Brevity
by Sally Thomas
Brevity
1 That you have trusted all your life to chance Occurs to you at midnight, or when you Drive past a cemetery. Disappearance Is happening all around us. Morning dew Evaporates from grass. Now here, now gone. All flesh is grass, the prophet cries, but truly, Your life is as the shimmer on the lawn That rises, then is air. How do the newly Departed cease to mourn the things they miss? How do we cease to miss them? How do we Not live our span of years in hauntedness? This earth we love will not remember us For long. It offers us no guarantee. Among the graves, the mist shines on the grass. 2 It comes to you at midnight, or when you Push back your office chair. So suddenly The intervening thought is there again: No one would miss you. Do you never see That look in someone’s eyes, or is it true That you could slip away unseen into The vastness of the night outside and be No more or less than part of it? The vain Reiterations of the things you say No longer comfort you. Lunch break today: You’ve knelt inside this random church. But who Is there, to hear the hunger in your cry? Have mercy on me, Lord, you say again, Though you suspect you say it to the sky. 3 Drive past a cemetery. Disappearance? These graves would beg to differ. We are here, The buried bones proclaim. Our circumstance Is that of those who wait, and not in fear— No longer. All our feelings burned away, We calcify, impervious, enduring Calamities of change and weather. Say We wait in hope. This is our long maturing. But here we are, and here we’ll be until We aren’t here any longer. It is you Who drive by in a hurry. Crest the hill. Now let the graveyard disappear from view— Your mirror will forget it. So will you. Next time you see it, you’ll be someone new. 4 It’s happening all around us. Morning dew, Cut grass stuck to your feet—this world won’t let You shake it off that easily. Why should you? You’re made of it. All flesh is grass, dawn-wet And clinging to whatever touches it. It’s happening all around us. What to do With our gestating death, the thing we hate The most about ourselves? Like morning dew We’re here and gone. You read now on your face Time’s signature that marks you for its own. And so you are. It’s happening all around us. It is the air we breathe. It is the one Pure inescapability, that we Have feet of earth and minds of brevity. 5 Evaporate from grass. Be here. Be gone. Be brief in your remarks. Show up alone Or not at all. Be winnowed down to bone And air. Let everything in you be shown, Your human emptiness. You’re not unknown, Not really. Here you're standing, fully grown, Attired and sane, with your first coffee, on The train platform to somewhere. On your own Again and always, sweetheart, though your phone Is buzzing in your bag. Ignore that tone That says, Ignore me at your peril. Done, You say. At every moment, dice are thrown. What flowers from the seed that you have sown? Be happy not to see. Be here, be flown. 6 All flesh is grass, the prophet cries, but truly, I say to you, the grass endures. The bald Spot where the apple tree came down? See, daily, The grass creeps over it, now that the old Remains have rotted. Two years on, again The soil has nitrogen to spare. Impatience Will get you nowhere. Wait. That which was green Will green once more. The apple tree’s spring radiance Has given way to something humbler, yet More stubborn and ongoing. Have you tried To kill this grass? Beneath a flagstone, light- Starved roots—cold, white—are only purified By deprivation. Move the stone. They’ll grow. All flesh is grass? Well, if you know, you know. 7 Your life is as the shimmer on the lawn At 4 a.m. in summer, when the air, Already water-beaded, lets its hair Down on the night-cooled earth. An hour gone, And daylight takes the water up again. You breathe it, swim through it. The summers here Consist of these fine movements of wet air And airy water, which is never gone But changed. So let the reader understand What all flesh is. In this economy, What’s lost is nothing. Nothingness is lost— And nothing else. Your footprint is a ghost Upon the grass, yet you don’t cease to be A something held in one vast patient hand. 8 What rises, then is air? Your every word. Be careful what you say, for what is heard Is never, somehow, what you meant to say, But something wild and windblown as your hair When you’ve come in from walking on a day Of gusts and intermittent rain. There, there, You murmur, comb in hand. I didn’t mean— What did you mean, then? Do you understand How wildfires start? One spark. I didn’t mean To say it. But you said it. Understand? That’s how the quarrel goes. But all the