Wyrmes Mete a chapbook of poems & prose Bill Bly My frendys, my godes me hav forsake. To wyrmes mete now am I take. for Poogie wyrmes mete [pronounced approximately WEER-mehs MATE-eh] lit., worms¹ meat (i.e., food, meal). Middle English term for the body that the soul will leave behind after death. The specific reference comes from a Latin sermon, delivered probably in Worcester about 1400, preached on the canticle text ŒI am black, but comely¹. The sermon contains some vernacular verses addressed to a ŒLady Everyman¹: Tell us, O lady de blackworth, what worth have worldly glory and the aforesaid vanities, of which men are wont to make boast. Once you were fair in body, gentle of blood, privileged with honours, abounding in houses and wealth. All these things you possessed, and now of all you can say thus ‹ Now all men mowe sen be me, That worldys joy is vanyté. I was a lady; now am I non. I hadde worchepes; now it is begon. I was fayr and gentil both. Now ich man wyle my body loth. My frendys, my godes me hav forsake. To wyrmes mete now am I take. Of al the world now haf I nozth bitt gode dedes that I wrogth. Only tho schuln abyde wit me. Al other thynges aræ vanyte. ‹ A.M. Kinghorn, Medieval Drama (1968). William James Bly Jr. February 19, 1912 ­ May 24, 1991. Mary Jane Rex Bly September 26, 1914 ­ April 15, 1992. Married February 15, 1941. Golden Anniversary 6 The Button 7 Golden Anniversary 8 March 22, 1954 11 When the Call Came 13 She¹s Still Mad 15 1935 16 If He Came Home 17 Say Goodbye 18 When They Died 19 Mortality, Thy Name Is Daddy 20 My Father Loved His Death 22 Ashes 25 The Impatience of the Living 28 Peopling Heaven 31 1950 34 (Feeding My Son,) My Father Behind Me 35 His Portrait Speaks 36 Say Goodbye 38 This House 39 Watching My Mother¹s Brain Scan 40 Take Her 42 He Still Thinks 43 Elegy 44 To Bring Rain on a Land Where No Man Is 45 Lenten Meditation 46 At the AIDS Concert 48 This Is Where They Leave Us 49 The Fish 50 He Still Thinks  52 Golden Anniversary The Button The button pops ticks on the floor rolls into silence. The cloth falls away from the breast. In the sudden cold the flesh stills as if for flight. The nipple is a star. The old man my father who has forgotten every thing but not my mother thrusts his hand inside her blouse. Golden Anniversary His hair¹s parted on the wrong side. One eye is swollen nearly shut from an unknown wound or irritation. He wears a bib. He¹s strapped in. Before him on a tray the best institutional meal: meatballs, mashed potatoes, stringbeans. A glass of orange juice with a straw. A vase of yellow silk roses. Outside the window, no color but snow and naked trees and rocks; In front of the window and doubled in reflection, a two-tier cake crowned with white wreaths and golden ribbons, frosted the two colors of an egg. They stand against the portieres in her mother¹s house; they look right into their life: he¹ll be drafted in six months, then hired out to slaughter for three whole years; seven years will pass before she conceives a child that will live, then another; then another war, but then home, the kids, & the grass, & the long slow years of the young family, though they¹re older than many; he takes the bus to work so she can drive with the kids to the store; then the kids take the bus to school & she drives to the store alone; they have friends, parties, clubs; he drinks a little, then more, then too much; she says she¹ll leave if he doesn¹t stop, and he does. Then they have two cars, the kids start to drive, then they¹re gone; he starts to drink again, but not too much, not at first; they still have fun, perhaps more now than ever; the store he owns is failing, he struggles, moves it, then lets it fail; they sail out into the short swift years of retirement, they take trips, they play games, they spend their time together; he drinks because he drinks now, but never before five, all day he¹s hers, does what she wants, does what he does, when the sun goes down he too goes down, and down, until he cannot hear her calling him to bed, cannot hear a voice at all. But when the sun rises he too rises, and shines his love on her, they make more plans, pack, unpack, leave, arrive, play more games, spend more time together; their friends are dying one by one, perhaps he¹s communing with them in the dark, perhaps with the dark, each day he¹s no less here than the day before, but his nocturnal absence grows and grows. Then his left foot won¹t go down where he puts it down and he falls; his left hand goes weak, and he does without it; he stops drinking, it doesn¹t help; his steps get shorter, he shuffles, then totters; he falls, and he falls, and he falls on his bottom, on his side, on his face; then nothing works except he eats and eats, will only stop when the food runs out or is taken away, still he wastes as if starving, soon weighs only a handful more than she does, but she cannot pick him up ‹ she can feed him, wash him, change him, get him in and out of bed, but she cannot pick him up, and he falls & falls & falls. It¹s the end now, there¹s no saving him, only waiting; they take him away from her, put him in a room in a building; some say that it¹s a mercy, and sometimes she agrees ‹ it¹s not impossible to love him now, she can come and go, he can stay their love regains its balance, now that they both can rest. March 22, 1954 Unbelievably, it snowed during the night. Yesterday morning he¹d unzipped the lining from his trenchcoat, but sundown brought a sharp wind; just after turning off his reading light, just before turning onto his right side his arm shoved beneath the bolster, he thought he might have seen flurries against the window but his eyes found no purchase on the dark sky so he turned them towards the back of his wife¹s head upon her own bolster in her own twin bed across the valley of the nightstand ‹ a game he played whenever she fell asleep before he did: to seek her while still blind from the reading light, to watch her form emerge from the gloom as his pupils dilated, to see if he¹d aimed just right with his eyes. This morning a dusting (they called it on the radio) covered the red-dog lane that zigzagged down past the house then up to the bus stop, but in the field opposite only frost lay on the tendriled clumps of new grass. The warm earth, he thought, the warm earth ... the words felt so good in his mind¹s mouth that he spoke them aloud, walking through the smell of his breakfast into the dazzling kitchen where