1991] Until recently, when my father died, I hadn't given much thought to heaven. As a child I'm sure I imagined it as being "up there" somewhere, far enough away that we couldn't see it -- even from an airplane -- and that when we died, we would somehow sail there, perhaps on wings that unfolded, like a butterfly's, when we broke free from the chrysalis of the body. This beautiful image doesn't survive into adulthood, when heaven is vaguely thought of, if at all, as a place where the dead wait for us, the suspended relationship expected to pick up where we left off. The Scripture most often read at Christian funerals is the one from Revelation 21: "And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things have passed away." The former things. Meaning -- the present things. Perhaps as grownups we can no longer believe in heaven as a place, but we can still conceive of a state of being or consciousness where all the things that torment us in this life are magically removed. In fact, what else can we do for our lost ones except to picture them, arrived at last at that bliss and peace, in the most beautiful place we can imagine? But then heaven isn't for them, it's for us, isn't it? It doesn't exist "up there" or away from here at all -- and it's not constructed of clouds or ether or crystal spheres, but rather of the concrete love we bear for our departed ones. When the news got out that my father had died, the platters of lunch meat and the casseroles began to arrive at my mother's door, borne by friends who could only hold them out, unable to find anything to say. There isn't anything to say, and the food was of considerable pragmatic value: none of us, my mother especially, felt like cooking, and the house was full of people -- relatives, neighbors, other friends -- who needed to be fed. And food is the most appropriate gift, because it is perishable, as are we. In medieval times the body was called wyrmes mete, food for the worms. And since what we eat becomes us, we are sharing our physical substance, the very real mystery at the heart of Communion. At such a time an offering must be made -- to the living, not the dead. The dead need nothing from us any more, and it is this emptiness we perhaps are trying to fill with flowers and food and murmured words of sympathy. No one is fooled: it cannot be filled, because it was there before, it is always there. Death is a presence, not an absence. Death is what we share with every other human being, alive, dead, or yet to be born. Death is the one thing we have in common with all of creation. Death makes our life. In our quotidian consciousness, the world is too huge and complicated for one person to be able to perceive, let alone understand or control. So we narrow our focus, hatch our little plots, fret over trifles that the intensity of our concentration makes into monsters. And then someone dies. In Greek tragedy, this moment is called peripeteia, which is usually translated "reversal" -- the hero's fortunes having suddenly gone from good to bad. But the etymology of the word yields "falling all around," the image of a building collapsing about one. However, this also opens up the sky and the horizon as far as one can see in all directions. When someone dies, we are given the opportunity to behold our life as it is, complete. A death clarifies, makes most real, illuminates; whatever is extraneous falls away, and we can see where we really are. But where are the departed ones? Where did Daddy go? In one sense, of course, I am where my father went, and I can feel him any time I want: all I have to do is look at my hands, which resemble his, or hear his voice in my own when I answer the phone. And then of course there is his memory, alive in everyone he knew. This idea is most beautifully expressed in Galway Kinnell's poem, "Memories of My Father," which I read at the funeral: ŠThen the lost one can fling itself outward, its million moments of presence can scatter through consciousness freely, like snow collected overnight on a spruce bough that in midmorning bursts into glittering dust in the sunshine. Literally, of course, my father went to the cemetery. Some would say those ashes are not him, but of course they are, or else it wouldn't matter where they ended up. What's left of him is in that box that I carried to the grave against my side, where I carried my kids when I picked them up, where my father carried me; my father is in that box I left in a hole in the ground. When I walked to the car, I wept because I was abandoning him, and because this is what our life is, being left behind, then leaving. Perhaps the proper question to ask is not "Where do we go when we die?" but rather "What do we leave behind?" At the punch-and-cookie reception after the funeral, my mother kept saying to herself, "I'll have to tell Bill about all these peopleŠ" and then remembered. Across from where my mother sits at the kitchen table will always be my father's chair. Love stays here. Love brought us into the world, love sends us hence; from the unknown into the unknown. Love keeps us, while we're here, shelters us in the daily from the immensity we cannot bear to behold except in glimpses. And love attends the devastation of those glimpses. As we pulled into the church parking lot for the funeral, it began to rain; by the time the music started, it was pouring. Lightning snapped, dimming the lights a couple times. My mother's favorite part was the thunder: when it boomed the thought popped into her mind, "That's Bill Bly, pounding on the gates of heaven!" She hasn't yet said whether she thinks he was let in or not. For the moment I stand alone where my father stood when his father died, with the walls down all around me, seeing what he saw with my eyes. And I think I can see heaven: if we can enter it, it can only be here, where we come from, whence we go, the place where love is crossed with death to bring forth love. ________________________ Galway Kinnell, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, p. 11. 