27 June 2018
When I get home I’ll see you there through the entry window, at the heart of the floor, sleep-watching the stairs, on watch for blurs through your cloudy cataracts, on watch for me in your dreams.
Tag Archives: death
Vulture, by Robinson Jeffers
In Igneous Range, the vulture is the firebird, a symbol of ancient Iran, and a symbol of transcendence.
To be eaten by that beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes …
Published posthumously in 1963.
Jeffers Literary Properties
Stanford University Press
Reading © 2017 Kaweah
For more discussion on this and other Jeffers poems, see Robinson Jeffers: Fire from Stone.
©2017 Kaweah (Dan Jensen)
Rites of Disposal
When I’m finally done, when all
my smoldering embers go cold, put me away.
Clean me up, straighten me out, and put me in my box.
Take it up to that green landfill
where they dump such things
and label them with cut stones.
Find me a plot, dig me a hole.
Sow me deep like a pumpkin seed
that you don’t want to grow.
Cover me there with earth by the yard,
and if you must speak, be brief.
The Last Gypsy of the Brennica
Here, young stranger, a speckled egg
of Carpathian granite, blooming with crystal,
stolen in my youth from the womb
of a Moldavian stream, said the old Gypsy
when he handed the riverstone to me.
Mill it—down to flour.
Fertilize it with this old man’s ash,
carry the meal up to Ram Mountain
and cast it out there. Like the Roma,
let the rain wash it to the Odra and the Wisła,
let that blend of stone and man
leaven the two waters
with the ashes of my love
and the soul of my mountains.
Let it ride the Wisła east, the Odra west,
Down through Silesia, past Krakow’s poet-tomb;
May it seal the wounds of my people,
Prussian and Pole, Czech and Jew—
children of the two veins together;
our dark blood never spill again
even to where the twin rivers spill
upon the northern sea.
© 2015 Kaweah
Suffocants
They breathe only what can be inhaled
from others. That is their way.
When you had no more air for them,
their memory of you was a bible.
They buried the book and mourned it
as you lay breathless, solitary,
according to their law.
They encircled their book,
emitting weeping sounds,
embalming it with rose water
and saline solution.
I stepped up secretly, discretely
pushed each one into the hole,
back after back, there not being faces.
The tomb was spacious
(The book was large).
The earth weighed heavily on the spade,
but it rested well upon them.
They have come to no harm, do not cry.
They lie there today,
sipping each other’s air.
© 2013–15 Kaweah