These are poems I've written both in the past few days and since 2004...they're prose, really, with little or no attention to meter, and in some they seem more like fiction. Not a poet to begin with, I am most comfortable in prose. Two of them were published in 2006 in BlazeInk.com (a webzine that no longer exists, unfortunately).


Elegy to Colin Stuart Krivy
February 23, 1967 – July 11, 2004

By Cassandra Krivy Hirsch

Imposters
I.
Night, those first months, even in the crook of Joe’s body,
Brought dreams.
Dressed as hope, they were imposters.
In one, I am with Colin in an apartment I don’t recognize.
He sits quietly, his head back, absorbing my panic,
Tells me to stop trying to change the unchangeable.
I awoke from that one looking at Joe and said,
Well, that’s just plain stupid.

II.
Weeks later Colin walks alongside me
In the street, everything around us grainy,
Like a photograph’s depth of field.
I ask him if he’s okay where he is, if he feels all right.
Yes, he tells me, I’m getting plenty of therapy so it’s going to be fine.

I’m really okay.

And I’m puzzled, even in dreaming.
Alive, Colin often poked fun at the discipline.

III.
The third came on with an aggression that left me breathless with hope
When, wrapped in my sunlit apricot walls, I awoke
Expecting to be at a dinette in a tiny kitchen,
Chin propped.
Because I saw him near the fruit market, walking into a shack,
Not the larger house where he lived.
I followed after where,
Inside I watched him move around, his steps labored,
The mild slur of his words when he spoke to me
Particles that disappeared into the air as soon as released.
He was not well and I knew: it was the brain damage,
From when the car hit him.
So happy to see him alive,
I asked him,

Do Mom and Dad know? Does Dan?

No, no one does.

Can I tell them? Can I tell everyone? People’d want to know!

Colin glanced at me, turned away.

It’s not great. I’m different. I’d prefer to be left alone.

He let me stay awhile.
Let me watch him live his labored life a few hours,
Seemed to enjoy my presence, though we hardly spoke,
Not words beyond those first I could recall in those new moments after.
Dreams may be a betrayal
But waking from them is more often
The ultimate cruelty.


It (First Autumn After)
Feeling the Toronto city streets without him, not
Eyeing the bedraggled, the pierced, the painted
Who exist to be seen,
Who normally draw even reluctant eyes.

My childhood foil, unwittingly older than my two years beyond him
From the time he was born,
Takes the purpose from my step, from his grave.
And I wander ‘round the truth of It.

I’ve come back now, this first entry to where he lived, and the after looms.
Oh, no, I won’t believe It,
Though It claps Its hands around my throat
Thwarting grief, taunting it out, then stuffing it down.

The house where he lives sits occupied by a hired warm body,
Hired by him, before, for his dog, his plants, his things,
His life left temporarily,
Though in a few short months this temporary life will be
Etched in granite.

Forever now, every visit here, the pain sometimes smile-washed
From worn skin and webbed eyes
(to make it less real for younger minds I bring into It)
Is a drive home not to a Toronto house,
But to my belligerent brain.


Rosh Hashanah
It is ten weeks now
And we are gathered all
In my parents’ home
To bring an old year

To its end, to hope
For healing. Though smiles
Divide our faces
In parts, to places

That feel unnatural,
Even singing prayers
We feel it smart, whole
Hearts cut clean by earlier
News, by death, by loss.

For the kids we tell
Ourselves to quiet rage
To turn that page so
Quickly; too, too quick.

Kubler-Ross would wag
Her head, her finger
Saying, let pain be.
Now bring her here. Now!

Make her see that not
A year has passed yet
And when it does, mind,
We – friends, sib, family –

Will come and relive
Together the thoughts
The dreams, the instant
Remembering we bargained.


Life Space
In the city where he lived
The empty space he left is altogether different.
It is everywhere I look,
While in Philadelphia, it is nowhere
But in the lurch of my mind
When I reach, from old habit, to poke at the phone, drawing up short
Before I can make the move to call him.
In Toronto, when I see a cyclist with his slighter frame,
The blunt force adjustment to fact
Makes me swallow harder, look away.
A dog like his Gabby trots past
And my head turns with it,
Following it for a few more steps.
I have talked myself momentarily into hallucination,
Spying men who look so like Colin
That if I weren’t a lucid woman,
I would stop them to peer into their faces
And prove to myself that there is only an unsatisfying likeness.
Something would be missing in the eyes
(and they would no doubt be the wrong color, blue instead of a light brown,
round instead of slightly slanted and long-lashed, further apart than mine)
The smirk would be missing that he sometimes wore,
More a clue to his clever mind than a put-down.
So, I let his feeble doppelgangers walk the earth and fool my eye.
I do not hound them with my haunted version of who they could,
Who they cannot possibly, be.


