There are the mysteries of life, those of faith
(Leastwise according to Pastor, though I suspect
That is the get out of jail free card one acquires
By standing upright in the pulpit)
But death is a pretty clear-cut thing,
Going about its business all methodically,
Like a combine up one row and down the other,
And even if it’s a sudden thing,
(Folks coming up to you at the wake in some relative’s parlor,
Patting you on the forearm, absently, mechanically,
Purring At least he went quickly, dear)
It’s all down to any number of things,
Small, unobserved, nothing you’d notice at the time,
Like geese, one here and two there,
Flying to no place in particular
Until they darken the sky with their huge V;
Why, even when old Kuzitski the junkman
Ran his truck off the road up off the Hancock Road
And burned himself up all to hell,
That had been stalking him for days, years,
Maybe from birth.
Every once in a while, I will run into one of the girls from school
(Only on occasion, mind you--I suspect most of them
Go out of their way to avoid me, as where my life has led
Is a strange, almost monstrous thing to them)
And most often there is just idle chit-chat
About how dry the weather has been,
And how they opened a new Jamesway over in Walton,
But if there is someone who occupied that niche
Of best-friend or something akin to that,
Someone who shared sleep-overs and cigarettes,
They will ask me (quietly, almost conspiratorially)
How my newly minted singularity is a blessing in disguise,
Saying breezily Why, just think of what you can do now…
Trailing off to nowhere when they see the toddler
Wound around my legs, and then they understand
The weight of motherhood, of mortgages and monthly notices,
The unrelenting gravity of the whole thing.
(When you have buried a husband,
A good man who was the only port in a storm
When what passes for fun, Adam and Eve’s knowledge,
Goes all pear-shaped on you;
You get a goodly glimpse of what is and is not.)
Other girls I graduated with have gone further ,
Broadening themselves, as some maiden aunt would say;
They float back into town come Thanksgiving and Christmas,
On break from the teachers’ colleges at Cortland or New Paltz,
And I can hear them breathlessly nattering on
About all they’ve learned on evaluating children,
Standard-testing and psychology-textbook regurgitation,
And it is all I can do not to spit,
Not to turn on them and yell
You do not know the first **** thing about any **** thing,
But I let it pass--they will find out plenty soon enough,
It will find them all in its own time.
Mrs. Soames, as well as the unfortunate Kuzitski, appear courtesy of the novel Nickel Mountain, by John Gardner, which you need to read, right now if at all possible
