When the Hour Pushed Ahead

 

 When the Hour Pushed Ahead

 

Yes, the long shadows go out

from the bales; and yes, the soul

must part from the body:

what else could it do?

 

                        Jane Kenyon

                        Twilight: After Haying

 

A pint of blood, I know,

I know it is not the same losing

a son the way you did

& losing a son

the way I did.  The undoneness

of it.  The gone body.  How he is

 

wheeled to his last

rooms, how he will be cooling

precisely, to remove a heart a pancreas

his kidneys . . .each to their now

different destiny, a new haven.  They will when

not in his skin when

in the skin of others some boys

some men some girls some women

 

split themselves like cells splitting

like in the beginning

when want was first

the word and then the body

and the body was will made

muscle and the mansion was prepared.

But going there well, can we

 

ever be prepared for such

a lyrical or such a soundless

leave-taking?  Can we even be

expected to be ready to imagine

the skin being 

unzipped from its

muscle & draped

on the pyre?  Remember Priam

 

begging Achilles for Hector?

For the dignity of his body?  All those miles

Achilles sped in his chariot desecrating muscle

& all that makes a man

a man, though by the end of the day

the gods reshaped the pulp of it back

into a prince?  Remember those two heros

broke against their own murdered:

one a son & one a lover

& for a moment, a moment! this particular

moment they were scintillating

they were only one

soul?

 

Grief is a self seen

in a lifted-to-the-light kaleidoscope, and

on the days the muscles, the triceps especially,

tire long before they aught and are

they are! their own acute agony.

and the son goes dark & is set

and gone

under the horizon.

 

That body,

now absented from, sewn after all his

removals, his cells gone

solemn & done, now they echo.

Don’t they

(I want them to echo)

of that cauldron of your body

that made them all those days

and years ago

and it’s last pang of strained

labor.  They never tell you about

 

the last labor, after the baby

after the afterbirth, when the minutes

then the years have been

delivered out of the womb

 

& your body is the quiver: 

of both quake and the place

the arrows are kept safe

slung for the hunt, fletch catching

the brief thrum of the thumb

before it is pulled by the shaft

before it is notched & aimed & before it makes its

sinewy hum, converging or parting ( you choose )

the waves it moves through

to home in after being

stretched near to breaking, after being let go

to penetrate a world

we mothers to sons gone before us

are not able to go to,

like this blood I volunteer to be taken, 

I can only

imagine the next body

it will go to.