Liberty from Porcelain

Sorting through the piles, stacks and heaps of books waiting for shelf space at Raymond’s house in Baton Rouge is a search guaranteed to uncover yet another outstanding read. I’ve done a lot of that in the past week or so, but until Monday morning missed the third pile to the left of the window, next to a shelf of biographies in front of an easy chair and under an end table in front of a box of grandbaby toys. Thanks to the gift from Raymond of a book of essays a while back, I have become a great fan of Thomas Lynch’s writing.

Lynch is an undertaker in a small Michigan town, but also a writer of international renown and author of poetry, essays, a memoir and a collection of fiction. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and the The London Review of Books. The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (2009) was a finalist for the National Book Award. His other work includes Still Life in Milford: Poems, Booking Passage, Bodies in Motion and at Rest, Grimalkin & Other Poems and most recently, Apparition & Late Fictions. Lynch lives in Milford, Michigan, and West Clare, Ireland.

His poem “Liberty” is included in the 1998 collection, Still Life in Milford. Lynch’s unusual mix of occupations—running a family mortuary and writing—has enabled him to observe the human condition without the distraction of sentimentality, a style reflected in his 1987 debut book of poems, Skating with Heather Grace, and in the essays from The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. The poems in Still Life in Milford speak of Lynch’s family history, the death of his father, and the recently departed residents of Milford.

LIBERTY

Some nights I go out and piss on the front lawn

as a form of freedom—liberty from

porcelain and plumbing and the Great Beyond

beyond the toilet and the sewage works.

Here is the statement I am trying to make:

to say I am from a fierce bloodline of men

who made their water in the old way, under stars

that overarched the North Atlantic where

the River Shannon empties into sea.

The ex-wife used to say, “Why can’t you pee

in concert with the most of humankind

who do their business tidily indoors?”

It was gentility or envy, I suppose,

because I could do it anywhere, and do

whenever I begin to feel encumbered.

Still, there is nothing, here in the suburbs,

as dense as the darkness in West Clare

nor any equivalent to the nightlong wind

that rattles in the hedgerow of whitethorn there

on the east side of the cottage yard in Moveen.

It was market day in Kilrush, years ago:

my great-great-grandfather bargained with tinkers

who claimed it was whitethorn that Christ’s crown was made from.

So he gave them two and six and brought them home—

mere saplings then—as a gift for the missus,

who planted them between the house and garden.

For years now, men have slipped out the back door

during wakes or wedding feasts or nights of song

to pay their homage to the holy trees

and, looking up into that vast firmament,

consider liberty in that last townland where

they have no crowns, no crappers and no ex-wives.

The line near the middle, ‘on the east side of the cottage yard in Moveen’ refers to the poet’s home in Ireland. Moveen is a townland on the westernmost peninsula of County Clare, where Lynch keeps a cottage that once belonged to his great-great-grandparents. It was there his great-great-grandmother planted the whitethorn between house and garden.

She Dreams, He Snores…

Finally made my way to reading another of those gift books, one shuttled off to the side and forgotten for a long while, and as happens was once more surprised by a writer previously unfamiliar. Kind of a 'late to the party’ feeling about it, but fortunately there is nothing at all dated about the writing of Thomas Lynch. His themes are as relevant today as they will be a hundred years from now. The book here before me is a book of essays from 1997, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. Wonderful title and one with a direct reference to the day to day work of Lynch, which is that of undertaker in a small Michigan town. Notwithstanding, he is a writer-poet of international fame and author of four collections of poetry, two books of essays, a memoir and one collection of fiction. I have the poetry collections to look forward to, but in the meantime read, reread and relish every line and paragraph of The Undertaking. The poem below is collected in Lynch’s 1999 Still Life in Milford: Poems, but first appeared in an essay titled, “Mary & Wilbur” one that is a part of The Undertaking. The poem was written to commemorate the re-opening of an old bridge in Milford that was at one time slated for demolition.

“AT THE OPENING OF OAK GROVE CEMETERY BRIDGE”

Before this bridge we took the long way around

up First Street to Commerce, then left at Main,

taking our black processions down through town

among storefronts declaring Dollar Days!

Going Out of Business! Final Mark Downs!

Then pausing for the light at Liberty,

we’d make for the Southside by the Main Street bridge

past used car sales and party stores as if

the dead required one last shopping spree

to finish their unfinished business.

Then eastbound on Oakland by the jelly-works,

the landfill site and unmarked railroad tracks—

by bump and grinding motorcade we’d come

to bury our dead by the river at Oak Grove.

And it is not so much that shoppers gawked

or merchants carried on irreverently.

As many bowed their heads or paused or crossed

themselves against their own mortalities.

It’s that bereavement is a cottage industry,

a private enterprise that takes in trade

long years of loving for long years of grief.

The heart cuts bargains in a marketplace

that opens after-hours when the stores are dark

and Christmases and Sundays when the hard

currencies of void and absences

nickel and dime us into nights awake

with soured appetites and shaken faith

and a numb hush fallen on the premises.

Such stillness leaves us moving room by room

rummaging through cupboards and the closetspace

for any remembrance of our dead lovers,

numbering our losses by the noise they made

at home—in basements tinkering with tools

or in steamy bathrooms where they sang in the shower,

in bedrooms where they made their tender moves;

whenever we miss that division of labor

whereby he washed, she dried; she dreams, he snores;

he does the storm window, she does floors;

she nods in the rocker, he dozes on the couch;

he hammers a thumbnail, she says Ouch!

The bridge allows a residential route.

So now we take our dead by tidy homes

with fresh bedlinens hung in the backyards

and lanky boys in driveways shooting hoops

and gardens to turn and lawns for mowing

and young girls sunning in their bright new bodies.

First to Atlantic and down Mont-Eagle

to the marshy north bank of the Huron

where blue heron nest, rock bass and bluegill

bed in the shallows and life goes on.

And on the other side, the granite rows

of Johnsons, Jacksons, Ruggles, Wilsons, Smiths—

the common names we have in common with

this place, this river and these winteroaks.

And have, likewise in common, our own ends

that bristle in us when we cross this bridge—

the cancer or the cardiac arrest

or lapse of caution that will do us in.

Among these stones we find the binding thread:

old wars, old families, whole families killed by flues,

a century and then some of our dead

this bridge restores our easy access to.

A river is a decent distance kept.

A graveyard is an old agreement made

between the living and the living who have died

that says we keep their names and dates alive.

This bridge connects our daily lives to them

and makes them, once our neighbors, neighbors once again.