click book
The Dead Are So Disappointing
by
Katherine Fishburn

We tended the river, my father and I,
while he watched the line he had cast
I looked for life in the shallows
...you eyed my fatal collection of flies.

Calling me to his side as he stood on the bank,
he showed me a carp heavy and dark
locked in the wavering shadows of roots
...sucking the life from the rich foreign water.

When later I stumbled and fell in that water
...I fished you out:  my catch of the day
the limbs of my translated daughter
festooned with ribbons of minnows and rush.

In recasting these lines to give my life form
I often have trouble defining just what
I've been thrown and what is my own

But this much I know:  of that close summer day
when the reel stopped its turning I remember the living
...but never the drowning.

__________________________________________________________________________

Pain 6

remains
long after the proximate cause
has receded

wakening us from our dreams
of paralysis and drowning
unable to perform a Houdini
where we burst free of the water
just as our breath gives out
brought back to life
by the catch
in our spine

making us flinch at a loved one’s
light-fingered caress
until
the gesture
is
no
longer
repeated

Pain 13

is the fetal corpse
lodged in the womb
which will never emerge
by its own reckoning

but must be carried to completion
and birthed out of season
at the doctor’s command
in order to improve
the terms
of our mourning

if not our reason

Pain 21

in its effect
surpasses that of the carrion flower
whose pale yellow bud swells
in the shimmering heat
like a carmine-ringed abscess
on the soft-fleshed arms
of an otherwise
inconspicuous
African succulent

until it bursts open
with the perfectly symmetrical
stench
of decay
an odor
so loathsome
that all but the saints
and the blow flies
stay away

Pain 22

requires us to obey without question
a jealous and intemperate god
who forgives neither
willful error or chance inattention

repent as we might for our sins
there are no confessionals in this church
no intercessions or indulgences
no remission or sacrificial redemption

with this god
we’re on our own

Pain 32

bears lone witness to an extinction
one unaccompanied
by the flames that follow the sunset
instead one at the end of the cycle
when the star has flamed out
with no rebirth or reenactment
the following day

an execution
lasting forever without reprieve

as a tree
the last of its species
discovered too late
for the code breakers
to read the secrets coiled in its leaves

produces deformed blossoms
that cannot bear seeds

Pain 59

empties
the purse of charity
no longer able to swell
in the presence
of accustomed affliction

and compresses the lips
into parallel unwavering lines
that only unseal
when we eat

but with the tongue unused to tasting
the nose unused to inhaling
the body no longer takes pleasure
in letting
part of the world
come inside

_________________________________________________________________________

KATHERINE FISHBURN'S first collection of poems, The Dead Are So Disappointing, is published by Michigan State University Press (2000).  She is the author of numerous essays and scholarly books, the most recent of which is (click title of book) The Problem of Embodiment in Early African American Narrative.  Katherine Fishburn is Professor of English at Michigan State University.

The numerically ordered poems are from Katherine Fishburn's new ms, The Language of Pain.

For more information on this book: visit the Michigan State University Press Website at:

http://www.msu.edu/unit/msupress/lotus/dead.html

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