Growing Old Together
Elephants Know Things
Rabbit
Guitar King Arthur
You have never gone tripping on the vibes
Midnight Vesper
Spring Burial
Pandemic in the Time of the Easter Bunny, 2020
69
Primary Sources
Pioneer Speakers
Wedding Day
On the eve of your radical cystectomy
I want to back out of this life
find a hack to returning
to our old life when
your bladder was cancer-free,
you peeing in the open wheat field
of your Kansas farm after the keg party.
Is it too late to be unborn
hanging around in the bardo
pretending the vague unknown
is better than this body
heavy with so much water?
Two nights ago your smiling
ghost visited in my dreams
the urostomy bag near your belt line.
You looked whole, giving
me a little wave and a dance step
your eyes saying look I’m still me
come on, let’s keep going.
for Lawrence Anthony, conservationist & Elephant Whisperer
When I learned about the South African elephants
mute & majestic slowly making their way
through the Zululand bush to say goodbye
to the man who had saved them, I knew
I would find you again somewhere
& I forget my floundering, my roaming
the world backwards, writing in this blue
notebook, my wild hair frothing.
When I learned that it had taken
the elephants two days to make the journey
to the home of their person, & that
they then loitered for two more days
breathing their grave ceremony
of farewell, I bow in awe to
ancient grace so dignified, & I ask:
How did they know
from across the time & place of grasses
(they had not visited for a year & a half)
that their person had died?
When I hear the clear cries at night
of the coyotes whose long voices
part the stars, I know I will still find you—
that we are made together then
of mystery crossing invisible borders
affronted by this flesh,
& when my eyes blur like the old dog’s
as she lounges on the porch swing in autumn,
my rogue fears become vague fears & begin
to abate themselves.
You come into my garden looking a little like Audrey Hepburn
your cheekbones slanted & your chignon ears arched high in elegant severity.
When I watch you, this big feeling is something like grief,
the tenderness exploding in refrains of Hallelujah, these Leonard Cohen
chords flying, touching the fence that protects you from the coyotes.
You feed on bitter leaves of the last endive plant
waiting for the first frost of autumn while
I stand in silent vigil wrapped in scarves & woolens.
I am a disciple of your secret warrens & I scour my life for signs
that the pilgrimage of winter will be a hyphen—
separating us only temporarily.
I know you are not a rootless cosmopolitan
& I know you are swift & sure & agile.
You will burrow anywhere you can find
silence & safety in the wild prey instinct of prayer.
Even the deepness of pondering is designed to overthrow us.
I want to believe your goal is to become
an elder, but your lifespan is short.
Forgive me for comparing you to a film star
as you find your way among dried tomato vines & short grasses.
A truckload of dahlias could not move me more.
I leave you here.
for J.A.
Arthur Riley, the world deserves to know your name
& the world deserves to hear the wail of your blues guitar
electrifying the canyons of Chicago—
those long slow strings howling up the bridge toward Grant Park.
Someone’s having a grand party we’d said
as we were drawn to you from blocks away grooving
a group of sightseers on the corner of Michigan & Monroe.
The city is in you nowhere & everywhere slipping into the ether
flowing beyond pavements & penthouses.
In a city of buskers your name
should be written on the big shoulders of skyscrapers
should be talked about in bars beside The River Walk
should be the reason to love all things beautiful.
Your name should be handed down to future generations:
Arthur Riley, Chicago Blues Busker the one
who casts trances on passersby
lifting the joy of mums & cabbages
scattered in lavish planters
parading these throbbing city streets.
You have never gone tripping on the vibes
and it’s showing.
When someone asks “How’re you doing?”
you always answer with the weather:
“It’s hot.” “Cool front moving in.” Not
with the truth of the wilderness in the eyes
of the deer & not in solidarity
with the cedar tree branches deep
into the arroyo; not in tune with the bookstore
selling archival editions of William James &
not with the visions of all the dead mothers
of all the dead grandmothers & not
in agreement with all the smoky cats casting
their ancient spells of the living spirit among us
uncovering the little corpses
the little prophets everywhere
the truth-tellers, the maidenhair ferns,
the Medusas with their fronds unkempt.
Be eerie I want to tell you: learn from the sage
on the banks of the Guadeloupe River:
know how to love up close: give gratitude
to be living in the days of the birds…still…&
learn to be the reason the forest will always stay holy.
for my cat, Ruby
All night the wind hammered against the screens
while you, tender crone of a cat, slept with me
both of us bearing all the old things inside of us.
You were an almost-corpse at my feet so feeble now
both of us beginning to know how to survive alone in the dark.
I was unable to move into the morning of your last days
your sheltering breath reminding me
of the fallen oak branches by sunrise.
It was cold all around:
the familiar warmth of Central Texas
gave way to the North Star of steady truths.
All night my rocking pleas against
the creaking and the pounding outside
tried to let you go dissolving into all the cats
I have ever loved.
That day the sun shone red.
