Your weeping silver-belled tree from Japan was cut down
Your clematises, rare and common, torn from the trellises by the steps
The crocosmias from Far Reaches (“we’re here because we’re not all there”) also gone
Along with most of your poppies, that choir of colors swaying into the sunlit sidewalk
Your dahlia bulbs and scabiosa fama we tried to replant but they needed you
Your bloodroot survived (!) and blooms near our front door like a pale-yellow secret
Will the pink passionflower return with the lady birds where the MooDoo you gave us
mingles with the earth and roots?
Your wild garden—weedless, habit arranged like the collages you made, the hand
stitched quilts (of your Basement Constellation: What was I thinking?), lithographs,
lampshades—cleared to crabgrass and witch hazel, the lingering atom glads,
fenced dog-space
Nowhere for the woodcock to rest half-hidden in the overgrowth
After you moved back to the city, sixteen floors up with no stairs to fight, closer to your
doctors, shows to see, but the neighbors like ghosts and the secondhand grass
smoke pouring in through the air ducts
La Mama King Gilgamesh and the Man of the Wild CTof H – Twelfth Night Both thrilling
Books and booklets (as we used to say all killer no filler), washi-paper kites, yards and
squares and scraps of fabric, stamps, poppy seeds, floating-world Edo prints,
illustrations of plants and birds, Norteño vinyl and Monk vinyl, collage material,
shears, rakes, glass syringes, call bells. . .
Day’s ukiyo-e, Kuzunoha with a brush in her mouth, counterspirals out from the wall
The slow dispersal of possessions lightening your house a ritual distraction
Of the house next door: You missed more moonlight sonata followed by vigorous tearing
up of sheet music on the porch, stomping etc.
Your kimonos you shipped to a scholar in Berkeley not knowing she had recently lost
her own collection in a fire outside London
Your Chevie pickup truck with the stiff clutch you sold to Katie (cut key: “Brakes ‘drag’ or
‘snatch’”) and your powder blue Volvo B18—an early spring and autumn car—to
Ανδρέα (Ahn-dray-ah)—both for a dime
The tailoring manuals and hat mold you gave to Thomas, moon and eclipse diagrams to
Andrea, barrister to Pat, poppy seeds to Vaughn and Jeffie, more bookcases and
seeds to XYandZ, purple martin house to James, silk fabric trapunto batting plants
etc. to Michelle, couch to Andy, display cabinet, nightstand, sideboard to Walter, a
mask to your mechanic, oak desk to Dennis, yarn to Q, lamps and agastache to
Graciela, more books to Charles, credenza to any passerby, bundles of this and that
to friends and neighbors near and far
The quarts of Nancy’s yogurt you purchased for random giveaways
Your plast roast beef required special handling, ditto your preserved mantis on a leaf
(hope it survives the photoshoot), monarch butterfly, northern flicker feathers,
antlers, eggshells of birds . . .
In the end you threw out those old letters from bell hooks
Your face fell when you saw the waterfall rushing down your basement wall
My lawyer has a guy who ‘will make things go away’ (his actual words!) No problem with
hazmat, 12 foot bamboo etc.
Farschlepte krank is the word you used to describe the long move back to the city,
where, in another life, you were once a worker bee at a large corporate press now
twice as large and cored with data munging, demand forecasting, DevOps
measurement and optimization, “applied Bayesian modeling/inference or machine
learning techniques to real world data.” The standing crystal book-plaque you
received for 15 years of labor you regifted to me with professionally etched edits
I know one word of German ~ Stauber
When Pat died we barely knew her. Her sister had donated a kidney to her and she was
on a medley of meds and always between doctors—had major body chemistry
problems since childhood and seemingly an endless war with insurance/medicare
etc. A neighbor and a policeman stopped me on her porch the Sunday night when
you asked me to check on her. Woody had been barking inside all day, alone. The
last thing Pat wrote you: “Every time I travel it’s an ordeal of sorts.” “I cooked an
actual turkey yesterday, small.” “Gratitude Day” “It’s snowing like crazy on the hill.”
“What did you do-parade?” You found some of Pat’s photographs in The New
Weird America with her bio—“her work is rooted in lifestyle choices that exist
outside mainstream culture and the changing roles of image-making at the turn of
the century. . .”— and a contributor photo of her younger, holding a bandaged teddy bear and its missing arm
Brightly knit tea towels among the last things Pat made—I still have mine—yours you
sent me a photo of the following year on her birthday
And the mantis—they say—you lead lost children—home—forever after
I had a set-back on the vertebrae so trying to travel light and less often
No trip to Japan scheduled around several kite festivals, no Roden Crater in 2025, no
more train rides upriver
I started getting a dropfoot . . . T4 nerve etc
The gardening practices of the Grounds Committee you called corporate communism
not gardening but landscaping
Waiting in line for a covid test No forms Just a ‘kiosk’ with 35 people in line behind me
thinking what is her problem?