his eyes found at once the still frizzled back of his wife¹s head now bent over the stove at the far end of the room. He did not greet her, but she heard him somehow (above the sizzle of bacon underlaid by the sizzle of the radio that never quite came in clear out here except deep in the night and when it rained), for she laid down the fork and reached for the handle of the coffee pot. In that moment, he wanted to reach under her reaching arm and cover her lovely breast with his hand, but then she turned, her eyes all business ‹ he sat straight down, the good boy of the family. At the bus stop he rocked from foot to foot, shivering in the trenchcoat, briefcase banging knee. Above and behind him, the wooden sign began to steam. Across the little valley one light burned in a window. (In that light he now saw himself twenty minutes ago, jaws working sleepily, faced out across the little valley, barely able to see the bus stop where he now stood or any other world at all.) As he watched, grinding his teeth and giggling with cold, all the windows ignited. When the Call Came When the call came, my mother had the best friends over for lunch; but the husband was already soused, and the wife never could handle that big damn Cadillac. So when they offered to drive my mother said no: she hated the husband for being soused, for saying my father never drank that much, he swore, he never saw him drunk ‹ he, who was never otherwise ‹ and she hated the wife¹s helplessness, if not exactly the wife. So my mother sent the best friends away, and went to the neighbors two doors up, and they drove her; then while he parked the car, she went inside with my mother, walking beside, but a half step back. In the corridor my mother saw the charge nurse, and the look she saw she knew. The others all stood around her, tears arisen in their eyes, because they hated this, because they loved her, because she was their center now, this had now happened to her. And they now had the honor of being there, to touch her shoulder or her elbow, to ask the gentle questions ‹ ³Do you want...?² ³Can I get...?² ³Would you like...?² and then to wait for the answers to form, to carry out her will, to witness, to behold, themselves chosen to be here, now, to be hers. She gave herself into their care, allowed herself to be borne up, to be detained until they got him ready, then to be guided into the presence of his absence. The nurse, who had stayed past the end of her shift for my mother to arrive, now said, ³I¹ll leave you alone,² and was gone silently. My mother looked and saw nothing. She went over beside, laid her hand on his arm, felt nothing. She leaned over and kissed him, said goodbye to the already gone. Then she left, taking his absence with her. The neighbor waited just outside the door, eyes wide and full. She¹s Still Mad The cousins are gone, an hour ago, surely home by now. My sister also, exhausted by new love, gone to bed. Between us like a continent the kitchen table bent by the years to slope away from me in my father¹s chair down toward my tiny mother in hers. She says she¹s still mad at him for not fighting this thing, whatever it was. ³I¹ve been a widow for three years,² she says. ³He just gave up!² She¹s still yelling at him, as she did when he messed himself, or when he himself yelled because some neuron, shooting its last spark, had tripped the yell reflex. But she was speaking to herself, to him-in-her, to her beloved. We¹re groggy, as if with cold. It¹s late. I think, a story, Momma. Bring him back. 1935 Well, he was twenty-three, so I was twenty-one. He was making thirty-five a week at the Sun-Tele, I¹d just got a raise to twenty-nine. I broke off the engagement because he wasn¹t saving any money. Both our mothers came to me but I wouldn¹t change my mind. So when he took off across the country with his best friend Bus ‹ and they ran out of money and gas at the Grand Canyon, and his mother had to bail them out, Western Union ‹ I went out every night with another guy. This guy had plans, was talking dates, making lists; his bank account was serious. But when Billy Bly came back, I never saw that guy again, and I never told him why. If He Came Home ³If he came home by eleven, it was OK. He¹d be tight, even sentimental, but he¹d stayed with us, quit while he was still himself, or at least human, or that part of human that stays with us, that comes home. One night it was twelve, then one, then later. He finally rolled in, all shame. This time I didn¹t scold, implore, forgive. I went into the other bedroom and shut the door. In a while ‹ long enough for him to make and down another drink ‹ there was a knock. I said, ŒGet away from me, don¹t come near me when you¹re like this.¹ He said, ŒI¹m afraid of you.¹ Can you imagine?² I can. I stand there, in him. Another moment, then the floorboards creak as he gets away from her, nodding, confirmed in his worthlessness, awash in remorse as voluptuous as drink itself. Say Goodbye When They Died When his father died, it was his father who died: clear, clean, contained. He wrote poems about it ‹ even essays, for chrissakes ‹ because he could see it because he could contemplate it describe it describe his contemplation of it. Because he could. When his mother died he saw how everything would die, including him. That shut him up. Mortality, Thy Name Is Daddy In the June photograph, my father sits in a wheelchair, lightly grasping with his good right hand the brim of the golf hat just put on his head: a meaningless gesture ‹ not, therefore, even a gesture ‹ he will take it off, then replace it, then take it off again... Showing the photo, I say, ³Big Bill tips his hat on his way out,² which makes the picture; hides everything with the truth. He looks right at the camera. It is the stare of a stone. In the August Polaroid my spastic son Billy, twelve years old, is flopped against the side of the monstrous stroller I have to have for him. The Yankee cap I put on him a minute ago he¹s torn off by the back, clutches the thing, white-knuckled, in his good left hand; the bill is clamped between his teeth. His eyes are pointed at me, crossed in concentration. In a headshot of sorts from a 4th of July picnic, another Bill Bly peers from under no hat, over his glasses, seeing the camera, making a face for it, a wise-guy look: the son and father, for the moment able-bodied, able-minded, able-eyed, says to the camera that he knows this; a look his son and father cannot look, or lost, and now do not need. Twelve years before, the three Bills Bly are together in a small room of the hospital. The new baby has just been moved from Intensive Care; the vigorous, impatient grandfather can now hold him for the first time. He sits on the bed with the boy laid on his lap, the little head with its two bruised eyes upon the big closed knees. He lays his right hand along the side of the baby¹s face. I feel it in my own hand, on my own face. He says, ³Oh. Oh. Oh.