print previewback CAMILLE DUNGY
Notes on What Is Always with Us
This week I threw a birthday party for my mother, and grief came along
with the cake.
Grief didn’t seem to have a place at this party,
but grief would not stay away.
Ten mothers at my mother’s birthday dinner,
three of them bereaved of a child.
The dead celebrated right there with the living.
We asked grief to be quiet, but she smiled, smacked her lips, and tore into her steak.
~
On land, adult penguins have no natural predators.
The big bad wolf is not, in Antarctica, a problem.
No lions, no tigers, no bears.
Penguin eggs and penguin chicks are always at the mercy of skua and disaster,
but even from the leopard seal and orca the land hauled adult penguin is safe.
I am trying to write about penguins, about predatorless terrains.
I am trying to write about joy and a kind of cold beauty,
but grief won’t stay away.
Grief will ride in on the smallest of bodies, a tick on a cormorant’s wing.
If the winter isn’t cold enough to kill it,
that tick will embed itself in a penguin’s neck, the back of her head, anywhere
the penguin cannot reach,
and because she has no way to tell anyone
and because, even if she could convey her agony,
there would be no way for her fellow birds to help,
she will itch for a while, swell for a while, then abandon her nest for the water’s relief.
She will run and slide and dive into danger.
Her eggs will die and her chicks will die
and she may die as well.
I am trying to write about predatorless terrains,
but grief will ride in on the smallest of bodies, a tick on a cormorant’s wing.
~
I try to write everything down, because I know it would be easier
to forget and I want to
avoid the comforts of suppression.
Scouring journals for my notes about seabird ticks and their toll
on Antarctic penguin populations, I find a different set of notes.
I’d written, The only time I really talked to you was in your Trenton kitchen,
though what I meant was that was the only time I ever saw you genuinely smile.
The baby needed food, and you,
just back from pushing his stroller on a long walk
during which you and he both watched the morning sun shine
on the faded splendor of those Trenton streets,
were boiling a hot dog for your only son, and smiling.
There are things I do not want to say, I said in my journal.
Except the not saying won’t return anything you love.
The boy is dead. The boy’s mother is dead.
I was trying to write about beauty, but grief won’t stay away.
I was trying to write about babies and birthdays and birds.
I was trying to write about joy. 
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Notes on What Is Always with Us