Bone Rosary

New & Selected Poems

Thomas Lynch

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781780376189
• eBook ISBN: 9781780376196
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

America's much celebrated poet-undertaker Thomas Lynch is renowned for his thought-provoking poems on life, faith, doubt and death. This new retrospective shows the passage of his work over time, 'a pilgrimage of sorts through growing old and facing death – subjects that caregivers know all too well. Lynch's upfront, unvarnished style is likely to resonate with many who have come face to face with life's most important questions' (Mary Plummer, New York Times). Lynch – like Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams – is a poet who writes about real things with language rooted in the everyday yet masterfully infused with power. He spent his working life as an undertaker in Midwest America, becoming in his off-hours a writer of exceptional insight with much to say about life's questions and mysteries – big and small. Drawing on his own daily routine, he transforms the mundane task of preparing the dead into life-affirming accounts of how we live our lives. His lyrical, elegiac poems describe the dead citizens of of his home town, his own family relationships, and scenes and myths from his Irish Catholic upbringing.

193

CLOUD OF WITNESSES: NEW POEMS

194

A Laving Song

By water and the ancient codes we claim

this wriggling child for our kind and tribe

and call down blessings in the Blessed Name

of Nature and Creation, praying, “God,

God, safeguard this human against all evils.

Save him from cruel happenstance and cold.

Let him outlive us by a hundred years,

awash in grace, made fierce by faith, grown old

and wise, free of our most grievous foibles.

Today we proclaim he is one of ours,

with chrisms and singing, candles aflame

with Pentecostal tongues and paschal light

by which we reckon he will find his way

back home to you in the fullness of time.

And so we hold him up to heaven’s face

(See how he reaches for the bright abyss!)

so You will recognize one of Your own,

and know his voice when he cries out to You

as he most surely will; as we all do.

We call upon his cloud of witnesses—

our ancients and elders and our long lost—

to breathe into him all the holy ghosts

by whom we are well haunted and still blessed

and beckoned to what is or isn’t next.

195

Libra

The one who pulled the trigger with his toe,

spread-eagled on his girlfriend’s parents’ bed,

and split his face in halves above his nose,

so that one eye looked east, the other west;

sometimes that sad boy’s bifurcation seems

to replicate the math of love and grief—

that zero sum of holding on and letting go

by which we split the differences with those

with whom we occupy the present moment.

Sometimes I see that poor corpse as a token

of doubt’s sure twin and double-mindedness,

of certainty, the countervailing guess,

the swithering, the dither, righteousness,

like Libra’s starry arms outstretched in love

or supplication or, at last, surrender

to the scales forever tipped in the cold sky.

196

Accordion

We’d been invited to a

neighborhood do:

a graduation maybe,

or a barbecue.

We were underdressed,

the missus and me,

but I had my accordion

which is, unfailingly,

a compensation.

Whatever happened

there was this chute—

like the slides

we played on

in our childhoods.

It ascended

from the center of

the neighbors’ yard

into the heavens

beyond the sky

like a spiral staircase

without the steps.

And it came into my brain

they’d like to hear something

from the topmost

heights of it. So

I began to climb

on all fours

with the accordion

on my back

wheezing out the

occasional chord,

myself huffing197

and puffing with the

baffling labor of it;

my wife’s sweet face

gaping heavenw...

Table of contents

• Description
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Cloud of Witnesses: An Introduction
• from SKATING WITH HEATHER GRACE
• from GRIMALKIN & OTHER POEMS
• from STILL LIFE IN MILFORD
• from WALKING PAPERS
• from THE SIN-EATER: A BREVIARY
• CLOUD OF WITNESSES: NEW POEMS
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Also by Thomas Lynch
• Copyright