“Grief” by Matthew Dickman

Poet Matthew Dickman
Credit: musingforamusement.blogspot.com

Matthew Dickman’s exquisite poem “Grief” imagines grief as a purple gorilla that one must befriend. The poem starts with these lines:

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what’s left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish
you must put aside
and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed

Dickman, whose half-brother died by suicide, is no stranger to personal grief. Their older brother’s intentional overdose is a recurring theme in the poetry of both Matthew Dickman and his twin brother Michael Dickman, also a poet. In 2012, “American Poetry Review” released a collection of poems written jointly by the twins entitled “50 American Plays.” In the collection, the Dickmans write about their grief over their brother’s death. They also take an unblinking look at the violence and poverty of Lents, the working class neighborhood of Portland in which they were raised by their single mother — a neighborhood where “kids carry knives to school,” an interstate highway “rips the neighborhood in half,” evictions and gang initiations are routine, and fathers try to “beat back the dogs of sorrow/from tearing them limb to limb.”

Tony Hoagland, First Book Prize Judge of the “American Poetry Review,” said of Dickman’s poems: “I think, they are spiritual in character—free and easy and unself-conscious, lusty, full of sensuous aspiration, [and] tarted up in metaphor. We turn loose such poets into our culture so that they can provoke the rest of us into saying everything on our minds.”

Twin poets Matthew and Michael Dickman
Credit: booktrib.com

Dickman’s poem “Grief” hinges entirely on the metaphor of the purple gorilla, which represents his grief over his older brother’s death. Through the metaphor of the purple gorilla showing up at his home, Dickman captures the circuitous path of healing from loss. This is what we mean when we say grief isn’t linear. Healing from loss is not a continuous march forward. We have good moments and bad moments, nights we are able to enjoy the company of loved ones or the book we are reading, and nights when grief shows up without invitation, and there is nothing to do but invite it in and sit with it.

Dickman writes of the wily nature of grief. On the night in question in the poem, grief has come bearing pencil and paper, demanding that the speaker “write down/everyone I have ever known and we separate them between the living and the dead/so she can pick each name at random.” As the speaker’s night with the purple gorilla progresses, he plays her her favorite Willie Nelson album and she reprimands him for being unreasonable, coping with his feelings by “refusing to eat, refusing to shower/all the smoking and all the drinking.”

As the purple gorilla becomes more intimate, moving in closer, putting her arms around the speaker and leaning her head against his, he tells her “things are feeling romantic.” The purple gorilla responds by turning back to the pile of slips of paper with names the two have been compiling. She pulls another name from the “dead” pile.

and turns to me in that way that parents do
so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.
Romantic? she says,
reading the name out loud, slowly,
so I am aware of each syllable, each vowel
wrapping around the bones like new muscle,
the sound of that person’s body
and how reckless it is,
how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.

These last two lines speak to the impossibility of truly comprehending death.  In them, Dickman captures the feelings of anger, sorrow and injustice that accompany grief when it comes to visit.