² Beside that strong square hand, a tiny thin one dances, clenches and releases the air of the room, promising, fulfilling, knowing no better. My Father Loved His Death 1. At first he loved its distance the way he loved my mother sitting, reading, in the white frame house in Pittsburgh while he slithered, pop-eyed and reeking, through the Philippine jungle. Later, sitting on the sunset porch, he loved the way the sky like a rag soaked up dark from the earth; the moon and stars fell into it, the birds went quiet one by one. Then he would turn his chair to face the window into the golden rooms, and look, only look. At last he loved its coming, the rounding mouth, the dark, inside, downness of it; he fell away, peripeteia, in every direction, my mother could not catch him, no one could catch him; his eyes now sought the dark as they had once sought the light when first he fell face-first down into his life. 2. On a ship pitching west across the Pacific, toward tomorrow, toward Hell, he retched and retched into his helmet. Behind him his wife and me and his baby girl; behind him the house he had just built, abandoned now to strangers; behind him his return from the real war six years before, the shirt pocket ripped off by shrapnel washed and folded in the bottom of his kit. Ahead lay Korea, where he would fight, and freeze, and endure, things he didn¹t know yet. But it wasn¹t what he didn¹t know that made him heave and roar into that overturned metal skull, staining the canvas ligaments the color of brains. 3. I imagine him on the golf course when he sees his death for the first time. It¹s a blind par five; his drive has hit the crest and gone over. The other three have scattered their shots across the face of the hill; he refuses the cart for the straight walk to his ball. Coming down off the tee, his left foot goes funny and he staggers, but goes into a little trot and pulls out of it. His partner, still close, asks, but he¹s fine, fine, and he is. The carts hum away; quiet flows around him like rising water, except for his spikes combing through the long grass of the rough, a sound that reminds him of his Janie¹s fingernails on his scalp as they lay in the narrow bed, eyes inches apart. Then he¹s on the fairway, and the earth spreads out around him, the real world, the one that bears us up, that bears us, and tears take him, for he loves to love. At last he tops the rise. ³Oh!² he says. ³There you are.² Ashes 1. We cannot find it till we give up hope; I¹m already at the turnaround, certain that we¹re lost, when my wife says, ³That¹s it² ‹ the cemetery can only be seen when you get there. ³This waste,² she says inside the gate, seeking further words, ³This wasteŠ² the city child marvels but approves: ³We need it.² We¹re early. We don¹t speak of him. My father¹s been everywhere for days. In the slim shade of a spruce, we sit on the ground, cropping clover with our fingers; looking over each other¹s shoulders, we squint against the baking glare. 2. When it¹s time, a man in a suit comes to us, a box like a trophy base in one arm, easy as a melon. He speaks before I can; we are pulled into his wake, in a moment we¹re in the parking lot, calling over the roofs of cars. Alone, up front, he drives ahead. Not alone, we realize. ³That¹s him,² my wife observes. Our cars float down the drive like two skimming birds; we alight at an open place between groves of trees. The man gets out, shifts the box, extends an arm ‹ ³This way,² he says, and starts. ³That¹s him,² I say; he stops. ³I¹ll carry him.² He hesitates, then passes me the box. I pull it against my side, rest it near the hip, the place one perches the straddling kid who cannot walk any farther. My wife comes up, eyes big on me, I smile: so far, so good. The grave is a two-foot square hole in the ground; down in there, a black metal case with a lid. We look. I bounce the box once. At no signal I can see, the digger kneels, seems to dive into the hole, tips off the case-lid. Two sticks of gum slip out of his shirt, smack on the bottom of the vault. He snatches them back. I say, ³Maybe you should leave one thereŠ² the digger¹s face, when he gets up straight, is red as any drunk¹s. They all look at me: ³Well, old guy,² I say to the box, now holding it between my hands like a baby¹s face. There¹s really nothing else to do, really nothing else. I gaze around, to see where he will be ‹ it looks like a fairway: that is well. I give my father over, give him away, give him up; let the ashes take their weight, go down, stay under. 3. We cannot go right back, we have to stop; for neutral ground we choose a fast food joint. I want nothing; go, stop, stand, sit, here, there, all the same. I stare out over the cluttered street, but see only that spread of quiet grass with its attendant trees respectfully apart; what makes the tears rise is leaving him alone. He wanted this the way I¹d wanted to run away from him, from home, from everything that never worked; now I abandon him to that desire, and cannot have him any more. My wife takes my face between her hands, weeps for my weeping. We wonder if there is a heaven; I think not: not elsewhere, here if anywhere; not where the angels live, not a place at all, but what they guard: each of us the locus and the substance of love. The unbroken cannot be cherished, only feared or adored. We must be able to perish. The Impatience of the Living (August 1991) My father died at 79 last May, after a fairly rapid decline. The diagnosis was Binswanger¹s disease, hardening of the arteries of the brain. Had you asked my mother, however, and the fire would kindle in her eyes. ³I was a widow for three years before he died,² she¹d say. ³He just gave up!