We should have stayed away. All that squabbling
about the route, R saying he didn’t want to walk
on dead people’s bones, and what’s the point of staring
at dirt, grass, stone, when there’s nothing there to speak of
but what’s gone? I’ve had enough of cemeteries,
he said, having started young to collect his dead. I visit
graves the way others acquire stamps or Staffordshire:
it’s good to have a goal in life. Shakespeare, Wilde, Woolf,
Kerouac, Creeley—now Henry James, whose headstone,
in gray November rain, seems scrawled in some new typeface:
Rivulet Long Dead, or Wet Elongated. In his story
Marcher, flattened by horror on May Bertram’s tomb,
finally understands his doom, his squandering. The years
of introspection? Oops! Airless self-absorption really.
I thought how often, in James’s late stories, a ravaged
double turns up—missing a thumb, in tears, grotesque. That’s
who I could have been, the hero thinks: acquainted
with power, grief, depth. James himself, when dying,
believed he was Napoleon and spent his final days
dictating memos about his troops. My double? The rain.
There’s a writer for you. Passionate, profuse, musical.
If only I could be as generous, as at ease with falling.
