Now that I know you are gone
I have to try, like Rauschenberg,
to rub out, line by line,
your picture, feeling as I rub
the maker’s most inhuman
joy, seeing as I rub
the paper’s slow, awful return
to possibility.
Five times you screamed and won
from your short body a big boy
or a tall girl to join
the rest of us here,
and now let daughter or son
wear all that’s left of your face
when this drawing’s undone.
It is hard, heavy work.
The pencil indented the grain
of the paper, and I scour
a long time on a cheekbone
that doesn’t want to disappear,
hoping my fingers won’t learn
its line from going over and over
it. I replace your chin
with dead white.
Once, in a little vain
coquettishness, you joined
your party late, hair down
to your waist, and let the men
watch you twist it around
to a blonde rope and pin
the richness of its coils
into a familiar bun.
And now I make you bald
with my abrasion.
The hours we had to drink
before you’d put the dinner on!
My eraser’s wet with sweat
as it moves on a frown
of long, tipsy decision:
were we all so drunk
it didn’t matter, or should you strain
the Mornay sauce?
Already we are worn,
the eraser and I, and we
are nearing your eyes. Your garden
was what you saw each morning,
and your neighbor’s, making fun
of her oversolicitude:
“I swear that woman
digs her plants up every day
to see if their roots have grown.”
You tucked the ticklish roots
of half-grown youngsters, back in
and pressed the tilth around them.
Your eyes were an intervention.
You saw your words begin
a moody march to the page
when you tried to write what you’d seen
in poems you brought out one by one
to show us, getting braver
slowly-yes, too slowly. When
you finally sent some off-
too slowly—a magazine
took one and printed it
too slowly; you had just gone.
If I raise my head from this work
what I see is that the sun
is shining anyway,
and will continue to shine
no matter whose pale Dutch blue
eyes are closed or open,
no matter what graphite memories
do or do not remain,
so I erase and don’t
look up again.
When I answer the phone
I don’t any longer expect
your jerky conversation-
one funny little comment,
then silence until I began
trying to fill it myself;
at last the intention
would appear, “Come for dinner
and help me entertain
someone I’m scared of.” It was hard
to believe you were often
really sick and afraid.
You heard the tune
of our feelings, I think,
over the phone, even.
You liked a joke.
You loved Beethoven.
And this is the end of your ear.
I see your nose redden
with summer allergies,
wrinkle at your husband’s pun
and then straighten and fade.
What is left of you is graven,
almost, into one kind of smile.
I don’t think I can mourn
much more than I already have
for this loved irritant-prune
pucker, with ends of lips
pulled up. More than your grin
it lasts, and with it lasts
a whole characterization
I can’t dispose of
unless I rub clear through and ruin
this piece of anti-art.
When our repartee would run
too fast, or someone’s anecdote
run long, or someone mention
a book you hadn’t read,
that smile meant you were hidden.
It meant you needed time
to think of something clever or mean,
or that you thought we’d gone too far
from the gentle and sane.
It meant you were our wise,
dear, vulnerable, human
friend, as true and false as life
would let you be, and when
I move you that much farther from
your self to generalization
there is a blur
and your smile stops. This thing is done.
Swept empty by a cyclone
inside, I lift the paper.
But before I blow it clean,
sketched now in rubber crumbs,
another face is on it-mine,
Sneak, Poet, Mon
ster, trying to rob you with words.
Your death was your own.
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