² For her the three years were anything but rapid or fair. She nursed him through the first two, but when his falls became a matter for the EMS, the hospital refused to give him back. She spent the year of their 50th anniversary visiting him at the county health center, formerly the poor house. He spent his last year on earth forgetting everything, though she was the last thing he forgot. My sister was mad at him too, in part for abandoning our mother, but also because she feels that in her growing-up disasters, he was always more interested in how much it hurt him than he was in supporting her. Even my wife agrees. She tells the story of finding him on the porch all alone one night, staring at us through the picture window, as if he were already on the Other Side. A person who seems to have decided to die is already beyond our reach. When that person is a husband or a father, it makes for something worse than grief, it¹s insulting: our professions of love are thrown back in our face; it destroys our sense of ourselves as competent human beings, who not only want to care for one another, we can. My mother and my sister obviously didn¹t matter enough to make Dad want to stay; is there any way he could have hurt them more deeply? I heard all this in the days just after his death, as we gathered around the kitchen table. At first I was puzzled by the fact that everything that was said about my father seemed to fall into one of two categories: the pattern of his drinking, or the progress of his deterioration. For days this went on, as relatives and neighbors came in and out, nodding and clucking, adding their own examples to one or both refrains. I awoke one morning filled with shame, the echo of women¹s voices, flattened in disapproval, still ringing in my mind. I realized I¹d been rehashing the talk of the last few days in my dreams, and had somehow become the object of their censure, had become, in effect, my father. The reason was not far to seek: I was the only man in the house with my mother, my sister, my wife, and my daughter, and all that was talked about was how my father had let them down. And I thought, wait a minute. The man worked hard all his life, loved his family, loved to have fun and to give it as well. Is this all that¹s to be remembered of his life ‹ his drinking, his falling apart? His ³giving up²? I felt I must defend him from these grieving, angry women, because I could see what they could not: through the eyes of the son, the brother, the husband, the father I am. When I look backwards through my own life, I can see into his ‹ the years of being counted on, expected of, hoped for; bobbing in a sea of women¹s hearts, upheld but not always understood, held onto but never quite acceptable. To be loved by women was an honor my father lived to deserve; it was also a tyranny he had no desire to escape, except, perhaps, through drink. I knew what they seemingly didn¹t: how important they really were to him, and how much more important must have been whatever it was that made him ³just give up.² If that¹s what happened. I think what he saw three years ago was his own death. Not his absence ‹ I¹m sure he¹d imagined that many times ‹ no: death¹s presence. The death that was his. The death that was him. So I said, maybe when he saw the end, that was the end: it knocked him down, and he stayed there. They think he should have bounced back up, fought this thing, raged against the dying of the light. I don¹t. I think that¹s when the light went out. I think there are things we can¹t talk back to, fight with, even answer; things that take us, merely, whether we kick and scream or not. The question was moot, of course. If he cares any more whether we understand him or not, we¹ll never find out, not until we follow him. If that¹s what happens. What bothered me most about those gripe sessions was that understanding was assumed ‹ ³Well, he was an alcoholic...² ³He just gave up!² These glib phrases explained nothing, they merely tagged with a name something that he did or said or failed to do, so that it could be put away and we could move on. But we didn¹t move on ‹ the same stale stories, over and over, the same refrains, like kids spinning and spinning in the yard until they fall down, like a drunk who drinks because he drinks. Finally, the night before the service, someone said something ‹ I don¹t remember what ‹ that nudged my mother out of the groove, and she started on a story I¹d never heard before, her voice rising, musical, almost girlish. And there among the women at the table, my father ‹ charming, willing, fun-loving Bill Bly ‹ came to life again. e At the house among the relatives, my mother was almost giddy as she talked about the service at the church, during which rain poured down and lightning snapped, dimming the lights a couple of times. Her favorite part was the thunder. ³When I heard that crash,² she said, ³the thought just popped into my mind: ŒThat¹s Bill Bly, pounding on the gates of heaven!¹ I almost laughed out loud!² She said she was horrified, but now she could laugh, and we join her, because that¹s just the sort of thing that does pop into your mind when you¹re trying your best to behave, to do what¹s expected, to play the part you¹ve seen others play with such dignity before. She was laughing with relief, because for her that play-acting was finally over. She didn¹t go to the interment the next day: after three years¹ dreading it, then fighting it, then just waiting for it, she¹d had enough of my father¹s death. And in one of those ironic juxtapositions that give life its often brutal charm, my sister had just fallen in love, so she had no time for death or its ceremonies, beyond the absolute minimum required. So my wife and I went by ourselves, because someone was needed to say goodbye. The man from the funeral home shook hands, his manner breezy but not disrespectful. At first I was content to let him lead ‹ he knew where we were going, he knew what to do. But he took the box of ashes in his car when we drove to the site, and by the time we got there I knew I had to ask if I could carry it to the grave. It was about the size and shape of a trophy base, and heavier than it looked. I carried it against my side, where I carried my kids when I picked them up, where my father carried me. I¹d imagined this moment, but never like this ‹ so simple, so bare, so quick. I should have planned a speech; it was happening too fast. I also felt I was holding something up, wasting time, that I should get this over, get on with my life, let these others get on with theirs. I never could stand to wait for anyone, now everyone was waiting for me. Everything there was to be done for him had been done, all but this last thing. And I didn¹t know how to do it. I