The night before: "Grief" by Matthew Dickman

Imagine a Bird
Mar 10
3 min read

Three passings in four months. It doesn’t always happen that the deaths of loved ones come at you like a series of ill winds, one gust right after the other. But when they do, it is more than alright to crumble into bits.

Remembrance and recovery may take their time to arrive, and then at some point to offer themselves in little waves, across slight spaces of time between losses.

Tonight, the quiet hours before a friend's morning cremation in the U.K.

Next weekend, a local memorial for a cousin.

Through it all, my sister-in-law and I adapt to life without my brother. His wheelchair remains, but most medical equipment has been donated or safely disposed of.

I first read this wonderful poem, below, in 2011. With my friend Rubén, I browsed bookshelves in Los Angeles, searching for something to ease the pain of a lost long-term relationship. As it turned out, there was no easing, quite the opposite:

Poetry holds up a Windex’ed mirror to your heart and shows you everything inside. <3

Grief

By Matthew Dickman

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla

you must count yourself lucky.

You must offer her what’s left

of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish

you must put aside

and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,

her eyes moving from the clock

to the television and back again.

I am not afraid. She has been here before

and now I can recognize her gait

as she approaches the house.

Some nights, when I know she’s coming,

I unlock the door, lie down on my back,

and count her steps

from the street to the porch.

Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,

tells me to write down

everyone I have ever known,

and we separate them between the living and the dead

so she can pick each name at random.

I play her favorite Willie Nelson album

because she misses Texas

but I don’t ask why.

She hums a little,

the way my brother does when he gardens.

We sit for an hour

while she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been,

crying in the check-out line,

refusing to eat, refusing to shower,

all the smoking and all the drinking.

Eventually she puts one of her heavy

purple arms around me, leans

her head against mine,

and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.

So I tell her,

things are feeling romantic.

She pulls another name, this time

from the dead,

and turns to me in that way that parents do

so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.

Romantic? She says,

reading the name out loud, slowly

so I am aware of each syllable, each vowel

wrapping around the bones like new muscle,

the sound of that person’s body

and how reckless it is,

how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.

Thank you, Matthew!

Matthew Dickman is the author of Husbandry, Wonderland, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, and All-American Poem, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. His other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Sarton Award for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a father, teacher, and freelance creative living in Portland, Oregon.

https://www.matthewdickman.org/

Imagine a Bird