Ink-Stone Box — Blackbird Archive

← v15n1, Spring 2016

We carried your ashes to the pond

on White Stork Mountain, let wind

scatter them on blueberry roots and granite.

In hospice, your last breaths rasped

like waves from the pond’s dark throat;

your body lurched like driftwood.

Today I open your gift—the inkstone box—

dampen a stick of glued soot in water,

smudge it on stone. Black tears drip

into the carved dragon’s mouth.

I dip my pen and scratch

until we climb together to White Stork Tower,

live once more

for a week on nothing

but Campbell’s soup and oatmeal, listen to snow

tick on panes and cry: I’m a wedding veil

pulled over the moon’s stigmata,

a loon fluttering in the dark beyond stars.

grief mortality art

Henry Hart

Henry Hart is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Familiar Ghosts (Orchises Press, 2014), and two biographies, The Life of Robert Frost (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017) and James Dickey: The World as a Lie (Picador, 2000). His poetry and essays have appeared in The New Yorker , Gettysburg Review , Kenyon Review , New England Review , and The Southern Review , among others. He is the recipient of the Carole Weinstein Prize in Poetry and was named the poet laureate of Virginia in 2018. Hart is the Mildred and J.B. Hickman Professor of English and Humanities at the College of William & Mary.