thought, maybe I should have stayed home. Then I wouldn¹t have had to worry about how to say goodbye to my father ‹ I just wouldn¹t say goodbye. Some would say those ashes are not him, but of course they are, or else it wouldn¹t matter where they ended up; the cemetery, with its expanse of grass and quiet trees would not be there, this awkward ceremony would not have taken place. What we carry in our hearts is us, not him; what¹s left of him is in that box, the rest went up some chimney miles away. When I gave it to the digger, when he dropped it gently into the earth, when I walked away to the car, I knew I was leaving him alone. And that¹s when I wept, because this is what our life is, being left behind, then leaving. Peopling Heaven (Autumn 1991) Until recently, when my father died, I hadn¹t given much thought to heaven. As a child I¹m sure I imagined it as being ³up there² somewhere, far enough away that we couldn¹t see it ‹ even from an airplane ‹ and that when we died, we would somehow sail there, perhaps on wings that unfolded, like a butterfly¹s, when we broke free from the chrysalis of the body. This beautiful image doesn¹t survive into adulthood, when heaven is vaguely thought of, if at all, as a place where the dead wait for us, the suspended relationship expected to pick up where we left off. The Scripture most often read at Christian funerals is the one from Revelation 21: ³And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things have passed away.² The former things. Meaning ‹ the present things. Perhaps as grownups we can no longer believe in heaven as a place, but we can still conceive of a state of being or consciousness where all the things that torment us in this life are magically removed. In fact, what else can we do for our lost ones except to picture them, arrived at last at that bliss and peace, in the most beautiful place we can imagine? But then heaven isn¹t for them, it¹s for us, isn¹t it? It doesn¹t exist ³up there² or away from here at all ‹ and it¹s not constructed of clouds or ether or crystal spheres, but rather of the concrete love we bear for our departed ones. When the news got out that my father had died, the platters of lunch meat and the casseroles began to arrive at my mother¹s door, borne by friends who could only hold them out, unable to find anything to say. There isn¹t anything to say, and the food was of considerable pragmatic value: none of us, my mother especially, felt like cooking, and the house was full of people ‹ relatives, neighbors, other friends ‹ who needed to be fed. And food is the most appropriate gift, because it is perishable, as are we. In medieval times the body was called wyrmes mete, food for the worms. And since what we eat becomes us, we are sharing our physical substance, the very real mystery at the heart of Communion. At such a time an offering must be made ‹ to the living, not the dead. The dead need nothing from us any more, and it is this emptiness we perhaps are trying to fill with flowers and food and murmured words of sympathy. No one is fooled: it cannot be filled, because it was there before, it is always there. Death is a presence, not an absence. Death is what we share with every other human being, alive, dead, or yet to be born. Death is the one thing we have in common with all of creation. Death makes our life. In our quotidian consciousness, the world is too huge and complicated for one person to be able to perceive, let alone understand or control. So we narrow our focus, hatch our little plots, fret over trifles that the intensity of our concentration makes into monsters. And then someone dies. In Greek tragedy, this moment is called peripeteia, which is usually translated ³reversal² ‹ the hero¹s fortunes having suddenly gone from good to bad. But the etymology of the word yields ³falling all around,² the image of a building collapsing about one. However, this also opens up the sky and the horizon as far as one can see in all directions. When someone dies, we are given the opportunity to behold our life as it is, complete. A death clarifies, makes most real, illuminates; whatever is extraneous falls away, and we can see where we really are. But where are the departed ones? Where did Daddy go? In one sense, of course, I am where my father went, and I can feel him any time I want: all I have to do is look at my hands, which resemble his, or hear his voice in my own when I answer the phone. And then of course there is his memory, alive in everyone he knew. This idea is most beautifully expressed in Galway Kinnell¹s poem, ³Memories of My Father,² which I read at the funeral: ...Then the lost one can fling itself outward, its million moments of presence can scatter through consciousness freely, like snow collected overnight on a spruce bough that in midmorning bursts into glittering dust in the sunshine. Literally, of course, my father went to the cemetery. Some would say those ashes are not him, but of course they are, or else it wouldn¹t matter where they ended up. What¹s left of him is in that box that I carried to the grave against my side, where I carried my kids when I picked them up, where my father carried me; my father is in that box I left in a hole in the ground. When I walked to the car, I wept because I was abandoning him, and because this is what our life is, being left behind, then leaving. Perhaps the proper question to ask is not ³Where do we go when we die?² but rather ³What do we leave behind?² At the punch-and-cookie reception after the funeral, my mother kept saying to herself, ³I¹ll have to tell Bill about all these people...² and then remembered. Across from where my mother sits at the kitchen table will always be my father¹s chair. Love stays here. Love brought us into the world, love sends us hence; from the unknown into the unknown. Love keeps us, while we¹re here, shelters us in the daily from the immensity we cannot bear to behold except in glimpses. And love attends the devastation of those glimpses. As we pulled into the church parking lot for the funeral, it began to rain; by the time the music started, it was pouring. Lightning snapped, dimming the lights a couple times. My mother¹s favorite part was the thunder: when it boomed the thought popped into her mind, ³That¹s Bill Bly, pounding on the gates of heaven!