A short time ago, in nurturing and stoking an unhealthy devotion to Miss Marple—surely it happens to us all?—I began to contemplate the precise reasons for my ardor. Her sartorial verve, general snappishness, and kettle skills were certainly factors. But I had to admit that it was Miss M’s confounding, staunch, and ultimately delightful refusal to reflect upon death that really Did It for me. And the longer I tarried down such thoughtful roads, the more I realized how many other fictional detectives shared the same mesmerizing obtuseness. They wonder, collectively, about motive. But, the true poets amongst us, they glide about the edges of their central preoccupation, prodding at meaning—death—only peripherally, and with the jaunty stoicism of the unruffled. Profound and permanent loss is an inconvenience: a crunched scone, a missed bus. They do not, it seems, mourn. But sorrow, however silent and embarrassed, remains, I think, at the spine of these stories. These reflections on Jessica Fletcher (Murder, She Wrote) and Nancy Drew, then, are part of a larger project, a poem series, in which I pair a fictional detective with one of the classic stages of grief.
Lunch, slim bricks of rye, the vomit that is chicken salad.
Tiny-eyed Hannah, she of cottage cheese lumps, how she wheedles.
"I will, but will not like, planting scilla, tart." Finger-dagger the soil,
its weak and sniveling wet. Portent.
Later, how I will flick dirt from beneath Prima Ballerina Rose,
how I will stain the ivory broadloom in proof of the ways we’ve failed.
Dad, I don’t care, never did, where the clock is. The staircase
can twist and twist and emerge, well, only up.
Dark. The day passed out and drooling, I gather Ned
crush him to my heart scab, my chest’s itchy skin. There is this
and then there is what I wanted.
Friends, no engineer could build the bridge that links the two.
I clamp the kitchen counter, thumb to palm. Come closer
and I’ll burn you.Watch how I char the eggs instead,
watch how the mangled edges burn, rush weakly in.
For all the ways we knew the world.
The mailman, for instance, came, comes at two. The milk,
If properly cooled, rarely sours. Cumulus nimbus, they disperse.
And I pretended, reasonably, to be wise.
But life is—who suspected?— mere picnic blanket, grabbed at the edges,
Just, and tossed cruelly open, free.
Loves, we roll, idiot stray crumbs, through our broken days.
Loves, how I loved you all.
And watched, true, as death lit his eyes on your apricot youths.
The sun splinters on the Atlantic, its mean chops.
But am I right? The boats skip regardless from the harbor,
flit little handkerchief sails. And though I mistreat them
the daffodils preen. The afternoon brightens, sighs, clumps happily on.
Fine. I push my cuticles too far, wince at the platitudes
I mutter in the bathtub. How to get out?
Dry off? What don’t I miss.
