Sutterwriters

Poems of Grief and Healing by Dennis Hock
Cover photo: Pathway at San Damiano Retreat, Danville, CA
Photo: Dennis Hock
Book design & cover by Lawrence (Chip) Spann
ISBN: 0-9754421-6-3
Library of Congress Control Number : 2006938987
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"First the tears came streaming out, then the poems."
         ~from author's introduction

The death of a father, of friends, the self-questioning of solitude — these poems take their joy from coming through. Their lucidity is earned through deep love and its counterpart, pain. I admire most their emotional complexity and unfailing craftmanship.
         ~ Dennis Schmitz

Dennis Hock converses with grief and meditates on the journey with it in words and images that are profoundly moving in their clarity, honesty, and depth. In this book, there is no hiding. But there is redemptioin.
         ~ Ann Conradsen

Poems from The Secret Cup

January 6, 1956

Mourners can't look at the children.
Most stare down at the ground,
a few gaze up at the headless vapor trail
of a jet climbing into the sun.

Nana pinches Hail Marys between her thumb and forefinger,
the sorrowful mysteries bloom like black roses on her silent lips
as the priest mumbles Latin against the hard morning air.

she is in that box—
they say she is looking down from heaven
but it took six men to carry it here—
she is in that box.

Somewhere a plum wash of dawn sky
spreads over a dark plane of water.
But here it is all earth.

And then the spadeful.

And then the words are over, and the mourners
return to their cars, putting on darkglasses against
the sharp glint of windshields and chrome bumpers.

As the father guides his four children from the grave,
they feel their bodies pulling up
like birds backing higher into the sky,
their wings flapping away from the casket

buffed and silver
and gleaming like a huge bullet
embedded in the dark green turf.

Moment of Stone

My father sits on the edge
of the hospital bed, his body
spilling into his feet,
into those paper slippers
that, like cupped diapers, catch
the waste of his bones.

A small blue spot buzzes
in his brain where the aneurysm once lived,
and he doesn't recognize his own hand
as he raises it to explore the bandage.

His doctors, smug with surgery,
talk to our family as if he weren't there,
as if he were a novel they'd read yesterday
and now are reporting on to a book club.

I lean in to look more closely at my father:
his eyes, their irises rinsed in grey,
have lost all depth, and his mouth
sucks in quick chunks of rasping air.
His brain has quit feeding.

It doesn't happen as the Incas said,
a body doesn't fade
into energy of mystic light.
It hangs around,
dense and oppressive,
while the spirit vaporizes
and the pulse hardens into flint.

But no one notices this.
Doctors brag, nurses fuss, and
my brothers and sisters joke in relief

as the mylar get-well balloons parade in
fuzzy circles of color across
the vision field of
a man's blurred extinction.

Later, our family will go across the street
for breakfast and talk of how good Dad looks.
And the weight of the thick ceramic coffee mug
will remind me of how heavy the door handle felt,
filling my hand as I left his room.

To My Granddaughter
            (on her 7th birthday)

Let me whisper you a secret:

when sun sinks into ocean at end of day
it doesn't sizzle
   because during its course across the sky
it has spent all its heat on you and other flowers
   and now is but glow without fire.

And here, a second secret:

all night long the sun travels under the earth
from west to east,
   eating from rich veins of golden ore
until it has gorged itself with new heat,
   then rises again to spill
its warmth across your waking face.

And I look upon your sleepy smile
and feel like a shy and grateful Egyptian.

Namaste

If we could only learn
to carry each other around
inside ourselves,

the loneliness that glides
  along the edge of violins,
the ineffable ache of the heart
  at sunset,
the sudden movement to tears
  as a child smiles,
the elevator drop of the brain
  when a friend dies—

If we could only learn
to carry each other around
inside ourselves,

all would fold
into prayer
and we would be healed.

Namasté

Dennis Hock, an English professor for over 30 years, currently teaches composition and creative writing at Cosumnes River College in Sacramento, California. He also works in hospitals and retreat centers with grief therapy groups that use expressive writing as a healing process. He is editor (and a contributing author) of Looking Outward, Looking Inward: A Social Ethics Reader.

The Secret Cup is his first collection of poetry.