They Closed His Eyes

by Brett Rutherford

     after Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

I went to visit a dying friend,
for one last time. His eyes
were open. I took his bony hand
and pressed it. His fingers clutched
at life, and he gasped a name
(not mine) and said, "I always
loved you best of all." I lied,
and said I loved him equally.

No mother, brother, lover, son,
no sister, cousin or father
came to stand by as the tubes
were removed, the machine
silenced and wheeled away.

They closed his eyes
that were open still
and wanted to be open
still for the coming sunrise
mirror red on the East River.
They hid his face
with a white linen.

And out of nowhere
anonymous mourners came,
some sobbing, some silent.
They come each day, I am told,
and they come for everyone
who has no one. They stood
as the bed frame was dropped
and the wheeled death-cart
was moved to its side.
From the sad sickroom,
they moved away like shadows
and vanished in the corridor.

In a dish, the night candle
burned on a low table.
It cast on the wall
the deathbed's outline,
and in that shadow
the sharp lines
of his wasted body.

The dawn appeared
pearl white and then ruby red.
With a thousand noises
the city exploded to life:
horns, sirens, jackhammers
and the mournful hum
of traffic far below.
As ordinary light
cascaded into the death-room,
I thought a moment:

How much more lonely than we
are the newly-dead!

On the shoulders of men
who did not know his name,
gloved and face-masked
against the feared contagion
they bore him away
and in a chapel left
the freshly-wrapped body
on a plywood bier.
A number was stenciled there.
Then others surrounded
his pale body
with yellow candles
and things of black crèpe
disposable grief that had
no shape but the wing-edge
of a dusty raven, no use
except to fill the space
between the corpse
and the imaginary public.

No one came. Well, almost
no one: a bag lady crone
put down her burden and knelt,
mumbled some prayers
and shuffled off. She crossed
the narrow nave. Door moaned,
opened without a hand
upon it to let her out.
The holy place was quiet,
a cell of silence as a barrage
of taxi hails and basketball
court echoes filtered in
through a broken window.
One pigeon fluttered in,
cooed disapproving
that it was not a rice-wedding
then flapped away.

I was directed there.
Some hours had passed.
I stood alone, or nearly so.
A young priest approached,
saw who and what was there
to be blessed and buried,
covered his face,
and hurried away.
My ears reached out
until I could hear
the chapel's one clock
in measured ticking.
A bank of candles
to one side of the nave
took to guttering
at the same beat
as my own breathing.

All things here
were so dark and mournful,
rigid and cold,
not even a tear was welcome,
and I thought for a moment:

How much more lonely than we
are the newly-dead!

Should there not be
a legion of mourners?
Should he not be
where all who knew him
could gather and mourn?
I imagine the high belfry
of his New England town,
the iron tongue clanging
of the funeral bells,
mournful in last farewell.
Veils and black suits,
eyes cast down in grief,
his friends and relatives
passed in a line and shook
each other's hands, and hugged.

And in that high place
in the old family's last vault,
dark and narrow,
crowded with his ancestors,
the crowbar opened
a niche at one end,
and they laid him away there,
then sealed it up
amid a hecatomb of camellias.
Newspapers would show
the memorial plaque;
friends would come annually.

But this was not to be.
New England paid no dues
to a death in New York,
a death of that kind among
those kinds of people.

The body, on its plywood
plinth, would go instead
into a plywood casket,
then onto a barge,
with hundreds of like kind,
piled high and hauled across
to the Potter's Field
on desolate Hart Island.

Pick-axe on shoulder,
the convict gravedigger,
cursing his lot in dawn-fog,
stood on a mound. His box,
among many other
numbered boxes, dropped
into a numbered plot.

Not a word was said,
not even a prayer.

It was silent. Only now,
after years of dream-dread
can I see it: headlong,
crooked, piled one
upon another at crazy angles,
a quilt of coffins, at last
death's final suffocation
into a nameless grave.

And I sit up in my bed
and think:

How much more lonely than we
are the unmarked dead!

On winter nights
in bitter darkness,
when wind makes
the rafters chatter,
when whipped rain
lashes the window panes,
in such a lonely time
I remember my poor friend,
and the nameless dead
heaped up with him:
how many had I touched?
how many had touched me?

There on Hart Island,
in the pit full of brother-souls,
do they hear the rain
with its same yet ever-
changing monody?
Do they hear the winds'
stern fights across the bay,
the tug boats, the fog-horns,
the sway-song of tides buoyed
by the revolving moon?
Do their bones freeze
with the cold of winter?

Does dust to dust return?
Do souls abandoned by earth
have any place in any heaven?
Or is it all the rot of matter,
organic filthiness and worms?

I do not know. I tramp most
graveyards merrily. I am not
a morose or gloomy soul, and yet,

something there is — something
that treads behind my nights
with loathing and terror.

City of a billion lights, city
of symphonies and towers
aspiring to Promethean heights:
how did a hundred thousand souls
perish in your averted gaze?
A hundred thousand brother-dead
I cannot begin to mourn and cannot
even count.

How much more lonely than we
are the hundred thousand dead
who have gone on without us?

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870), a Spanish poet from Seville, influenced by E.T.A Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine, wrote an elegiac poem titled "They Closed Her Eyes." I have gender-changed, "written over," and expanded upon his poem for this work, which is in memory of the 100,000 fatalities from HIV in New York during the 1980s, specifically those who wound up in Potter's Field because no family would claim their bodies.