² She hasn¹t yet said whether she thinks he was let in or not. For the moment I stand alone where my father stood when his father died, with the walls down all around me, seeing what he saw with my eyes. And I think I can see heaven: if we can enter it, it can only be here, where we come from, whence we go, the place where love is crossed with death to bring forth love. 1950 ... That evening we go for a two-family picnic up at the Clearys¹, the neighbors who drove Mom to the home as Dad was actually dying. At the door Til cries when she first sees Mom, and Bob is appropriately awkward when he hugs my sister and shakes hands with me. After that the talk is easy, slipping from one subject to another in our present lives. My sister and I bring out our amazing stories from New Sodom; they cluck and shake their heads. Throughout, we keep an eye on Mom, but she¹s fine. Only once do we brush against the real past: the origin of the long friendship between our families. We¹ve exhausted the news, and the talk has turned free-form. We¹re comparing our earliest memories. I mention that one of mine is this very house going up, which Bob says was in 1950. Then my sister Lynn says no one will believe hers ‹ the 36-inch snowfall at Thanksgiving that year, when she was just over a month old. Mom (or it could have been Mom-mom) is standing at the open front door of our house, holding Lynn in her arms. Everything is white, with more snow falling, and someone is struggling toward them with bags full of groceries. Bob says, ³That was me!² Mom remembers that Dad was at Fort Knox (recalled for Korea), trying and trying to call in, but the party line was always tied up. Til recalls that another neighbor (Fred Lieb) worked at the A&P in Burgettstown, twenty miles away; he was stuck there for two days, but when he did make it back he had lots of food. Then they all groan about the Scharnbergs: all they did was wade from house to house, mooching cigarettes and beer.... (Feeding My Son,) My Father Behind Me Behind me is a portrait of my father when he was maybe fifteen years older than I am now one of those charcoal boardwalk sketches from an empty-nest vacation. The left half of the face is him all right, but the right eye seems too big or it¹s open too wide whatever that ice-blue eye¹s looking at has it frozen, perhaps with fright. Or, from another angle, that of time (time to come, for the man sitting for this portrait), that eye is what it will become ‹ a mere window, perfectly clear, itself seeing nothing. My back is mostly turned to that framed antiquity. I feel him watching, from time to time, but not from behind ‹ rather from within, through the eyes he half made, made of the stuff of the most potent form of what¹s left of him. I¹m feeding his grandson, his quarter-son, whose crossed brown eyes can only speak, not hear, but all his fathers are listening. His Portrait Speaks Everyone¹s saying he looks like me. Even he says it, catching a glimpse of some strange stout man with silver hair just catching a glimpse of him in a store window or the mirror. But I don¹t look like that. I never looked like that even when I looked like that. What ought to worry him is the way he is like me down underneath where (he imagines) no one can see it but him and me. The preference for sulking not fighting back, the fundamental furtiveness, the mean streak he¹d like to call his righteousness. And now he¹s lost the core, or rather found it empty as I did at his age: There was a bad man in our midst; I led the ³authorities.² We drove this bad man out, but I wasn¹t satisfied: I had him followed, and when he tried to settle in a distant place, I tipped off my fellow guardians of decency, and they drove him out as well. Could I have expected such a man to turn at bay and attack me? Could I have believed that he would press his doomed case so hard, so desperately, that I would have to sue for peace to him? Who but the lawyers would have known that virtue is not absolute in law, that right must be negotiated, not just invoked. Could I have believed the world to be such a place? That¹s what knocked me down, a vigorous man in the prime of life, whose only thought was to protect his children from such palpable evil as this man embodied. That such a man existed at all made my skin crawl ‹ how could it be that he wasn¹t spewed forth into the outer darkness for what he was and what he did? Because there is no outer darkness ‹ the sun shines on the like and unlike alike; there is no justice in this world. The darkness is within: our selves like the galaxies center on a black hole just behind and just beneath the heart; its work done by density alone... Say Goodbye Say goodbye to dark walls of long, fluid fingers, goodbye to the dark, the big dark starred by neuronic sparks alone, night of no moon: you are the moon. Say goodbye. Here when you return desiccated, burned, blasted by wind and smoke, a sack of stones and dust, busted and spilled, Air will have sung you, fire made you glow. Now earth takes you back, slick fingers once more press and caress. This House My mother lives here, alone, sad as she¹ll ever be, the house huge around her tiny frame, dust laid in soft reproach on every horizontal surface, every place planes meet an althing of gossamer. Somebody¹s doing housework, she thinks as she watches a busy arachnid the size of a comma take over the corner between window-frame and door-jamb. I am here to help her move, to decide what to take, what to leave, what to throw away. Oddly I¹m the sentimental one; every object I pick up weighted with its significant use over time, the measure of its life; each thing only itself, of course, but most itself in this house where this mother lifts this teacup and blows across the tawny lake, fluting the water, her eyes focused beyond the opposite shore on another tiny mother making a new home in the wilderness. Watching My Mother¹s Brain Scan We march straight through the head-shaped hollow rock of light from ear to ear; the view reforms with each 5 mm step ³There¹s her cerebellum,² the technician says, touching it. I¹ve seen this landscape in books; The Illustrated Head, however, never looked like my mommy from the side from across the room. He spins a dial, punches up numbers, now we pass through her face head-on, tip of nose to arch of atlas. We¹re discussing the concept artifact: the machine tolerates no movement, or else the image breaks up, blurs, becomes a smudge, scalloped waves of dust, or, most amusing to him, ³smoke out the ears² ‹ the artifact of bloodrace in the carotid ‹ the only sign she is alive lying so still on her back, wound in a sheet, strapped to the sled shoved deep into the magnetic oven. Thus must she have appeared, her skin and no-bones transparent to the loving eyes of her guardian angel in the months before she was born. But here, nothing remains of what brought her; only one brought here by her remains to watch over, can only hover and fuss and try to comprehend what¹s happening to her, to him, to everything, even this gleaming machine. Take Her Take her home, she hates it here, she¹s so tired, so sick, so tiny She hates what it¹s done to her, she says, ³What can I do?