Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SUITE TO FATHERS: 2, by JAMES HARRISON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SUITE TO FATHERS: 2, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: In the cemetery the grass is pale
Last Line: A speech to become meat.
Alternate Author Name(s): Harrison, Jim
Subject(s): Death; Fables; Dead, The; Allegories


In the cemetery the grass is pale,
fake green as if dumped from Easter baskets,
from overturned clay and the deeper marl
which sits in wet gray heaps by the creek.
There are no frogs, death drains there.
Landscape of glass, perhaps Christ
will quarry you after the worms.
The newspaper says caskets float in leaky vaults.
Above me, I feel paper birds.
The sun is a brass bell.
This is not earth I walk across
but the pages of some giant magazine.

̺ ̺ ̺

Come song,
allow me some eloquence,
good people die.

̺ ̺ ̺

The June after you died
I dove down into a lake,
the water turned to cold, then colder,
and ached against my ears.
I swam under a sunken log then paused,
letting my back rub against it,
like some huge fish with rib cage
and soft belly open to the bottom.
I saw the light shimmering far above
but did not want to rise.

̺ ̺ ̺

It was so far up from the dark -
once it was night three days,
after that four, then six and over again.
The nest was torn from the tree,
the tree from the ground,
the ground itself sinking torn.
I envied the dead their sleep of rot.
I was a fable to myself,
a speech to become meat.





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