How to Mourn

Not with logic, that I’m sure of.

Woken by birds and breathy car
engines, I’m still groggy from
the half life of a dream:  Peppermint
mushrooms in that rawboned college
housing, my sneakers three flights
upstairs.  It took a lifetime to lace them
while I thought about space and the
people waiting downstairs and the
cardamom color the walls were
painted, until finally we were outside,
fallen onto our backs while the sky fell
onto us, blanketing and prophesying.

Much too late for breakfast, the pilot
light, soft blue flame, went out again.
I forget whether we have oil or
propane  because I don’t really
understand the difference, except that
oil is viscous and gas invisible, until
you put your head in the oven and
then the lungs know.

In the morning I walk a route designed
for conversation, circling the cove with
a friend. Not everyone is waiting for
the tourist season to end. Someone
carries a five-stepped ladder, green
paint, and brushes to a storefront,
again where the trim has chipped, a
kind of afterthought. There is so
much body and episodic growth in
June when the sun turns up.  But at
forty-six the hips can buckle,
shortening my stride. 

We talk about the odd placard on my
school desk: I don’t work here, like a
prop in a film.  So many possible
emphases: I don’t work here, as though
another pronoun took the job. I don’t
work here, couldn’t possibly, must be
beneath me.  I don’t work here, I barely
even breathe here, much less toil. I
don’t work here but in another
universe where death and 
breast don’t share a diagraph.

Rounding the last mile, I stoop to pick
up a photo dropped next to the
highway, glommed onto the dirt path.
The backdrop looks familiar, courthouse in downtown
Portland, maybe, and a clown of a man
stands atop a stone column, with a top
hat, but he is juggling swords.
We both agree it’s worth nothing
to keep looking.

Afternoon at my annual, I promise I
am a person who can feel, because I
weep in the room where so many
women first begin to die. Just last week
in another country a distant sister
[enigmatic, practiced, adored] was in
her last hours, family still breathing in
the moments, nurses fiddling with
the bedsheets, daughters
wordless without her. 

A technician with a plunging neckline
plates my small breast between the
plastics, my arm awkward above me, a
skirt of  comforting lead heavy on my
hips. Why shouldn’t my breast tissue
be dense, too-palpable, the doctor’s
examination demanding another
ultrasound next week?  It will be
benign again, or it won’t. I need to
borrow from the Aramaic, the liturgy
of just last week, to explain that there
is no comfort but we still keep praying 
to

the One whose might is such that
even if all the heavens were parchment
and all the reeds pens
and all the oceans ink
and all people were scribes,
it would be impossible to record.

At night the readings go on, 
the dry-mouthed and mystified
scholars debating the same sentence
in all its constructions. In the small
hours the heavens open and there is
room to soar, words pour forth, the
fathers and mothers become sons 
and daughters and the ache 
demands to be codified, something 
done, made, a hymn against sorcery.

On the eve of her last breath, the 
coffee dregs lined the mugs, and the
visitors gathered like waves.
Suffering is enough to cow the faithful,
their sorrow inscribed with 
gall-nut juice and a feather quill. Until
one  hundred and twenty, we begged,
calling on those frail deeds that 
wither while we chant, logic be
damned.