Charles Bukowski

Consummation of Grief

Consummation of Grief - meaning Summary

Grief Made Audible and Mundane

The speaker transforms sorrow into audible and visible details, hearing mountains laugh and water cry while personal sadness infuses mundane objects. Nights of drinking amplify grief until it appears as household items and smoke, suggesting a life where small measures of love or living matter little. The poem ends with a bleak acceptance: the speaker feels destined to carry symbolic roses through death’s streets, a resigned role amid pervasive mourning.

Read Complete Analyses

I even hear the mountains the way they laugh up and down their blue sides and down in the water the fish cry and the water is their tears. I listen to the water on nights I drink away and the sadness becomes so great I hear it in my clock it becomes knobs upon my dresser it becomes paper on the floor it becomes a shoehorn a laundry ticket it becomes cigarette smoke climbing a chapel of dark vines... it matters little very little love is not so bad or very little life what counts is waiting on walls I was born for this I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.

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