The Awful Grace of God

Not death but the awareness of it. The moment
in nearly every Western ever made when the settler’s wife 

steps out onto the porch of their cabin, a baby 
on her hip and a four-year-old by her side who looks 

as worried as she does, and she sees some horsemen
on a ridge and knows they’ve not come to borrow a cup of sugar.

What must that be like. Sometimes death comes quickly—
a boy blows himself up in the marketplace, and his mother finds

a note that says, “Martyrdom is victory”—and at others
slowly, as when the pit ponies of Coalwood, West Virginia

were retired when they got too old to work so they could
spend at least a little time in the sun, yet when

new mine owners took over, the horses were loaded
onto trucks and taken to the glue factory while the men

were all down in the mine, though the women of the town
lined the streets and wept as they said goodbye

to their friends. Elizabeth says when Ned died,
it was as though he had just stepped out for a minute.

Harry is ten years younger than I am. When I used to
visit him in assisted living, he was happy when he saw

it was me, but I don’t go anymore: these days his mind 
is a glade in a forest until a scrap of memory tears through 

like a deer chased by hounds and he starts to cry.
Pain doesn’t forget, says Aeschylus, but falls drop by drop

on the heart until, against our will, wisdom comes to us
by the awful grace of God. I’m not buying it.

There’s a better way. Art, music: call it what you will.
Faces lined in pain, then soothed by the artist’s hand:

Van Gogh’s paintings, Don McLean’s song about him.
A math professor told me that when most people

talk about math, they talk about computation,
but when mathematicians talk about it, they talk about beauty.

DAVID KIRBY

David Kirby teaches at Florida State University. His latest books are a poetry collection, The Winter Dance Party: Poems 1983–2023, and a textbook modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them. He is currently on the editorial board of Alice James Books.