Two Centos by Marianne Worthington

Elegy for Ron Houchin: A Cento

Perhaps they are connected to us,
the names of the dead that drift up
as if we’re in a dream from this world
waking like a nest in the rain.

The body speaks its own language
like the mumbles of streams, whispers of leaves,
the owl singing its one-syllable lullaby:
another moon will polish the sky.

I do not question what in darkness may come—
it’s cancer—because my hands,
as if curled around a mystery,
remember work doesn’t end, only changes.

Crows never have the day off,
contemplate the patient hosannas of trees,
the dogs’ chorus accompanying the whoop and wheeze
and days of ball bearing skies.

You’re a spirit that I see
sitting out on the back steps at night.
We read old letters aloud
in silent syllables, in lines long and green.

It makes me sad that the old cry is gone from words.
I miss you and the beauty
of the world as mostly fire and fright
with edges like teeth.

The river clears its throat for your coming,
the river under blue light.
I keep trying to believe
my soul won’t always be orphaned.

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Cento composed with lines from Ron Houchin’s complete poetry collections: Bartley Modern Writers Series (M.K. Wilkes, 1973), Death and the River (Salmon, 1998), Ron Houchin Greatest Hits, 1976-2002 (Pudding House, 2002), Moveable Darkness (Salmon, 2003), Among Wordless Things (Wind, 2004), Birds in the Tops of Winter Trees (Wind, 2008), Museum Crows (Salmon, 2010), The Quiet Jars (Salmon, 2013), The Man Who Saws Us in Half (LSU, 2013), Planet of the Best Love Songs (Salmon, 2017), and Talking to Shadows (LSU, 2020).

[Who will remember those sonorous voices]
A Cento for Jeff Daniel Marion

Who will remember those sonorous voices,
that handwritten page, ink blue
so blue I can’t believe the years—

where have they gone, those words
like fading names on a weather-washed gravestone?
My heart’s hungry for a sprig.

I never knew it would be this hard. I remembered
summer, near dusky dark, lightning,
the long journey home to Tennessee

through pines, a moon full and rising, rising.
O who can understand the heart’s yearnings?
so swiftly and silently it all flowed by

as the road unwinds, familiar as lines
searching for something beyond words
leading finally to talk of the dead in the past tense,

vanished like a puff of breath.
Grit your teeth against hard times.
Memory and pain join hands,

a surging hymn, for what has passed.
Let’s hear it for the forgotten.
Grab your verses and come trotting, time’s

a bitch whose sands have washed our streets,
the sky, and a memory to outlive you
headward into the unnamed and unknown.

Your poems, source of a living
rock from its resting place on the riverbank.
From this heap of jumbled pieces, what can I find?

Water. Witness. Word.

■■■

Cento composed with lines from Jeff Daniel Marion’s final poetry collection, Letters to the Dead: A Memoir (Wind, 2013).