Gray and white, as if with age, or some preserving
of the past, as in Beowulf, our hoary ancestor,
hoary as in a bat or a willow, or the venerable
hoary dove that flew straight into my picture
window today and then lay dead on the front porch.
We buried it—in some distorted version of its normal self—
folded in a white cloth napkin in the backyard.
Still soft enough to be cut into like a cabbage, I thought,
I’m glad I’m not dead. Listen to them now,
higher up in the trees, biting and scratching,
with their unmistakable twitch of life. Don’t fear
nothing, their twittering voices cry. The true spirit
of living isn’t eating greedily, or reflection, or
even love, but dissidence, like an ax of stone.
Henri Cole
Henri Cole - "Corpse Pose"
Waiting for a deceased friend’s cat to die
is almost unbearable. “This is where you live now,”
I explain. “Please stop crying.” But he is like a widower
in some kind of holding pattern around a difficult truth.
His head, his bearing, his movements are handsome to me,
a kind of permanent elsewhere devoted to separation and death.
“Please, let’s try to forget, dear. We need each other.”
I feel I want to tell him something, but I don’t know what.
So much that happens doesn’t make sense. Each night,
I do the corpse pose, and he ponders me, with his corpse face,
while licking his coat. The Egyptians first tamed his kind.
Their dead were buried in galleries closed up with stone slabs.
When my friend and I were young,
we tramped through woods of black oaks.
- Henri Cole
Henri Cole - "Solitude: The Tower"
Long ago, I lived at the foot of the mountains,
where my parents lived when they were young.
Nearby, there was a daffodil farm, which I bicycled past
each day on my way to the supermarket.
Occasionally, there were earthquakes, but no one noticed.
At my desk, words and phrases grew only slowly,
like the embedded or basal portion of a hair,
tooth, nail, or nerve. As I looked at the empty page—
seeing into love, seeing into suffering,
seeing into madness—my head ached so,
dear reader, emotions toppling me in one
direction, then another, but writing this now,
sometimes in a rush, sometimes after drifting thought,
I feel happiness, I feel I am not alone.
"Neil" - Henri Cole
My mother never forgave my father for sleeping
with Neil. You don’t need a wife, she screamed;
You already have one. She sounded like a whipping woman
but she was wounded. For years, she shut herself
in their bedroom and slept. Once, her baking was so fine
that the silverfish in our house were morbidly obese.
To think of my parents now costs me such an effort.
My heart thumps as if I might faint or die.
I hope they are resting. They were not so strong,
pulling on each other’s hair when the devil seized them—
Mother, barefoot in her nightgown, and Father, in his
leather slippers and black-watch robe—
like erect white stems blurred silvery gray by pollen.
I feel so much admiration for them.
- Henri Cole
From Henri Cole's poem, "To a Bat"
“…Where are you going now,
Mr. Bat?
Can you see
your brothers and sisters
fluttering over the treetops?
Can you see
the world is crammed,
corrupt, infuriating,
shallow, sanctimonious,
and insincere?
Thank you for afflicting
my life…”
- Henri Cole, from his collection BLIZZARD (2020)
At the Grave of Elizabeth Bishop
I, detaching myself from the human I, Henri,
without thick eyeglasses or rubberized white skin,
stretched out like a sinewy cat in the brown grass
to see what I felt, wrapping my tail around me,
hiding my eyes.
I slept. I waited. I sucked air,
instead of milk. I listened to pigeons murmuring.
Scratching my ear, I couldn't tell if I was male or female.
The bundled energy of my life drifted along
somewhere between pain and pleasure,
until a deerfly launched an attack
and anger, like a florist's scissors,
pinched the bright chrysanthemum of my brain.
Overhead, the long enfolding branches,
weighted down with Venetian green,
suffused the air with possibility.
I felt like a realist, recovering from style.
Grief and dignity swirled around discreetly,
transferring to me an aura of calm,
as I lay in a shawl of gold light,
licking my paws, licking my throat,
my smooth imperturbable face revealing nothing,
even when I thought about my first loves,
surface and symbol, rubbing against me,
humping in the shadows, making my whole body tremble.
I purred, watching an iridescent blue beetle
imbibe chlorophyll from a leaf.
I flared my nostrils, hearing a starling
splash in an amphora of rainwater.
With my paws in the air, exposing my ripe belly,
I rubbed my spine, a little drunk on the ultraviolet rays
and on myself, I confess.
Then the sky cleared. Birds were flying.
I felt a deep throbbing, as from a distant factory,
binding me to others, a faint battering of wings against glass
that was the heart in the lovely dark behind my breast,
as I was crouching to tie my shoelaces,
feeling strange in the meaty halves of my buttocks,
until I sprinkled a little earth on my head,
like Hadrian reunited with the place he loved.
- Henri Cole