The Month of the Dead
Quick now, here, now, always –T.S. Eliot
I.
The dead like words
go out from us
into gardens and ponds, into cemeteries,
into newspapers in tiny print.
Even in silence they mark the progress
of grass, the lack of trees, the few
things that happen slowly to stone and brass.
Books stay closed, lists get shorter.
Ruby and Mabel name fewer old ladies.
Words and the dead like rain
soak into the dry ground.
It is not that people die so much
as that they do so on regular days,
May 23rd, August 12th, tomorrow,
taking those days forever with them.
II.
It is nothing to know where you are.
The old man still walks to where he once worked.
The difficulty is ever when.
The woman wears three watches in the airport.
In the snow outside
Pope Gregory’s castle, was Henry waiting
just to ask the time, the date,
for a calendar that would bring
Spring back to Spring?
That’s what we wait for,
when, a place to put everyone,
a day to cross off or set out in red ink—
dead now, there, now, always—
without the accumulated
birthdays and dentist appointments.
III.
It is only the small matter of lying
to make a month for the dead,
to set aside whole weeks
where no one meets or marries,
when no children are born,
a month away from other months
to say that those who are dead died then.
If we cannot find a month, perhaps
we can hold the dead to the days they died,
always Sunday if it was a Sunday,
the third Wednesday in July,
like Easter dependent on the moon.
Let them stay put while the anniversaries
of the living wander through the week.
Give us the peace of languorous summer months
and them a place both for when they’d left and where they’ve gone.
IV.
Words like the dead
contract and attach
to days of unexpected rain, to bank tellers,
to the background faces in paintings
and horizons out particular windows.
They mark the progress of hydrangeas
that sail through the California winter.
Words and the dead like leaves
crowd round what should only be
the hours we lay together in the grass,
the day the dog got out,
the Tuesdays full of nothing.
These one-time people, these scattered sentiments—
here now, gone, now, always—
we cannot gather them in, we cannot let them go.
[first appeared in Illya’s Honey]
