GRIEF Poem: The Grief the Dead Cannot Give Away, by James Maxwell

I knew a woman once who
Believed herself a fish
Always arching herself across the bed
As if any second going by
A gigantic fin might erupt from her back
And send us flopping over one another, awash
In saline fluids

Every now and again she’s call me over to the mirror
Bare-breasted and the color of tea in low light
She’d raise one elbow above her head
And draw fingers of the opposite hand
Across her ribs as if bow to violin and say
“See how my gills suffer in open air,
All this oxygen and death with hook and reel?”

She’d lie in the tub for hours examining herself
So that when she emerged slick and dripping
Even her cunt, the dark unshaven prune pit
Where I was made to dive for pearls on my own
And sink my fascination in unspoken depths
Hungry bellies, the bends, everything sinister and alive
We waded into a further obscurity

Then came a day when I returned home, a
Dozen scallops wrapped in newspaper and
Tucked under my arm
I placed them on the counter and thought I heard
A soft sound rolling from behind the closed bedroom door
Like clouds rolling up the Carolinas’ coastline in
Tempestuous little fists, brawling freely
Above the broad throat of the sea
And when I opened the door, I found her
Straddling the windowsill with one leg already
Well on its way into open waters, something unknown
A whole city perhaps holding its breath below
But really still honking for the hell of it
Not a single eye raised past 5th Avenue
One dream held quaveringly hostage inside another

“I yearn for my brothers and sisters,” she said
And without warning, withdrew all of herself
Back inside
That prospect of death tricking us into either
Boldness or cowardice
There is no in-between, nothing so very
Extra-curricular about it

Back in the kitchen, she eyes the sagging bundle
Of newspaper, and with pause, demanded to know
It’s all there, I admitted. Every bit of it
Not one organ, but its entire self among other
Equally succulent replicates of itself
She slipped a nail beneath the single strip of waxen masking tape
Separating a photograph, a blistering of helmets taken from
Sunday’s winning Giant’s game from a
Codex of stocks, percentages and figures
Far too dull for anyone but the rich to consider
Untucking triangular folds, neat as razors
She gently unfurled the parcel like
Disassembling a perfectly engineered swaddle
Some mysterious cocoon governing
Cycles of sleeping and soothing

First expecting her to cry out
To batter the little butter dollops into paste
With her fists, I
Stood idly by just over her shoulder, waiting
A glisten within the bramble of damp wisps
At the nape of her neck, revealing
Just where doubt or maybe fear first set in
Like an episode of delirium or the onset of a cold
The initial sniffle that gives you away
A dog’s tail wagging at the prospect
Of a bone, suffering
Entire lifetimes of this

But instead, selecting a scallop
Placing it in the palm of her hand as one
Might scoop jelly upon a slice of toast
She brought it close to her lips and bestowed
Upon it a single kiss as if
Releasing it from its debt, relinquishing
Back among the rest of them, clumsily
Dumping glob upon glob, the
Glittering little marshmallows from which
All good things come
And then disappeared from where she stood
Pulled gravitationally back into the
Bathroom as though summoned to serve

A campaign of silence
The belch of the lock that signaled
Intrusion upon the evening, taking
The form of absence, the
Unruliest of guests that we
Will allow

Soon I heard the water squeal to life
Bathtub filling by the bucketful
Perfumed pockets, rollicking
Beards of foam
The window of opportunity thrown
Suddenly open
Scallops in the cast iron, olive oil
And chive
Air alive with smells of dead flesh
An ear out for swirling, draining
Any reduction in flow
Consuming as though intending to
Scrape years off my life

And when I finished not a scrap remained
But here I noticed a bruise had
Pooled just outside the bathroom door
The carpet now matted and wet
Spreading, darkening outwardly
Like a puzzle piece forgotten in a puddle
Slowly losing its shape

As I sat imagining all the ways I could
Write it off as insanity
The door to the hallway
Erupted to life, fists
Battering, voices hollering hoarse to
Shut off the goddamned water before the
Entire city drowned