Dear Joanne

How can a human get used to grief?
I’ve found grief to be
forever the stranger,
pointing ways to walk
that are unfamiliar
to nose and heart and feet,
pulling nerves like fine wires,
singing plaints,
through tissues, organs,
hurting and continuing
to stretch the subtle body,
sometimes seemingly beyond its elasticity.

Does grief teach
the ability not to be whole,
does it take a person that far
into incompleteness?

I think so. And then also
that is where love hides.

It ambushes you, warm arms
are suddenly around you,
won’t let you go, tease, play
with your alive surprise
and yes-no-yes laughter.

Such a mystery is grief,
we dance in ways
we never knew the body could.

Sending you lots of love. 

          4.1.2024 Robert Hichens’ birthday and nearly 10 years since he died.

 - Silke Heiss

SMALL MIRACLE

(after Guy Davenport)

Some time in the 1950s,
during a visit from Tom Eliot
to St Elizabeth’s Asylum,
where he’d been confined instead of standing trial for treason,

Ezra Pound—who had sought to command
presidents, reform governments
in accordance with the dictates of his will,
ranting at the entire world, insisting it should change—

put up his feet on a table
in a small room in a long, dim corridor
(Tom Eliot did the same) so as to make enough room
for one of the inmates, his name lost to history,
to manoeuvre an imaginary
vacuum cleaner.

 - Jacques Coetzee

She wishes you a happy birthday
(after a black harrier swoops across in front of her car)
for Jacques

Had I the black harrier on my hand,
that sharp-eyed, sharp-clawed, sharp-beaked bird,
I’d let him fly, in front of you,
for you to hear his clap of wings,
perhaps a haunting cry.

But I, being me, have only this poem,
which I send you per voice clip,
for you to dance and hum into.

4th December 2023

- Silke Heiss

FLOWERS FOR WINTER

“Ah, where will I find flowers
come winter…”— Friedrich Hölderlin

There’s a cold hand round my heart as I write to you,
even though it’s still high summer in this room;
even though you are the one
for whom I swore to forsake all others.

Everyone knows you turned me out of the house we shared,
summoned your lackeys, signed the papers
and cut me loose like an unprofitable servant.

(Who would I have to become, what voice
would I have to assume, before
I could make poems out of those battering days,
when you had absolute power to hurt, and used it?)

And then, on the day I finally faced you again,
when I closed the passenger door of the uber car
that would take me away from you, wherever the hell I wanted,
away from the narrow room you’d chosen,
I slowly began to see: it was my hunger
for experience, for more life
that finally hurt you into malice.
You must have seen my hands were finally empty,
that they could find no flowers for you anymore
now winter had finally claimed you, claimed our house.
And so you turned me out of doors,
possessed, perhaps, by some ghost
of your old generosity—

knowing I would smell my way,
sooner or later, to a place
where the seasons still turned, where spring
was still possible.

 - Jacques Coetzee

Beyond language
for Ed

When my forehead surrenders,
puts itself against your shoulder,
you turn away in your sleep,
and my neck angles strangely,
but the discomfort does not matter,
it’s the contact that counts.

I plug myself into you
and good happens –
a wordless, explanationless,
self-evident,
simple
yes of peace.

My thoughts dissolve
into your skin, my woman intuition
streams
into the gleam
of your ripening genius. Something along
those lines.

The rain, which has been massaging
our roof, pounds louder.

 - Silke Heiss

AT PIRATES BAR AND GRILLE, PLUMSTEAD

Half past midnight already, and whatever
critical faculties he ever had
have long deserted him. These past few months he has learned
to be glad of the disco shlock
that pours into the room from the loudspeakers:
Gloria Gaynor vowing for all of us
that she’s indestructible, can survive anything;
Abba’s promise that we’ll sing like we did before.

Last year he would have hunched his shoulders, scowled
at the production values of such sweetened fare.
Now, with the old heartache finally behind him,
he is ready to swallow it all down—
the glamour, the reaching out for new horizons,
for desire that has forgotten the blinding rage
twisting its face.

Now Whitney Houston is belting out again
that she wants to dance, to feel the heat
with somebody who loves her, and all he can do
is swallow back tears of gratitude for this
rough magic, still somehow accessible
even now; for the disaster
that shattered him into pieces
just in time.

 - Jacques Coetzee