It (Redux - Second Summer After)
In one particular picture, his green-eyed Gabby, a shepherd/lab mix,
Emulates his easy grin.
She still lives, miles away.
His teaching is still part of her,
Still there in the well-mannered hello Gabby offers when she visits his aging parents.
They take her for weekends and vacations, like a child shuttled.
The dead man’s mother is still not facing It,
Still shoving it off, rebuking her dead son for his hasty leave taking.
And when the grandchildren, his nieces and nephews who can hardly piece together the
Life of their beloved dead uncle, come to visit with their own parents,
Their mother a brother short,
They fuss over their uncle’s sweet, shambling bitch, her hips gone bad,
And ask their grandmother if they can take her home.
“Because it isn’t fair,” they wail. “Gabby’s father is gone!”
And their grandmother wags her head, doleful and steadfast in her resolve
To deny It even now, two years later, and cling to what’s left,
Saying without the blade that bisects her will from unfortunate knowledge,
“Visit her and be content with that.”
And the animal senses nothing as she noses their palms.


Help
He used words no moderately
Literate reader would know on sight.
Reading his work, it behooved me
To mention his unintended slight.

To me he spoke of darkening,
Of not hiding when I met with
Themes which, first touched on, I would flee.
And try I did, upon his death

Accomplishing a gloominess,
Knowing how he has met too well
With my advice to tone it down,
Though at a price and at a bell.

It’s too, too permanent a loss.
For now his words, once loftily put
Have no chance but my effort to
Renew their interest and send them out.


Books
Now that we’re here,
I notice more
The way my parents’ home has filled with things.
Still a safe house for the treasures
My mother picks up at yard and estate sales,
Turning a few of them over on e-bay,
It has also become a repository for all of Colin’s work.
Volumes of paper, his plays, his stories,
Sit huddled in my Dad’s music room.
And in the room where Joe and I sleep,
My bedroom for one year before I married,
Colin’s down comforter covers the bed,
Some of his books are stacked on the shelves and night tables,
Books I took from his house after he died,
Books he’d owned with his name,
Slipped a piece of paper in between the pages, folded a corner.
He had, I knew, read all of his books.
It was part of his weave:
A voracious appetite for words, for language, for meter
And, I believe, the juxtaposition of this with life;
His life.
Last night in this bed I dreamt of being held, of riding in a car,
Of people riding their bikes, then being tossed in the air,
Left to die on the ground.

Bicycle
It was to be a new beginning with an open end
A tailwind and occasional grueling climbs,
A house to go to in winter, to write, to listen, to wait
And a life to meet Down Under where he would learn, for one year, to be a teacher.

Of course, he did, he learned, tossed high in the air, his helmet cracking, his skull beneath it.
And since then he teaches not children, but me.
From a now empty pine box, I listen to him coach me into a new life,
Hear him caution me not to forestall, not to excuse myself for another year.


Prophecy
When he was small, all of seven,
He could ball his fists and bruise her,
She would yelp and
Wind up punished.

He was blond and sweet, too clever
For an older sister not too spry, not quick enough
To dodge his wit, his strength, his cunning.
Yet, even small, he protected her when others bullied.

And when they grew closer in age,
Or so it seemed to others after his voice went south
His body muscled, while hers curved and softened,
She fancied he was older and her pride soared.

Until he withdrew to the basement, forsaking family.
Well, she felt the slight so that
The privilege of a visit to hear music
Was not taken lightly.
(Gary Neumann still reminds her of being 13).

Moving downtown, he chose the attic room, again away.
And she went to college, commuting.
They seldom chatted, but he called the ambulance
When she sliced her finger, and went along.

His stories, when he was small,
Were dark, funny, filled with death.
Their mother, even as he grew to write, saw herself in every word.
Saw her marriage in his plays.

He wrote one particular story perhaps as an adult,
Not with keystrokes,
Found undated days afterward,
A tale of a man whose palm spoke of a brief life,
A man who, when he left the psychic,
Found his bicycle had been stolen.


Anniversary
It was the few months before that filled her with dread
Snapped her eyes wide, drum-tucked the quilt around them,
Darkened the night and strummed at her intestines.

The month before burgled her appetite, for food, for sex.
Numbed her to her children at critical moments,
Heightened their pain for her, doused hers with It.

Mothering was easier some days, unthinkable others.

With weeks remaining, her husband lay awake too,
Understanding platitudes were banned; not like before,
In the first days after, when she wanted them to drown the roar of her anger.