Aleda Shirley

Three Poems

THE CUSTOMARY MYSTERIES

When they transferred the site of Hades to the air
the Stoics brought the dead into closer proximity
with the living & so for a time the sky

was full of souls. Away from home I often wake
disoriented & febrile, but in the past year
when I’ve stayed somewhere high above the ground—

a hotel overlooking the gulf, a borrowed apartment
thirty storeys over Chicago where at sunset
snow fell, flakes of flame into an inland sea—

I woke with the sense of being in my own bed.
We’re subjects of two worlds: the daylit one,
solid & consecutive, where we meet our friends,

our families, the charming stranger in line
at the post office, & the one at night where
the border between past & present blurs

& we’ve the chance of a connection, however fugitive,
with people who are faraway, the dead,
the gods. For the ancient Greeks the psyche

had no function except in its leaving of the body,
though sometimes it would blaze briefly
in the trance of fainting or when facing death.

From the hotel I watched a section of newspaper
blown from someone’s balcony swoop & dip
& glide for several minutes above the beach,

the thermals made visible in a way they aren’t
by birds, who can move themselves, or a kite,
for which I first mistook it, guided by a human hand.

I wanted to think of it as a soul ascending,
perhaps that of my friend who died suddenly at forty,
some refractory & lissome residue of who he was

lingering on, but the sky was littered with planes
pulling banners advertising happy hours & water parks,
with satellites & space debris & ovals of ozone:

there’s no longer enough room. And the world,
fulgent & resolute, clicks on, its vision the same
as a casino’s: to keep the wheels turning.

PHANTOM PAIN

And now only faith could make me certain
that beneath the mulch in the garden the bulbs of the daffodils
& the bulbs of the tulips double themselves
as they sleep through winter. In front of the mirror
a blown black vase that held strands of forsythia last April.
The dead leave us incomplete. It didn’t occur
to me the emptiness would be permanent,
that nothing that came after would ease the ache
as the cold rains of October blew out the pilot lights,
& what I was once attached to, what was once attached to me,
would glint in the welkin & go truant.
I count the cats at their Hadley bowls in the morning,
as I would count the leaves of the redbud,
the old selves lingering, like smoke or cedar,
in coats in the hall closet, camel’s hair & tweed,
waxed cotton. Once I glimpsed my face drifting
through the transom, past a bough of cold stars.
At some point the dead outnumber the living,
except in the silly brocatel of the physical world
where I hear in the sibilance of gingko leaves falling,
one night a year, their footsteps as they walk,
with no thought of me, through corridors
of the underworld. I imagine them together,
a wing of the beloved, but my dead
have their own dead to find & so must disperse,
unable to remain in an assembly of my devising.
I wonder if they gather, seasonally, in a vast hall,
the air filtered into fake euphoria, like a casino’s,
a serried music of wealth urging them to wager more,
& on the great window a pale outline of bones.
Perhaps when I join them it will be different.
For now they have their own resolve & muted ardor—
skin & moon at room temperature,
hothouse phlox, blooming in the lunar seas.

BROWN, BLACK ON MAROON

When I think about you now, in the middle of the night
when I can’t sleep, I’m seized by a frantic
need to pack & yet I can’t get my things together,
the things I need & those that can’t be replaced if I leave

them behind. I’m wandering through a vast strange
house that bears some resemblance to places
I’ve actually lived, except the rooms keep opening up
to other rooms, each darker than the one before,

tenebrous corners where I can’t imagine placing a chair
or lighting a lamp. There’s a view of winter
from a high window, hopeless planes of white
interrupted by a line of trees, the ruins of a tobacco barn

where my grandfather worked half a century ago,
a silver car moving too fast down a country road.
Held, rubbed round like a lucky piece of hematite,
the random facts that lodge in the mind glow

with a promise of revelation: I learned recently
that the statues on Easter Island, which I’ve seen
in photographs a hundred times, actually face inland;
they do not look out to sea. There was a night,

on an endless drive home from Chicago,
when I saw from the highway a field in flames,
farmers conducting a controlled burn, red swirling
so hard against the sky & stars that the stars moved

backward. All this, all this & more I’ve left unsaid,
what I feel in the dark room when I’m wildly gathering
up sweaters & photographs & tarnished silver forks,
is why it grows less possible each day to map the void God’s

absence has scooped from the world. Death’s bearable
when it’s your own: you won’t be there the next time
the white azaleas ignite on the lawns of the south
& an aria drifts out from the windows of a living room,

or when the sound’s coarse, the rattle of news on cable tv,
a dry bitter fall. For a long time I thought of you
as the one who left but now, in the middle of the night,
the face I see in the window of the speeding car is my own.