DEATH Poem: An English Kind of Death, by Solomon Carlyle

The winter I house-sat one of those mansions in
Chestnut Hill was the same winter my father
came to tell me that he’d

like for me to meet the
woman he’d been seeing
who I’d already heard about from one of my aunts

I took her call in the night smells of October
and when I told her that I had to hang up now
she said that she still missed her little sister every day

Well, no shit. We all did.
She died in May for fucksake
and now I had to put up

with the weeping Man with the Golden Helmet
in his broken complacent armor
of late middle age

He said, “You don’t
know what it’s like to be
in a house all by yourself” and

I said, “Look around you, motherfucker.
Just do like the rest
of us and read a fucking book.”

Consensus advice said that’s how most men are
who lose their wives
It’s not uncommon

Intellectually, I knew this
Tactically, I would not be
be treated like a child by death

I’d bury my dead like the English bury their dead
so dead, they say,
that you need another word for it

when all the emotion is gone
and one can sit comfortably
in melancholic indifference

this wasn’t about a resurrection a replacement
or a reunification like they’d have you believe
the damned Italians

always with the fatalism
spoken in fearless accents and expecting
every unwilling guest of ruin to kneel at unwashed feet

and scrub at the indignities
because the whole human
business must be ritualized

Otherwise it becomes a grief so large that
we all just sink
into it throwing feather

darts in the childhood
garage with those you don’t care to know
in the posture of surrender thinking

of nothing
because there was nothing
to think about