If it bleeds
the news makes madness to order
nobody was to be offended
we live now perpetually fighting battles
how strange that you should be dead
Poems on the topic: death
Poems on the topic “death” on Poets.by.
Clueless
this lack of notice is a sin
going to chapel with the ground
full of people
who might have believed
in one true exchange
which they cannot have now
and we out of fear
preparing ready answers
and little tales
and the old doctors return
to see death providing
scarfs and gloves
Post mortem
tomorrow missed us where we lie
who are without doubt a poor dinner
in a box like letters from death
my counterfeit sleep and strange hair
her face the same face as my soul
Forward planning
for death I am making
up my accounts
having just my little tongue
and a little talk
a little house very pretty
and a little moon
and in the cards
an opportunity to be
Anatomy lesson
her dead body is opened
like the king’s business
they see themselves
in a royal library of meat
divertisement though it be deep
is a strange perfection in tragedy
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills…
death and torture
in the news tonight
escaping the prison
of what is certain
I drive toward the mountains
which make so low a sound
Spotted owl
a who who to which
we can give no answer
the snappish owl
is dead and buried
we ward off witches and spirits
with the noise of profit
Spell for a widow-maker
Snag turned deadfall,
dread widow-maker with
your fag-ends caught
in the crotch of a living tree,
hold fast while the chainsaw
gnaws through your limb,
don’t pinch the bar in your haste
to get free, but as soon as
the uppercut meets the undercut,
drop straight, don’t twist
or kick. Sink into the soft
mulch of your many autumns,
the bed you made for just
this final fall.
Planting sang
Sing a song of sang, that human root:
wrinkled homunculus growing slow as thought.
Even the seeds take twenty months to sprout,
stones that finish growing in the ground
as if traveling through the interminable gut
of some great beast that vanished in the Pleistocene.
Sing a song of burying in haste,
the berries’ flesh a tempting prize for mold.
So if picked on a morning in early September,
nestled into a plastic vial & sent by overnight mail,
you must plant them as soon as they arrive —
don’t put it off till after supper.
Choose each resting-place with care,
moving slowly through the woods & stopping often.
Pretend you’re burying a grandparent, piece by piece.
Make a hole with your index finger
Sublimation
with love but no touch
my hand may become a wing
in the company of the dead
I find the light ravishing
Coil
midsummer
and the rose is dead
after being married
to a stake
a creature
that having sunk
from want of spirit
died pretty
no one is awake
beyond the ordinary
violence of
a peak
but if we be eaten
we shall again live
and a cat will be a cat
circumspect and factious
Mind crime
the multitude I had in my head
lie dead
everybody with his flag
standing by him
Describe a feeling — we’ll find a poem
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