August Notebook: A Death

By Robert Hass, from the Paris Review Winter 2009

1. River Bicycle Peony 

I woke up thinking abouy my brothr’s body. 

That q That was my first bit of early morning typing 

So the first dignity, it turns out, is to get the spelling right. 

I woke up thinking about my brother’s body. 

Apparently it’s at the medical examiner’s morgue. 

I found myself wondering whether he was naked 

Yet and whose job it was to take clothes off 

And when they did it. It seemed unnecessary 

To undress his body until they performed the exam 

And that is going to happen later this morning 

And so I found myself hoping that he was dressed 

Still, though smell may be an issue, or hygiene. 

When the police do a forced entry for the purpose 

Of a welfare check and the deceased person is alone, 

The body goes to the medical examiner’s morgue 

In the section for those deaths in which no evidence 

Of foul play is involved so the examination 

For cause of death is fairly routine. Two policemen, 

For some reason I imagine they were young, 

Found my brother. His body was in the bed 

Which was a mattress on the floor. He was lying 

On his back, according to Angela, my brother’s friend, 

Who lives in the building and is schizophrenic 

And always introduced herself as my brother’s 

Personal assistant, and he seemed peaceful. 

There would have been nothing in the room 

But the mattress and a microwave, an ashtray, 

I suppose, cartons and food wrappers he hadn’t 

Thrown away and the little plastic prescription 

Bottles that he referred to as his scrips. 

They must have called the ambulance 

And that was probably a team of three. 

When I woke, I visualized this narrative 

And thought it would be shorter. I thought 

That what would represent my feelings 

Would be the absence of metaphor. 

But then, at the third line, I discovered 

The three-line stanza and that it was 

Going to be the second dignity. So 

I imagine he is in one of those aluminium 

Cubicles I’ve seen in the movies, 

Dressed or not. I also imagine that, 

If they undressed him, and perhaps washed 

His body or gave it an alcohol rub 

To disinfect it, that that was the job 

Of some emigrant from a hot, poor country. 

Anyway, he is dressed in this stanza, 

Which mimics the terza rima of Dante’s comedy 

And is a form that Wallace Stevens liked 

To use, and also my dear friend Robert. 

And “seemed peaceful” is a kind of metaphor. 

2. Sudden and Grateful Memory of Mississippi John Hurt 

Because I woke again thinking of my brother’s body 

And why anyone would care in some future 

That poetry addresses how a body is transferred 

From the medical examiner’s office, 

Which is organized by local government 

And issues a certificate certifying that the person 

In question is in fact dead and names the cause 

Or causes, to the mortuary or cremation society, 

Most of which are privately owned businesses 

And run for profit and until recently tended 

To be family businesses with skills and decorums 

Passed from father to son, and often quite ethnically 

Specific, in a country like ours made from crossers 

Of borders, as if, in the intimacy of death, 

Some tribal shame or squeamishness or sense 

Of decorum asserted itself so that the Irish 

Buried the Irish and the Italians the Italians. 

In the South in the early years of the last century 

It was the one business in which a black person 

Could grow wealthy and pass on a trade 

And a modicum of independence to his children. 

I know this because Earlene wrote a paper about it 

In school and interviewed fourth-generation 

African American morticians in Oakland 

Whose grandfathers and great-grandfathers 

Had buried the dead in cotton towns on the Delta 

Or along the Brazos River in Texas, passing on 

To their children who had gone west an order 

Of doing things and symbolic forms of courtesy 

For the bereaved and sequences of behavior 

At wakes and funerals, so that, for example, 

The eldest woman in the maternal line 

Entered the chapel first, and what prayers 

Were said in what order. During Prohibition 

They even sold the white lightning to the men 

Who were allowed to slip outside and take a nip 

And talk about the dead while the cries 

And gospel-song-voiced contralto moans 

Of grief that could sound like curious elation 

Rose inside. Also the rules for burial or burning. 

Griefs and rituals and inside them cosmologies. 

And I thought gratefully of Mississippi John Hurt’s 

Great song about Louis Collins and its terrible 

Tenderness which can’t be reproduced here 

Because so much of it is in the picking 

Of the twelve-string guitar and in his sweet, 

Reedy old man’s voice: 

            When they heard 

            That Louis was dead, 

            All the people dressed in red. 

            The angels laid him away. 

            They laid him six feet under the clay. 

            The angels laid him away. 

3. 

You can fall a long way in sunlight. 

You can fall a long way in the rain. 

The ones who didn’t take the old white horse 

Took the morning train. 

When you go down into the city of the dead 

With its whitewashed walls and winding alleys 

And avenues of autumnal lindens and the heavy bells 

Tolling by the sea, crowds 

Appear from all directions, 

Having left their benches and tiered plazas, 

Laying aside their occupations of reverie 

And gossip and the memory of breathing— 

At least in the most reliable stories, 

Which are the ones the poets tell— 

To hear what scraps you can bring 

Of the news of this world where the air 

Is thin in the high altitudes and 

Of an almost perfect density in the valleys 

And shadows on summer afternoons sometimes 

Achieve a shade of violet that almost never 

Falls across pavements down there. Only the arborist 

In the park never comes for new arrivals. He is not incurious 

But he loves his work, pruning the trees, 

Giving them their graceful lift 

Toward light, and standing back 

To study their shapes, because it is he 

Who gets to decide 

Which limbs get lopped off 

In the kingdom of the dead. 

You can fall a long way in sunlight. 

You can fall a long way in the rain. 

The ones who don’t take the old white horse 

Take the evening train. 

4. 

Today his body is consigned to the flames 

And I begin to understand why people 

Would want to carry a body to the river’s edge 

And build a platform of wood and burn it 

In the wind and scatter the ashes in the river. 

As if to say, take him, fire, take him, air, 

And, river, take him. Downstream. Downstream. 

Watch the ashes disappear in the fast water 

or, in a small flaring of anger, turn away, walk back 

toward the markets and the hum of life, not quite 

saying to yourself There, the hell with it, it’s done. 

I said to him once, when he’d gotten into some scrape 

Or other, “You know, you have the impulse control 

Of a ferret.” And he said, “Yeah? I don’t know 

What a ferret is, but I get greedy. I don’t mean to, 

But I get greedy.” An old grubber’s beard, going grey, 

A wheelchair, sweats, a street person’s baseball cap. 

“I’ve been thinking about Billie Holiday, you know 

if she were around now, she’d be nothing. You know 

what I mean? Hip-hop? Never. She had to be born 

at a time when they were writing the kind of songs 

and people were listening to the kind of songs 

she was great at singing.” And I would say, 

“You just got evicted from your apartment, 

you can’t walk, and you have no money, so 

I don’t want to talk to you about Billie Holiday 

Right now, OK.” And he would say, “You know, 

I’m like Mom. I mean, she really had a genius 

For denial, don’t you think? And the thing is. 

You know, she was a pretty happy person.” 

And I would say, “She was not a happy person. 

She was panicky and crippled by guilt at her drinking, 

Hollowed out by it, honeycombed with it, 

And she was evasive to herself about herself, 

And so she couldn’t actually connect with anybody, 

And her only defense was to be chronically cheerful.” 

And he would say, “Worse things than cheerful.” 

Well, I am through with those arguments, 

Except in my head, though I seem not to be through with the habit— 

I thought this poem would end downstream downstream— 

of worrying about where you are and how you’re doing. 

Comments

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