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Death, Great Friend

To Doris Fink



janine canan




��I
��Does that box you’re in hamper your return? Earth can’t get to your bones. Much of you must have melted by now, risen in gas to join the minerals, that feed the grass, whose leaves give oxygen to the air. Someone breathes you. The wind carries you over the world. Through gaps in the atmosphere, a few of your molecules enter space. A long time ago you started coming here -- for a long time you’ll be returning.
��You’re gone now, and I talk to myself. You’d appreciate this conversation, but you can’t hear it. Talking to the dead, talking to myself on this bright spring day, I seem to be afraid of death, and don’t accept life either. Nothing changes, everything changes -- like an old Chinese poem. You’re fixed now, you’re dissipated. Farewell, then. I know you’ll return -- in memory, or some new substance.

��II
��I don’t go out to your grave.
��I see it clearly:
��The pretty little hill,
��the weeping tree nearby,
��thick green well-mown grass in the sun,
��where you whirl in the air.

��III
��You picked up the pieces after your mother was demolished by Nazis -- in Germany a factory manager, in America a woman led in and out of hospitals for drugs and shock. At twelve your father stroked and you were on your own. You worked your way through art school; and during the decade your husband became a surgeon, entertained yourself with babies, paints and jazz.
��You raised your daughters, three beautiful girls, to be independent like you. And it’s a good thing! For cancer took you in nine months at age forty-six. In your last hours, nestled like a newborn, you lifted your face to be kissed. I want you to feel joy, you exclaimed. Dear Friend, how will I ever get over the bitterness of human suffering?

��IV
��Our friendship continues to grow, as the years roll on past your death -- as if your paintings were still being painted. In the early years representational scenes of mother and child. Watery flowers becoming more inward, landscapes intestinal gaining in power. What would they have become -- this inward coming out to face the world. Your soul face, your real face.
��Our friendship now is invisible, yet every day more substantial. I need you as never before -- your point of view, immense common sense penetrating the fuss of obsession, your strong heart speaking out. The friends who are distant are the ones easiest to talk to anyhow. Like a conscience made of softness -- a persistent kind of love.

��V
��This loss goes on and on. You’re never coming back, and no one can replace you. I think of your epic dreams, in which the history of the twentieth century unfolded. What was in the air as concrete to you as to me -- intuitions exchanged without obstacle. You saw evil, eager to fight for good. You hounded me when I strayed in loneliness.
��Pretty, dark-eyed, shining olive-rose skin blended with the landscapes of Galilee -- your warm voice sharpened when something was wrong. What you liked made you laugh like a baby. Happiness, righteousness, clarity you invented, as you danced and drew. And then your ovaries, that made three glory eggs, revolted, generating meaningless cells, chaos, death. How this loss goes on and on. You’re never coming back. And no one can replace you.

��VI
��You’re nothing but a crushed flower, petals soft and frail; like the petalled velvety vulva you painted with my face looking out. Oh, those female faces we wore, looking on with horror. There’s no hope for changing the world -- giant organism chaotic, cruel, crushing in its cornucopious productions: moments of perfect inspiration followed by inevitable deflation.
��Attachment brings pain, non-attachment the void; doing freely for others both joy and violent punishment. Now you see what the world is like, said Tolstoi. Non-world bathes psyche and nature like sunlight or silver mist, in these portraits of life -- ungraspable souls hinted at on paper and canvas: our lone lives.

��VII
��Children flown to Los Angeles, New York; husband remarried; pictures gone from the walls; the house sold -- no sign left of you. Only your voice, my Soul, keeps calling. You’re permanent now, Friend who’ll always be near me. You haven’t changed a bit. Oh Death, Great Friend, what huge arms You have, vast enveloping wings. You spread them, and we fly -- dark and shining blue to the sun.






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