Jay Johnson, "Alabaster Cave," 2012
1. Belay
A half-buried boulder or an ancient pine will do for an anchor if I’m to come back. Black basalt, soot-blackened bristlecone where I set my tie-in, wearing the bright biting jewelry (cams, nuts, hexes) for an ascent later, jingling as I lean backwards over the shaft—this hell-mouth whose headframe timbers have rotted away. I loosen my grip (rope smooth as a whip snake) and glide down, down into dark.
Down into dark, the place where coarse- grained rock scoffs at my descent, brakes my entry. This is the place beyond light. I carry a moon on my forehead, see the shine as I scroll down from basalt to wet gabbro. Weak orb smaller than my hand, pinpricking light like stars in the faceted, mafic stone. I can’t see my hands, now, but I feel them—warmed as the friction slows me. I’ll need friction to rise again.
O Geographers, there’s no map you can give me better than my own fingertips to guide me along the whorled topographies of this crumbling mineshaft. I’ll orient by by the rope remaining, by the silver dollar of my headlamp—a coin tossed into the seep so far below. I’ve come to retrieve something, leave something, mourn my beloved dead who begged for death while alive. I’ve come to dig within the waste.
2. Taharah
I’ve come to retrieve my father’s body, to free it from service to its own decay. I have come to bury his body myself, in winding sheets soaked in benzoin and slaked lime, his body turning the color of tannic water as he lay dying. He was light as a bird, flesh tapering down to bone, and yet I know I’ll find it impossible to carry him up and out of here now he’s dead. If I can find him. If I (dulled with grief) can find my way home.
I sat with him, at the end, talked to him even though he gave no sign of hearing my brave chatter—firstborn child, a daughter trying to shepherd him safely through dying. What did I know, did I think I knew, that would help? I knew the names of so many things he wasn’t interested in (although even before then, he had been slowly collapsing within himself, no interest in new things as the old things slid by, unreal as a city shimmering in a heat mirage.)
He didn’t know where he was. All his maps all gone, the man who never traveled without one told the doctor he was in Connecticut with his cousins, maybe, or an aunt. I never had a poker face—he could tell he’d misspoken and yet did not know how. We were in the desert, not the verdant East, we were wandering in the desert parched, waiting for Miriam’s Well to reopen, but it would not. He had forgotten how to ask, how to eat, forgotten everything but the pain.
3. Bottom
The moon’s below me when I look down, a sump pump having trapped it in a jet black pool. At the end of my rope and the climb down, edges bleed into edges, dissolve into the shape of my shadow cast on the walls. Knee-deep, stepping into it and holding. Gathering my gear. A slow incline, a slow walk—wading through the sharp-smelling runoff towards a slight movement of air. A lateral shaft that opens into a natural cavern. I mark an entry. My small moon, lighting up pearls on stalagmites.
A room of salt, and calcium, and damp. So much like the bodies we are, the bodies we were. Even here, animal life—blind, translucent creatures— move towards food and love, away from pain, the way I do. (At the end of his rope, my father pinned by pain—moving away from food, pushing away at love. Every touch, branding by fire.) My father who tossed me in the air when I was four, topsy-turvy, both of us laughing as he’d catch me over again. I stand, unable to cry, my cheeks wet from the seep.
4. Remains
Transformed in dying, he resembled those sleepers found preserved in bogs. I didn’t want to wake him, since every last waking touch had been agony; and now, a mottled, desiccated wholeness—unwakeable. What was left of my father was inaccessible, but not yet gone. There was no comfort in being with him, solace remote as the clouds beyond the mountains to the east, but I stayed long as I could, wanting to ease his passage away, away, to comfort him as he’d comforted me when I was a small child, as he left us.
There was a service. There were words we said, in Hebrew and in English. There were honors, and a folded flag in somber ceremonies of presentation. We were his children, his kin, his friends, but he’d gone. After taps, the silence. The dry seed coils of Chilean mesquite rattled in the wind, a thin snare, scrub peyos. The seeds traveled from the Atacama to attend. I took two brittle pods, these seeds that traveled, so like my father, so like me, so far away from where we came, not close to where we’d go.
5. Ascent
Months have passed, or minutes. One moon’s burnt out, and a second, but I have a third full of light thin and blue as skim milk, and in that weak moonlight I find my rope, loop a friction knot, hitch myself up out of the runoff. What I’d come to retrieve I’ve found, and pocketed. What I’d come to leave, I’ve left in a cave wet with precipitate, with tears. My father’s body helped create mine—it’s gone from my sight, untraceable. A loop, a knot; I’m rising up, out.
6. Kaddish
Not the great howl of other poets, for me. I’ll sit with my grief, I’ll say Kaddish (not as we’re told—to pray it in a group—but alone, without regard for tradition), I’ll forget the words. It’s possible words have left me altogether. I will continue this holy sacrilege silently, holding a memory of my father when he was younger, when I was a small child, when he’d toss me up in the air, both of us laughing, and I’d fall back safe in his arms. This will be my yahrzeit.
