Reprise: Like coffins falling off a truck
David Groff's "Disbelieving These Deaths, I Go to Sit by Lake Hebron"
Originally published on How to Grow a Poem in January 2024.
The interplay of what’s literal and the self-aware metaphors in David Groff’s “Disbelieving These Deaths, I Go to Sit by Lake Hebron” offers the reader one point of fascination in an endlessly fascinating poem.
But it’s not always easy to say which is which. Or even to know if it’s necessary to distinguish between the two, as narrative and metaphor mingle and merge and toy with one another in the waters of a biblically named lake in Maine in which discarded slabs of slate are coffins—or discarded slabs of slate—and “the guys who I drag everywhere” pass by in a litany of losses.
That interplay is explicit in the early lines of the poem:
"The lake is only mildly disturbed; it didn’t know the deceased, so its sympathies don’t extend to empathy and it’s a lake, not a pathetic fallacy, though I try."
But it’s present as well in “a chorus of dead from a chorus of caskets,” and in Lake Hebron itself, which takes its name from the place in the Bible where, among other distinctions, the patriarchs and matriarchs are said to be buried, but which is also known for “millennia of murders.”
Groff is an award-winning poet, author of three collections, a teacher, and a longtime independent book editor (his bio appears below). He began writing “Disbelieving These Deaths, I Go to Sit by Lake Hebron” on a late-summer day in 2019, while in residence at a nearby writers’ retreat in Monson, Maine. (By the way, it’s not altogether fanciful to think of that slate as the stuff of burials: the once famous Monson slate was used to inter John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onasis among many others.)
The poem serves to catalogue all of “these deaths”—from AIDS, suicide, the loss of elderly parents, even of a stranger who died on 9/11 but who looms large for Groff. However, it also finds, ultimately, something like resolution in a lake “alive with togue, perch and bass.”
“One friend said to me. ‘This is a romantic poem,’” Groff said.
But as haunting and layered as the stand-alone poem is, it also does double duty in Groff’s newest book, Live in Suspense (2023 Trio House Press), where it introduces many of the important topics and themes of the collection.
“When I talk to my students about organizing a manuscript, I talk about ‘tent pole’ poems that introduce other elements that are integrated into the book. Or maybe they’re magnetic poles,” he said. “You want to put your best foot forward.
“This poem felt like that.”
“He became my talisman.”
Intriguingly, only one of the dead in the poem is given a full name. Like countless other New Yorkers, Groff, who lives just a short distance uptown from the site of the World Trade Center, found himself, disbelieving all those deaths, in the streets of Lower Manhattan in the aftermath of the attack, as improvised posters of lost loved ones were plastered all around.
One of those posters particularly captivated Groff. It was of 25-year-old Daniel Crisman, an aspiring actor and poet with a day job in the Twin Towers.
“He became the point of entry for me” to the unspeakable loss. “I took him as my talisman.”
In the years since, the memory of Crisman has remained close to Groff and his work, appearing once again in “Disbelieving These Deaths, I Go to Sit by Lake Hebron,” “gladly diving at 43 into this crisp water.”
Sitting by Lake Hebron and drafting his new poem, it didn’t occur to Groff at first that he was writing it on September 11, 2019.
Here then is the poem.
Disbelieving These Deaths, I Go to Sit by Lake Hebron
A thunderstorm has spun from a near-blue sky,
then faded like a tantrum, the child sunny and unharmed.
Warmth like a human’s breath shrugs off the fall wind.
The lake is only mildly disturbed; it didn’t know
the deceased, so its sympathies don’t extend to empathy
and it’s a lake, not a pathetic fallacy, though I try.
I work to stay here, not to be netted
to various keenings. Hard to do even on a good day.
In the shallows are the slabs of slate
like coffins fallen off a truck, each one
not containing a body I knew, although slate caskets
irretrievable in water speak to me. They inform me
that if I were really here I’d notice the cloud
very like a whale until it blossoms like a poppy, fast.
A chorus of dead from a chorus of caskets
ought to open their lids and shoulder out their slabs
to walk on water.
My dead father would eye the lake for plops of fish
he could catch and feel guilty for eating, eye to eye,
though he was dubious of lakes, preferring currents,
local water strung to seas, which lets me see him
as a river, bodies of water as bodies,
as metaphors, including the Babylon waters of weeping.
My mother, city born, should
stride to me across the tidelessness,
the wind revealing her girlish nape,
and George my most recent dead guy, cleared
of the thunder behind his brow and now,
rise right here, part of the democracy of day,
along with Daniel Crisman, 25, dead on 9/11,
eighteen years ago today, a man I know from a poster
gladly diving at 43 into this crisp water,
warmer than dying young. All my loves
with AIDS, the guys who I drag everywhere,
Ron, Len, Craig, Jay, Paul, Mark, John,
Tom, Richard, the armada ghosting the cove,
their wakes cut short, should land on the island I am.
Hebron, the first city, arid, blazes from across the ocean
its millennia of murders, histories bleeding into each other,
torches and missiles and rifles like lake lightning.
Children killed in cars or cages—they should splash.
All of these once knew the word for lake,
said lake, swam in a lake of genuine water,
fell through the frosty metaphor of lake,
their lips too blue and sewn ever to say lake again.
Here they are none of them at all,
evaporated out of time until I become
a lake nobody swims in. Again the trees tremble,
the clouds lower their cliché of brow,
the water snaps like a shroud.
It is a day in September, more thunder to come.
The lake is alive with togue, perch, and bass.
--David Groff
About David Groff
As a poet, writer, independent book editor, and teacher, I work to engender resonant words.
My third book of poems, Live in Suspense, was published in July 2023 from Trio House Press. My previous book of poems, Clay, was chosen by Michael Waters as winner of the Louise Bogan Award and published in 2013, also by Trio House Press. It was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. My first book, Theory of Devolution, published in 2002 by the University of Illinois Press, was selected by Mark Doty for the National Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle awards.
With Jim Elledge, I edited the anthology Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners, from University of Wisconsin Press, which won the Lambda Literary Award for best anthology. With Philip Clark, I edited Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS, from Alyson Books. I completed the book The Crisis of Desire: AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood for its author, my friend the late Robin Hardy, which was published by Houghton Mifflin and the University of Minnesota Press.
I have received residencies from the Anderson Center, Jentel Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Monson Arts, Ragdale, the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Saltonstall Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation.
In my work as an independent book editor, I focus on editing and developing narrative-driven books, from literary fiction and thrillers to memoir, history, and public and political affairs. I’ve edited books by Pulitzer prize-winners and recipients of the National Book Award. I work directly with writers on developing and editing their book projects, and I work with publishers and literary agents as well.
As a culture worker, I cofounded the Publishing Triangle, the association of LGBTQ writers and publishing professionals; I’ve served on the board of the Lambda Literary Foundation; and I am the literary co-executor of the estate of Paul Monette, whose fiction I published when I was a senior editor at Crown Publishers. At writers conferences and MFA programs, I have led a seminar called From Writer to Author, focusing on how our commitment to literary citizenship can support and advance our literary vocations and do good work in the world.
As a teacher, since 2007 I have taught poetry, nonfiction, and publishing in the MFA creative writing program of the City College of New York and advised students on their poetry, fiction, and nonfiction MFA theses. I have also taught courses at Rutgers and NYU.
I received my MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, my MA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa and my A.B. in English/Creative Writing from Princeton University. I live in New York City with my husband, Clay Williams.
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