² Take her out of this, this is no place for her, for any of us, really, but we can bear it, ‹ at least for now ‹ what¹s not to be borne. He Still Thinks Elegy I¹m told that the symptoms of falling in love Are the same as those that come from grief Loss of appetite; abstraction; The air is almost too rich to breathe Yet you can¹t stop sighing; Moving at all feels foolish If not dangerous ‹ You turn a corner and nearly leave your bones behind; Weeping because the sky¹s so blue Or because a tiny baby¹s neck is too skinny and weak To hold up its head But its eyes drink in the world just the same The heart¹s great gain Batters the body as fiercely As the heart¹s great loss A hole in the heart Is a hole in the heart Whether it comes from bursting or breaking But the wind of love can only sing Through an open pipe To Bring Rain On A Land Where No Man Is Job 38:26 One does not seek calamity. Even when it cleaves in twain the man next to me, splits him from pate to parts so that his half-body bumps against me before it drops behind where it may or may not catch on my heel ‹ even then, it doesn¹t happen to me: it doesn¹t happen. Justice is a human word, neither uttered nor heard in the land where no man is. When I be brought there, Pray God bring the rain also. Lenten Meditation In Trinity Church at the head of old Wall Street Ash Wednesday is a busy day. From before dawn until after dark the line goes out to the street ‹ every shape and size of human being appears, moves like a corpuscle crowded fore and aft through a tiny vein in the lung, arms full of its quotidian gear or else empty, hanging awkwardly like a scolded kid¹s; nothing, for the moment, to do but shuffle ahead toward a figure in severe black who bears in one hand a tiny pot and on the other a grimed thumb. At the interface of the world and the world that thumb bestows upon the forehead a kiss of death with the words, ³Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.² The corpuscle then returns to the world bearing, for a day at least, the reminder of that larger return: the mark of Adam, which means, of course, dirt. The priests change, the people change, no one comes back; the choir comes and sings, then goes away; daylight creeps in, floods the room, ebbs and creeps back out: even the dirt is only last year¹s palms burnt: this year¹s dirt will take its place. The smudgepot is maybe a century old, the church itself has stood five generations; the dirt beneath has borne up three churches and before that trees and before that nothing but the sky The labelled dust in the boneyard has been just dust for centuries having whirled briefly at the interface of being dust and being dust. This spasm of matter is only a mystery to dust whirling in the breeze that also blows the stars about the heavens: dust in the ground knows what it is. At the AIDS Concert So many so young so familiar with death. Several skeletons are in attendance, one is one of the composers. He speaks winningly of his virus, which is portrayed in the piece we are about to hear by that most protean of voices, the clarinet, and whom he defeats in this musical fiction with a toy piano: charmed laughter, which he acknowledges, a boyish grin (he cannot be thirty) and rallies us with his conviction that the virus will be defeated, if not this way, then another, and that he will survive. And everyone smiles, tears stand in eyes all around the room, it is a sentimental moment. But the virus is not a character, not a villain but a messenger with vital information: The door to the last room has been opened. That door is in this room. This Is Where They Leave Us Another damn funeral. The spirit of my dead friend whispers like a tuning fork: You don¹t matter very much. I, less, existing only in you. You can only be reminded of me in someone else¹s ‹ or else your own ‹ arc of phrase, cadential gesture. I, made of memory, remember nothing but what you may recall. You will go a long journey, or a short one, or will stay at home. You will love, be loved. If nothing else, will suffer. If not now, later. If not then, then at the end. You will come apart, taking that much of me with you. They will gather for you then go their ways long, short, alone; you will come apart again. This is where things die. This is the only place where that matters. Death makes sense of everything. This is where we leave you when we go. That¹s what this is. The Fish At the weigh-in I was under, he was half a pound too much. For the next hour he sucked his gums and spat over and over into a dixie cup, sitting on the crapper, pushing, pushing, his coach murmuring above him. He finally made weight by smiling on the scale. I loved to wear the red tank top that buttoned snugly under the crotch, I loved the tights with padded knees, the square white shorts, the thick white socks, but most of all the high black shoes, light as gloves, only allowed to be worn for the match. I was a rookie, him they called Gramps ‹ I was fourteen, he was twenty ‹ my mouth was full of braces, his was full of stumps. My coach said, Just go after him. He¹s starved so long he¹s weak as a girl. All you have to do is last. I had wind and strength to spare, I had youth, I had brains, even a kind of virtue: this was manly, this was fun, this was healthy, a boy used this to grow on, mens sana in corpore sano. What Coach didn¹t say was this: He¹s poor, he¹s dumb, he hates you. He wants to kill you, and he¹s going to try. But I saw it in his eyes above the center of the mat, and it took me down and pinned me under him, wriggling and twitching like I had no arms or legs. He Still Thinks He still thinks this is about something. He still thinks this will work. He still thinks it¹s about words, and their throw-weight. He still thinks it¹s about dance. He still thinks words work. He still thinks thinking works. He still thinks. He still thinks he will go on. He knows this is wrong, but he still goes on thinking it anyway. He knows being nice doesn¹t make you right. He knows being right doesn¹t make you win. He knows being right doesn¹t matter a damn. He knows nothing matters a damn. He knows it doesn¹t matter a damn that it doesn¹t. He does not want to have lived in vain. He expects to die in vain. Otherwise, he expects nothing. It¹s against his religion. Otherwise, he has no religion. He feels he cannot bear the mendacity of his fellow creatures. This is his mendacity. He can bear it. He can bear all of it. Because he can bear it, he lets it live. Because he can bear it, he brings it home to live in his house. Because he can¹t bear it that he can bear it he doesn¹t give it a room. It lives in all the rooms. He still thinks he¹s a terminal. He¹s a portal. Bill Bly (William James Bly III) is a freelance writer and musician, and the teacher of ten thousand in his quarter-century in upper education.  