By Michael H. Brownstein
One moment you feel a weight of gravity,
A blanket, for example, the first light,
A slight draft and then, out of focus,
You come into yourself and understand
The confusion of ghosts. How unsettling to be
Alone. You were dreaming and now
You are watching yourself sleep.
When they come, you will not be ready.
In those minutes, in those days, in that first week,
Can you not hear the thunder? The watcher?
The making of the pyre? Nails to wood?
Sorry, there is nothing here – just wind
You now control, a wall no longer in the way.
How do you make a ghost? Someone was not there
When someone was needed. You were alone
When you could not reach out to laughter.
Let the thunder roar, let the sitter sit with you,
Let a candle light your way, let the warmth come near,
Let your lack of weight make it that much easier.
Somewhere there must be a home for you.
Somewhere there must be a brightness to grow into.
| Copyright © 2019 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s latest volume of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else, was published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018. |
I’ve read this poem numerous times already, and it’s clear that it will continue to sprout new meanings, new associations, for many more readings. Dreaming, sleeping, dying, awaking, laid out for burial, survival, transformation, loneliness, portable thinker, visitation....
ReplyDeletevery nice
ReplyDeleteThat opening stanza! Its enumeration of everyday (or everyseason) things that waken us – the implied comparison of waking up while still physically alive to “waking up” dead as a ghost, a spirit surviving physical death. Does the narrator, whether Brownstein really or an imagined narrator, believe in spiritual survival after death? Or is he adopting that common belief – how common we don’t really know, do we? – for “poetic purposes”?
ReplyDeleteThere’s also that nice comparison of sleeping (while physically still alive) to lying there dead (after one has physically died).
Bravo, Michael! Utterly B*R*I*L*L*I*A*N*T poem. I say so even if I am too dull a poet to judge such brilliance.
After wondering whether the narrator actually believes we spiritually survive our physical deaths, I happened to notice again the poem's subtitle, which seems to suggest that the possibility of such survival is used "for poetic purposes" only....But future readings may cast more light into my mind as to whether to suppose this or not. In any case, my admiration for this poem only grows firmer.
ReplyDeleteFrom my friend Thia Barnett (who reviewed a play here that her son, Micah, was in a few months ago):
ReplyDeleteOn a related theme of the afterlife, read Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. An acclaimed best-seller, it concerns the profound loss suffered by President Lincoln at the death of his beloved little son, Willie. Written from the point of view of ghosts who’ve gone beyond, it is poignant, at times humorous – even bawdy – but nonetheless explores the profound experience of loss and separation we all experience at some point.