time, These things you say dissolve and disappear As clouds roil on the sky and church bells chime. Your words go up in vapor. You are here. 9 The dead learn not to mourn the things they miss. The past checked at the door, all that was good Subsumed into the vision, through the moonless Night they go, completed, empty-handed. The dead shall need no light of lamps or sun. They shall lack nothing. Why are we afraid? The Lamb shall be their light. We love the sun And hope for more. We love our buried dead, Who leave and haunt us. It is we who miss What we have loved and nothing has replaced— Not now, not here, not while we live. The laced Tree-shadows on the wall gesture at us, Faint images of something more alive That offers only all it has to give. 10 How do we cease to miss them? How do we Relearn our happiness? The grass will green Again across the red-clay wounds where they Lie buried, all their features winnowed down To bone and tooth and hollow socket. We Continue in our vivid selves: our green Or blue or brown eyes. Hair and skin. But they In their particularity have gone Where they are recognized. The selves that we Recall both are and aren't the true selves, seen Today in greater wholeness. They might say That we have never known them. Grass will green Across those red-clay wounds. And we may find That things regrow in what is left behind. 11 We live our span of years in hauntedness. How many times today have you rechecked The back-door lock? The oven setting? Less Is more, they say, but surfaces collect The clutter of our dailiness: our books And bills, our coffee cups set down in haste, Our reading glasses, keys. A wan ghost looks Forever over every shoulder. Waste Not, want not, it murmurs. All the past You tend here? You can never set it down. You tell yourself that it was made to last. What can I tell you? What is there to know? Time comes for everything you can’t let go. The water’s meant to rise until you drown. 12 This earth we love will not remember us. Already fescue’s swallowed up the place Where I had planted zinnias and cosmos Two years ago, or three. All flesh is grass That grows up un-asked for in garden plots And will not be eradicated. Let’s Be clear about the metaphor. The prophets Proclaim our human transience. But what’s This truth that tells itself when we observe The habits of the grass, which will not die Until it’s cut? Its purpose is to grow: To swallow up the scorched place at the curve Where tires left asphalt. Shards of windshield lie Knee-deep, until the city comes to mow. 13 So long. Earth offers us no guarantee. Yet here we are, alive today. For now. What do you mean to do with your one life, The poet asks, but does a poet see More keenly into human souls, or know More truly what it means to live—in strife, In sacrifice, in dull relentless pain— Than you or I know? Yes, this life is wild Sometimes. And without question, precious. But What do you do, when you wake up to rain And no milk for your coffee, when your child Appears before you fevered, skinned with sweat, To vomit into your cupped hands? Say thanks? Receive it all as gift?—Somehow. Say thanks. 14 Among the graves, the mist shines on the grass. So long—life offers us no guarantee. This earth we love will not remember us. Although we live our lives in hauntedness, We cease, almost, to miss our dead, perpetually Nearby and out of reach. We cease to miss, On their behalf, small beauties ever newly Reserved for us. Sunrise ignites the lawn. All flesh is grass, the prophet cries, but truly, The grass endures. It is the mist that’s gone. It’s happening all around us. Morning dew Returns to vanish. Thoughts of disappearance May taunt you. Still, again, on waking, you Receive your life in trust: this once, this chance.
Sally Thomas is the author of two poetry collections, Motherland and the forthcoming Among the Living, as well as a novel and a collection of short stories. With Joseph Bottum she writes the Substack newsletter Poems Ancient and Modern. Most recently her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colosseum, First Things, New Verse Review, and Portico.
Poet’s Note
I began work on this sonnet sequence several years ago, thinking at first that I was going to essay a sonnet crown: last line of one sonnet as first line of next sonnet, final sonnet ending with the first line of the first sonnet. When that didn't work, I remembered a sequence I had admired in the late Kim Bridgford's first collection, Undone, which functions essentially as a cascade poem. Each line of the opening sonnet becomes the first line of a subsequent one. That epiphany was like a door opening, and this is where it led.