The post office was an energizing nexus for you as it was for the seeing-eye potato
masher
Outside the competition, outside the marketplace
Sometime between 1985 and 1995 you bought the Ray Johnson exhibition pamphlet at
Jaap Rietman’s bookstore, published by Galleria Schwarz, 20121 Milano, Via Gesù
17, with an essay by Henry Martin in three languages
Oxygen tubing your wake as you voyaged around your room
Growing lighter and lighter, eating fluids
You craved the Pacific, the frozen custard in Hopewell, the watermelon from a truck in
Newburgh
Savoring the delights in Syzmborska’s How to Stop Writing (and When to Stop)—I just
bought 8 more copies—Henry Mitchell, Gayl Jones, Moritz Thomsen, Lucy Sante,
Thimble Magic!, Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, Textiles Asia,
Yield: The Journal of an Artist, The Philosopher’s Kite, Our Insect Enemies,
Hambone: 5—purchased from City Lights—The End of War . . .
Do our memories of those gone create the life they will become? Here and within,
between and without
I was actually thrilled to hear/see blue jays yesterday
In an old photograph you’re an art student at Santa Cruz, sitting in a living room in a
studio in the Hillside Colony in San Diego the summer you worked at a hotel
cleaning bathrooms
The hidden corners of a life only one knows, conceals, or forgets—into air
The world used to be more genuinely fun
Your favorite movie takes place after you die, at the abandoned Tsukishima Fisheries
Experiment Station, unnamed in the film as a liminal space where you arrive on a
Monday, through the winter fog and torii-like doorway, bell tolling, before being
ushered into the lobby where you wait with the others until you’re called into a
room to talk to a staff worker who confirms your identity and the day of your death
and apologizes for your loss and then tells you that you have three days to choose a
single memory you’d want to take with you into the afterlife, a memory that would
be reconstructed analogically on a film set (with actors and costumes, wads of
cotton on wires for passing clouds, water from a spray bottle for sweat, a real bench
to sit on, etc.) and shot as a memory-scene that you’d watch in the small theater on
Saturday, a matinee, and then disappear into eternity, while those unable to choose
a memory, those who refuse, become a worker at the facility or another facility
until they do
And the mantis will guide you on Bispo do Rosário’s Grande Veleiro past the seven
cataracts to the House of Osiris
You name it—my grandfather had a hunting license for it & my grandmother cooked it
Your metal coat stand, as if smuggled out of the Zone, waits for you by the doorway and
shouts “Come in!”
You already had the keys to your new place, smoke-free, the packing and sorting all over
again, the further dispersal (more textiles and kimonos to SoHarlem), then vertigo,
what savings left you said you’d leave to nonprofits and others who can deal with
the taxes
The lines of the aquarium you typed and cut and collaged into Aoki’s Grammar and
Composition with sea creatures for me
I’ve bent and lifted my last
In the body of your window with the flowing drapes, inked lines, falling squares, gridded
cutting mat rectangle glass panes, a faint blue watercolor wash, faint bleeding
cloth-red, two buttons “Under Sleeve,” upside down iron connected to gallbladder,
bile duct keyed to knitting stitch, in one corner cut and pasted “Take out the pins,
as you come to them,” and below center “Dear Girls: You have now become old
enough to prepare for woman’s duties ; one of these is the art of” above cradled
hands with needles and yarn above “Self Preservation”
“No, my friend did not pass into nothingness; no matter what barrier may separate us, I
will see her again. . . . The flight of an insect through the air is enough to convince
me” (XdM, tr. RH)
Susan Stauber (1954–2024)
Jeffrey Yang is the author of the poetry collections Line and Light (Graywolf Press, 2022), Hey, Marfa (Graywolf Press, 2018), Vanishing-Line (Graywolf Press, 2011), and An Aquarium (Graywolf Press, 2008). He is the translator of Bei Dao's Sidetracks (New Directions, 2024); Ahmatjan Osman’s Uyghurland, the Farthest Exile (Phoneme Media, 2015), cotranslated with the author; Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies (Graywolf Press, 2012); Su Shi’s East Slope (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008); and Bei Dao’s autobiography City Gate, Open Up (New Directions, 2017). He edited the anthologies Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems (New Directions, 2011), Time of Grief: Mourning Poems (New Directions, 2013), and the collection The Sea Is a Continual Miracle: Sea Poems and Other Writings by Walt Whitman (University Press of New England, 2017). Yang works as an editor at New Directions Publishing and the New York Review of Books. He lives in Beacon, New York.