Author: Cary Waterman

For the Greeks, who had no word for irreversible death, one did
not die, one darkened.
—Mark Strand

Where the Japanese iris right
now stand ready to
accept the inevitable
purple blossom

she found four dead mice
in their nest of dirt and dusty fur
all with their small ears pointed like pilgrims
toward the trunk of the huge cottonwood.

What happened here?
Cat? Owl? Dog? A silent disease?
Or had they just frozen one night as the air
on their bodies fell back to winter?

Their dusk bodies were soft as she picked them up
unsure of whether to leave them buried where they would
melt back into earth, first fur, then intestine,
vertebra, and finally small pocket of skull.

She put a rock over them but came back later,
removed them to a black plastic bag, afraid
of something, some disease, that the cat
would chew on them, get sick, maybe die.

Now where the grave was there is a space
in the clump of iris, a darkness, an open mouth.

 

 

Your wife had left you post-diagnosis

yet here you were this night stumbling on fire

with dance and blood,

a retired high school Spanish teacher,

now learning the new syntax

of multiple sclerosis.

It burned from your hands and feet,

the castanets, the dark mole

on the flamenco dancer’s cheek,

All the broken stomping, clapping,

duende of dark.

 

We stumbled into the lighted lobby

where you grabbed my friend and me,

said we must all go now,

tonight, for roja, for wine,

for the dance and the darkness.

 

But we sad women demurred

to the rain in our hearts,

afraid of the blood call.

We scurried like mice into hoods, coats,

another night we promised.

But it would not come again.

I knew then that I had

been called, chosen,

and all these years have remembered only

what it was like not to go.

 

Note from the poet: I hope wherever Lew is, he will remember
that night and accept my regretful apology. Lorca writes: “duende is a power
and not a behavior, it is a struggle and not a concept.” These are the moments
we live for.

 

For more poetry, see mnartists’ “What Light.”