PAT TRAXLER LAYS HER HEAD ON THE PILLOW

 In one of his essays, Edgar Allen Poe summarizes one of the essential elements of his philosophical musings by asserting that we are cursed with "the memory from before birth," a slight and wavering recall of a time when calm and serenity were in place. Nothing of the distortions or crass money, family, or religion made us nervous, devious, only half alive (if "alive" at all). The ideas concerned our constant and, at times, overwhelming desire to return to such a nocturnal, darkened, stress-less state. It was a yearning to return to the womb, perhaps. Whatever the motivation, these were longing for death-like sleep, a patent serenity. Following suit are Poe's peculiar interest in things decadent and decaying, those thin, reedy and tubercular characters of diseased gentry and errant aristocratic stock who hang on to the waking life by a mere thread, effete and defeated and gracefully blended into the material realm, waiting for gravity to take its toll and to become themselves receivers of the dirt nap, free of the binds that only punish you for having nerve endings.

Among the decadent writers and artists following Poe, there was literal worship of an aesthetic principle that the most remarkable beauty was in a person or a thing in its decline when it was letting go of the struggle and was reduced to its basic, most faithful and frailest form. An aspect of this, I suspect, was the envy of the declining aesthetic object, be it a human or a diseased elm; a deep and permanent rest awaited them, and death would be that thing that gives the lie to the certitude of philosophy or economic determinism that insist that life must forever be thus, a certain way, without change. Those who die have escaped, and there are no arms to bring them back to suffer more with the rest of us pining over a grave.

Poet Patricia Traxler gets all this wonderfully, succinctly in her poem, The Dead Are Not, published online this week at Slate; the poem is brief, and each finessed line conveys the complicated, conflicting, and confused set of emotions one journey through as yet another death comes closer to one's inner circle of confidants and family. Indeed, the dead are not dead yet,

Always they take

their time and we wait

politely, dreading

how real it will

have to be, sooner

or later, and at the

same time longing

to know that reality.

One has arguments with the departed, negotiations still in session, curses and protests of undying love are uttered, self-recrimination and blaming goes on for days and nights until one tires of their tears and breathes easier sunrises still come in spite the weight of grief. We mutter to ourselves that the dead are "in a better place," that they "felt no pain," or that.

"...at least they died quick..." all so we get on with our lives and our responsibilities. Yet, an echo of our accepting rhetoric stays with us as we shoulder our daily duties. That "better place" doesn't sound so bad. We become envious and petty all over again, we blame the dead for being cowards and laggards who would do anything to shirk their duty, and we come to envy them and that place they've gone. Gravity takes its toll, our bones ache, the mailbox is filled with bills, someone else you know has told you they have a fatal disease, your back hurts like shit:

Nights, as we reach

to switch off our bed lamps

and close our eyes,

we dare it to take us

into its mouth

that smells of tar,

saltwater, sludge,

take us up, then let us

tumble endlessly,

blameless again

and helpless as any new life

forced out for the first time

into the terrible light.

Traxler gets to the center of that guilty little secret at the core of grieving, the scourge of envy, and the many faces and tones of voice it takes. Without metaphysical baloney, faux piety, or even a tone of anger, she writes in the cool, reflective calm of someone who has investigated their feelings and discovered an unknown fact about their thinking. This poem has the remarkable clarity of genuine self-sight, unnerving in its tone, beautifully expressed. Her skill gives us the chance to see something very private, unobscured by wishful thinking. An excellent poem.