7.3.2.6 1950 That evening we go for a two-family picnic up at the Clearys, the neighbors who drove Mom to the home as Dad was actually dying. At the door Til cries when she first sees Mom, and Bob is appropriately awkward when he hugs my sister and shakes hands with me. After that the talk is easy, slipping from one subject to another in our present lives. My sister and I bring out our amazing stories from New Sodom; they cluck and shake their heads. Throughout, we keep an eye on Mom, but she's fine. Only once do we brush against the real past, the origin of the long friendship between our families. We've exhausted the news, and the talk has turned free-form. We're comparing our earliest memories. I mention that one of mine is this very house going up, which Bob says was in 1950. Then my sister Lynn says no one will believe hers -- the 36-inch snowfall at Thanksgiving that year, when she was just over a month old. Mom (or it could have been Mom-mom) is standing at the open front door of our house, holding Lynn in her arms. Everything is white, with more snow falling, and someone is struggling towards them with bags full of food. Bob says, "That was me!" Mom remembers that Dad was at Fort Knox, (recalled for Korea) trying and trying to call in, but the party line was always tied up. Til recalls that another neighbor (Fred Lieb) worked at the A&P in Burgettstown, twenty miles away; he was stuck there for two days, but when he did make it back he had lots of food. Then they all groan about the Scharnbergs: all they did was wade from house to house, mooching cigarettes and beer. 7.3.4 MotherDiedTOC This House Watching My Mother's Brain Scan Take Her 7.3.4.1 ThisHouse This House My mother lives here, alone, sad as she'll ever be, the house huge around her tiny frame, dust laid in soft reproach on every horizontal surface, every place planes meet an althing of gossamer. "Somebody's doing housework," she thinks as she watches a busy arachnid the size of a comma take over the corner between window-frame and door-jamb. I am here to help her move, to decide what to take, what to leave, what to throw away. Oddly I'm the sentimental one; every object I pick up is weighted with its significant use over time, the measure of its life; each thing only itself, of course, but most itself in this house where this mother lifts this teacup and blows across the tawny lake, fluting the water, her eyes focused beyond the opposite shore on another tiny mother making a new home in the wilderness. 7.3.4.2 BrainScan Watching My Mother's Brain Scan We march straight through the head-shaped hollow rock of light from ear to ear, the view reforms with each 5 mm step "There's her cerebellum," the technician says, touching it. I've seen this landscape in books; The Illustrated Head, however, never looked like my mommy from across the room. We're discussing the concept artifact: the machine tolerates no movement, or else the image breaks up, blurs, becomes a smudge, scalloped waves of dust, or, most amusing to him, "smoke out the ears" -- the artifact of bloodrace in the carotid -- the only sign she is alive lying so still on her back, wound in a sheet, strapped to the sled shoved deep into the magnetic oven. Thus must she have appeared, her skin and no-bones transparent to the loving eyes of her guardian angel in the months before she was born. But here, nothing remains of what brought her; only one she brought here remains to watch over, can only hover and fuss and try to comprehend what's happening to her, to him and everything, even this gleaming machine. 7.3.4.3 TakeHer Take Her Take her home, she hates it here, she's so tired, so sick, so tiny She hates what it's done to her, she says, "What can I do?" Take her out of this, this is no place for her, for any of us, really, but we can bear it, -- at least for now -- what's not to be borne. 7.3.3 SayGoodbye Say Goodbye Say goodbye to dark walls of long, fluid fingers, goodbye to the dark, the big dark starred by neuronic sparks alone, night of no moon: you are the moon. Say goodbye. Here when you return desiccated, burned, blasted by wind and smoke, a sack of stones and dust, busted and spilled, Air will have sung you, fire made you glow. Now earth takes you back, slick fingers once more press and caress. 8 bio Bill Bly (William James Bly III) is a freelance writer and musician, a student of classical Greek, and the teacher of thousands in his twenty-odd years in upper education.  He is the third of four consecutive William James Blys -- his father and no doubt his grandfather before him were subjected to the same bantering questions about his relatives. As it happens, his father achieved the rank of Captain in the U.S. Army, making the author the son of Captain Bly. Nellie Bly, the "first" woman newspaper reporter, who exposed the horrors of the insane asylum at Blackwell's Island, and who went around the world in 77 days (stopping along the way to chat with Jules Verne), was born in Pittsburgh like the author, but the name she was born with was Elizabeth Cochran. The real Nelly Bly is the author's daughter. He is no relation (that he knows) to the poet Robert Bly. 9 acknowlegements Acknowledgments With the exception of "Elegy" (1985) these writings date from the period between 1991 and 1995. Several poems were composed and given first readings in a 1991 workshop at New York University led by Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, and Michael S. Harper. An early version of "My Father Loved His Death" appeared in the resulting chapbook, A Poetry Collection, published by the Faculty Resource Network at NYU. "My Father Loved His Death" and "Ashes" appeared in the Fall/Winter 1996 issue (Volume X, Number 2) of Zone 3, published by Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. The three prose pieces were the product of a commission by the late, much lamented quarterly Books & Religion. Although in the end neither "Peopling Heaven" nor "The Impatience of the Living" appeared in the magazine, Editor-in-Chief Katherine Kurs provided not only the occasion but also the encouragement necessary to complete these (to me) important meditations. A crude hypertext "chapspace" containing some of these poems was first assembled for Robert Kendall's Hypertext Poetry and Fiction class at the New School for Social Research in the summer of 1995. It is not possible for me to thank Rob enough for his continued interest and support. This essentially hopeful piece was written on the occasion of the death of Jack J. Boies, a dear friend and mentor, as an offering to the family. Entitled "On My Father's Death, May 24, 1991." It contained early versions of "The Fish," the last two sections of the present "My Father Loved His Death," and ended with "She's Still Mad," which segued into "1935." Only two are full essays -- "The Impatience of the Living" and "Peopling Heaven" -- "1950" is a fragment that wouldn't fit in either. The general estimation of this early attempt was that the poems were OK, but that it wasn't much of a hypertext. The author hopes that this latter situation has been ameliorated, if not downright remedied, in this version.