He is the third of four consecutive William James Blys ‹ his father and no doubt his grandfather before him were subjected to the same bantering questions about his relatives. As it happens, his father achieved the rank of Captain in the U.S. Army, making the author the son of Captain Bly. Nellie Bly, the ³first² woman newspaper reporter, who exposed the horrors of the insane asylum at Blackwell¹s Island, and who went around the world in 77 days (stopping along the way to chat with Jules Verne), was born in Pittsburgh like the author, but the name she was born with was Elizabeth Cochran. The real Nelly Bly is the author¹s daughter, herself an author and editor. He is no relation (that he knows or will acknowledge) to the poet Robert Bly. Credits This print edition of Wyrmes Mete was prepared for the 10th anniversary of my mother¹s death, as a gift to my family. Poems ³Elegy² (1985) was written on the occasion of the death of Jack J. Boies, a dear friend and mentor. With the exception of this essentially hopeful piece, the rest of these writings date from the period between 1991 and 1995. Several poems were composed and given first readings in a 1991 workshop at New York University led by Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, and Michael S. Harper. An early version of ³My Father Loved His Death,² entitled ³On My Father¹s Death, May 24, 1991,² appeared in the resulting chapbook, A Poetry Collection, published by the Faculty Resource Network at NYU. ³My Father Loved His Death² and ³Ashes² appeared in the Fall/Winter 1996 issue (Volume X, Number 2) of Zone 3, published by Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. In 1997 ³The Fish² was included in a special sports issue of The MacGuffin, published by Schoolcraft College in Livonia, Michigan. Two prose pieces were the product of a commission by the much mourned quarterly Books & Religion. Although in the end neither ³The Impatience of the Living² nor ³Peopling Heaven² appeared in the magazine, Editor-in-Chief Katherine Kurs provided not only the occasion but also the encouragement necessary to complete these (to me) important meditations. Photos & Images Black & white pictures of young Jane & Bill Bly come from the remarkable 3-volume archive put together by my father in the early 1980s. Color photos of the Golden Anniversary were taken by John Petero. The ³Hat Tip² photo in ³Mortality, Thy Name is Daddy² was taken by my sister, Lynn Bly; I took ³Boy Bites Cap² myself; the photo of me was taken by David Varnum. The color photo in ³(Feeding My Son,) My Father Behind Me² and my ³head shot² on the bio page were taken by Deborah Griffin Bly. The black & white photos in ³(Feeding My Son,) My Father Behind Me² and ³The Fish² came from Ember, the Peters Township High School yearbook. The images of the Japanese figurines and the partially eaten pine cone were scanned directly. The image of the bare branch was drawn in AppleWorks® and converted with GraphicConverter®. Hypertext A crude hypertext ³chapspace² containing some of these poems was first assembled for Robert Kendall¹s Hypertext Poetry and Fiction class at the New School Online University in the summer of 1995. The general estimation of this jejeune attempt was that the poems were OK, but it wasn¹t much of a hypertext. Then, in Rob¹s Advanced Hypertext Poetry and Fiction course in the fall of 2000, I undertook the conversion of Wyrmes Mete from Storyspace to HTML, and began to use the Connection Muse suite of JavaScript tools to enhance and complexify navigation. It is not possible for me to thank Rob enough for his continued interest and support. I must also thank my hypertext buddies Deena Larsen, Marjorie Luesebrink, Stephanie Strickland, and John McDaid for their suggestions, encouragement, and philosophy. But most amazing was the joyous energy with which Julianne Chatelain attacked the project of reading and responding to this piece in Rob¹s AdvHTPoFic class, and her more than generous enheartening, a service I sorely needed when the mess I was making got me down. A month-long residency at the Vermont Studio Center in January 2002 provided the time and peace for me to be able to create a readable draft of the HTML version (online at http://infomonger.com/bbly/wyrmesmete/title.html). For this, I am grateful to Jon Gregg and Louise von Weise for founding VSC and keeping it running long enough for me to get there, and to the dedicated staff who fed and housed and sheltered me from the so-called real world for 28 days, especially to Kathy Black for arranging a work exchange, to Gary Clark for his free flow of ideas and righteous flat-picking, and to Arista Alanis for her gentle instruction in the kitchen, whereby I can now prepare bacon & eggs for thousands at a time. Blessed be all my fellow residents, 53 or so writers, painters, and sculptors whose work inspired and energized me, but in particular Marie Harris, Thomas Lakeman, JerriAnne Boggis, Winn Rea, Kenny Cole, Emna Zghal, Mee Kyung Shim, and Kate Cheney Chappell all generously took time out from their own work to help me in my struggle to make Wyrmes Mete a better piece. I cannot express how much the fearlessness and good-humored companionship of my sister, Lynn Bly, helped me to think about these matters with clarity and compassion. And finally, I would never have been able to endure the emotional ordeal required by revisiting these events were it not for the prodigious love and unflagging support of my darling Deborah. 15 April 2002 Allentown, PA ©2002 Bill Bly. All rights reserved.