We planted you deep in the earth
on the high plains of Southwest Kansas.
Sparrows scavenged above.
They must have thought you were wheat—
red wheat our people carried from Volga country
crossing the Atlantic now oceans of sky everywhere.
Our polka-dancing grandmothers tangled
with grasshoppers in harvest
and kneaded bread made from winter wheat
always believing in Easter even unto death. Amen.
Our prairie requiem of wild grief howls
with cries of German peasants.
We rest you into the dirt of your fathers.
Franz Schubert and Dolly Parton sing
in harmony to the red wheat rising.
This Kansas grassland is one hundred years of Austrian forests.
Pandemic in the Time of the Easter Bunny, 2020
I stopped the car. There was no wind now...I should have been afraid.
-Larry Levis, "The Widening Spell of the Leaves"
The resurrection has come and gone.
In the beginning it had the aura of a little party.
We stopped in the street properly distanced
and everybody was a celebrity.
There was Judy with her famous dachshund, Oliver,
pulling on the lead, trying to spread the bliss into place.
I heard Hey Sally's frothy laugh from two doors down
her bangle silver hair shining. We can live like this we say
with painted rocks along the trails all the eggs nesting.
But that was before the dying.
That was before Jesus had escaped from the tomb
before cousin Bill's delirium through the ventilator
before Ellis Marsalis stopped the floating notes of song
before John Prine said hello in there to Jesus on his way to India
the two of them laughing together with the Buddha.
It was before my mother stopped the wind from blowing.
I should have been afraid--her waving through the glass
like Saint Theresa, The Little Flower
like Marilyn Monroe, her ethereal skirt billowing
like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in her pillbox hat--
like all the luminous stars eyes smiling their way through eternity.
Today you are 69
& all the tenth-grade boys snicker.
“Turn to page 69” will always cause
an uproar in the classroom a hilarity
of eager openings from teenagers bursting
with the splendor of their bodies
& the wide wonders before them.
Today you are 69
& our bodies spiral together
like a yin yang drawing.
Chagall’s Birthday hangs on our dining room wall
the figures floating upward one face contorted to kiss
the other while hands hold a bouquet of cheerful flowers
the evening village in the window pulsing outside them
suspended in air as they swing themselves up
we twist
in celebration
of your 69 years
acrobats of ecstasy surrounded by
the primary colors of love:
red, indigo, black flowing dreamlike
forward & backward both ascending
together lifting off euphoric
in this blissful in this ordinary love
that seeps into classrooms, into museums, into bedrooms & parlours.
How splendid is this passion still in
all the rooms of our civility.
Always check the primary source says my teacher
even though I am drawn to the anecdotal
(but I know that text has not a beating heart)
not like the old man in the garden
tying up the vines of jasmine
the white stars of morning milking
the sweet spring air of fences
wordless
my cat, Ruby, snores--
a source of grace (word that is The Word)
waters from the Rocky Mountains
quench the blue-beard iris
in my grandmother's Kansas garden
while
the moon laps over ditches
in her silent vigil
on this prairie square night of owls.
Making peace with love is the hardest job.
Maybe I should have listened to the wind speaking owl when I was walking in the arroyo.
Kerouac says you get used to living in the dark; you realize the ghosts are all friendly.
The day you left the hospital after your radical cystectomy, I wasn’t prepared
for your suffering—all the messiness of life and of healing electrified in your sobbing.
Like the day weeks before, I’d come upon you sobbing in the music room,
our vintage Pioneer speakers filling the house
with The Marshall Tucker Band’s “Heard It in a Love Song.”
Before you turned around to look at me, I’d expected jubilation—dancing, even—
but I know now what only you knew then: your cancer had returned.
You were trying to hide your sobbing behind chords and flutes booming back to 1977
when we still were living in the pioneer days of our love.
That night you woke me at 3 a.m. to hear the owl’s call outside our window.
I heard two, speaking their love for each other across the trees.
You returned to sleep, and I lay awake still listening.
Behind your snoring I understood their language.
They said: You have many lives to live.
I believe them, even through all the corpses we’ve left behind.
These days of confronting mortality I try to remain calm,
while at night I run through my dreams wailing.
In Finney County it is 1976.
If you look closely
you can see the whole scene unfolding
decades later we remember
two barely adults at the altar
one believing in a god one not.
Both believing in love & gardenias.
Someone painted the car purple splattering
on the ivory flounces of May.
Families and friends wave us
into The Rocky Mountains
your pickup truck filled with weed
drifting upwards & fainting.
The stories have begun.
Let us begin the tellings with your mother back
at your old home
celebrating with her sisters still
in her green gown dancing.
Stephanie K. Merrill is a retired high school English teacher. Her poems have been published in The Rise Up Review, Feral, UCity Review, Moist Poetry Journal, One Art, Eunoia Review, Trampoline Poetry, and elsewhere. Stephanie K. Merrill is a Pushcart Prize nominee. She lives in Austin, Texas.
