Dusting the heads
of dead animals,
I think of how much
my father cherishes
this antelope, this duck,
this winged thing I cannot name,
and I understand that it is not
the thing itself that still
thrills him and makes
him want to keep it on the wall,
but the memory of the thing,
how alive it was, how alive
he was in the killing of it.
*
Over tempura, Pam tells me
of the time that she went
to a man’s home, and there
on the couch was his rich wife,
stuffed, her hand stretched out
in eternal greeting. It had been
in her will, the taxidermic clause
stating that he would lose everything
if he buried her. I sip my sake
and laugh, perhaps because
it is funny, perhaps because
I do not know what to say.
*
Though it is snowing
the room is filled with slant sunshine
and the light does what light does,
it seeks out the darkness.
I feel how what I think I know
has become something dead,
though once it greeted me
with open hands. Though once
I was ripe with it.
*
If we’re made of dust
what is doing the breathing?
*
Not that I want
an answer to that.
Only to be a vehicle
for asking.
*
In the parking lot,
the sound of geese.
No one could say
it is beautiful,
the strangled song
slicing the cold, clear air.
But they’re singing,
my god, they are singing.
Well, I definitely have knowledge of that second stanza, but the first is the best for me, the task of dusting the dead — that is understatement writ large. That second stanza, though, does so much for taking the pressure off the first while still allowing you to talk about the issue (by the way, Pam says gee, she’s never been in a poem like that!). I like how you scale it down from there into reflection and not incident, pursing that stuffed metaphor all the way, especially to the end, that glorious singing line that doubles so cleverly to celebrate the “strangled” song.
“No one could say/it is beautiful”? Aye, for me ’tis transcendently so. And on what I swear is the cellular level.
“I feel how what I think I know
has become something dead,
though once it greeted me
with open hands. Though once
I was ripe with it.”
This is the the axis, the polestar of your poem for me.
“[T]he world offers itself…/calls to you…/over and over announcing your place/in the family of things.”
-Mary Oliver, from, “Wild Geese”