Departed

Dec 29 2016

That started out plump, and red

and mostly head.

Then grew sturdy, and dense

on coltish legs

like watching asparagus grow.

Then blossomed,

urgent and awkward

and fully sexed.

The shoulders and chest

of her David made flesh, and blood.

The luxuriant hair

that made callow men long

to touch.

Until the prime of life,

when it was supple, and strong

and immortal as gods carousing.

The petty flaws

you only saw

in the foolishness of youth.

With the improbable hope

of growing old

with acquiescent grace.

But inexorably

grew wrinkled, shrunken, stooped;

muscles wasted

joints rusting out.

Then bed-ridden

in a stiffly fetal curl.

All skin and bone

and gasping breath,

sweet

with death’s sickly scent.

Until the body finally fails,

and all there is left

is human remains.

A dead body

eyes glazed and skin waxy

seems unnaturally still.

It looks deflated;

not just the air gone out of it, but actually smaller,

as if a few ounces of weight

had departed.

Still warm, but gone.

An empty stare, a cooling carcass.

The dearly departed,

consumed in soil

reduced to dust and ash.

Molecules,

dispersed in water and air

to the ends of earth

and back.

Like poems about weather, I find it hard to resist poems about death. If I let myself, all of my work would be horribly morbid. But once in awhile, I indulge. This is one of those times.

I’ve never understood the sentimentality over human remains:  the closure people seek in recovering a dead body, no matter what the cost or risk;  the denial of death that this simulacrum of life enables. Because we talk in euphemisms about dead bodies:  human remains and mortal coils and the dearly departed. While the nihilist in me sees death as final:  there is no afterlife; dying is an act of annihilation. And similarly, my inner nihilist sees the dead body not as sacred but as after-thought:  cooling meat, a decomposing carcass.  So I don’t care what neglect or indignity happens to my body after I die. (Although knowing, in life, that my organs will be harvested and put to good use is immensely consoling.) 

Anyway, I came across the common expression “unburied human remains” (I guess most common in crime novels and pulp fiction!), and this dichotomy struck me.  There is the reverence with which the expression is intoned. And then there is my literal take on the word “remains”. This is, not just what’s left behind, but the idea of refuse to be disposed of:  as in the remains of a meal on a dirty plate, the last little bit that needs tidying up. And so the idea emerged of a poem that followed the journey of a human body from birth to death. (In view of its origins, the title Human Remains would have made the most sense.  But I didn’t want to tip my hand, since in the beginning it’s not clear where the poem is headed.  Departed, because it’s less clear, works better. And that word also reinforces the question implied by the end of the poem:  this hypothetical idea of a soul, departing.)

I leave it to the reader to decide of something actually “departs”.  Theologians once weighed dead bodies in order to prove the existence of the departing soul.  (If they can confidently proclaim how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, then I what’s to stop them from telling how much a God-fearing soul weighs?!!) And the unnatural stillness of a dead body does strike one that way:  as if some animating essence has left it. Except I think it seems to take on more weight, not less.  (Perhaps because, in a very real sense,  the dead weight of a corpse actually is so much harder to lift than it was alive.  Although the reason is more bio-mechanical than  metaphysical:  a living person stiffens and shifts to assist, even if the adjustment is unconscious; while a dead body sags and tips, and so is a lot harder to manage.) 

The original ending was something like “dispersed/ to earth, and air, and water.” I’m glad I expanded on it. Because I like this idea of the body reduced down to its elements -- whether by burial or cremation -- and through serial dilution eventually spread around the planet. There is a kind of humility as well as a commonality in this:  that we are all mere ashes-to-ashes and dust-to-dust. And there is also a kind of consolation:  that life regenerates; and that -- even though consciousness ends and ego is rendered meaningless -- we are part of this continuum. 

To conclude, a few technical notes.

I’m not a gardener, but I’ve heard that asparagus grows so fast you can actually see the spears shooting up. I’ve never had a baby, but my new puppy has followed the same mammalian scheme:  first all head ...then all stomach ...then all legs. For the first 3 months, I would wake up beside her every morning and could tell that overnight she had visibly grown!

The sickly sweet scent is an allusion to fetor hepaticus. In liver failure, the breath goes from musty/sweet to rotten eggs. And in general, there is something indefinably unpleasant about the smell that hovers over a terminally ill body, bed-bound and confined to its small airless space. I heard a story about a cat who resided in a nursing home. She perched infallibly -- either a purring grim reaper, or an angel of comfort --  on the lap of each resident shortly before death. Presumably, it was an animal’s sense of smell that let her know. 

I’d prefer to have said “ ...the sickly scent of death” instead of “ ...death’s sickly scent”:  that is, using the privileged place at the end of a line (and in this case, stanza) for the word that has the most impact. Line breaks are one of the major differences -- if not the only one -- between prose and poetry. In prose, you can’t end a line wherever you want. In poetry, this choice is key. Because the final word lingers in the air and resonates for a few beats, its sound hovering in the still pause. But here, the small addition of “the” and “of” cluttered the line with too many words, and I had to shuffle things around.

I wasn’t sure whether to use “is” or “are” with “human remains”. I think either would be correct:  the term can be either plural, or a collective singular. In the end, “is” sounded better. 

The idea of this diffusion of molecules came to me from something I heard years ago. If I remember correctly, someone had calculated that every breath we take  contains at least a molecule that Napoleon breathed out. So nothing is destroyed. Everything is reduced to its elements and infinitely diluted, just as the iron-clad law of entropy dictates.