They said they fixed
my heart
and I knew
what they meant -
two stents and an angioplasty
in the left descending artery
and with that:
pump/pump, pump/pump
the vessels cleaned up -
the stents, mesh-like metal tubes
that, cut into quarters, might
pass for wedding rings.
painless it was and
amazing.
If only therapy
could accomplish
something so
quick and painless -
pick apart and clear
the accumulated
plaque
work through
attachments
made
and missing
feverish mistakes
that narrowed
a spirit’s path
in an empty world
the disappointments, O
the disappointments most of all!
because my other heart
runs backwards uphill exhausted
seeking the lost place I
might have known.
Tree bark
Long ago,
before I knew
very much
around the time
my parents
had forgotten me
I wandered around talking
to the trees
especially the
ones with
rough bark.
I imagined
they were
listening -
their leaves were like
many attentive ears
and somehow
the bark
expressed
their feelings.
I talked
to an apple tree
for about two years
I think
It said:
“Don’t wither.”
Early Spring, with Shadows
“accompanied by faint hopes and
faithless companions”
pablo neruda
Winter,
the old badger
is still
around
gritting his teeth,
digging in; resisting
the future as
if it is not
too late:
like a racist Senate, yet again
geared up
for a filibuster
to block the vote.
I adjust my scarf and
zip up my hoodie
because the wind,
as always, gets through
with its wake up call,
reminding my neck
it’s still
vulnerable. That many springs
never arrived!
But my legs want to walk,
my heart wants to brave the chill
and a certain bitterness.
This is life. This
is politics.
I get through it
one way or another,
confounded
by the usual companions;
your love,
your lies, your absence.
Some News, 2022
I missed the news.
I missed the war.
there was another
more thorough war.
I missed the scandal
but there was another
more astonishing scandal.
I missed the natural catastrophe.
But another one followed
with fires.
There was a great dispute
people kept talking about, but I’d
forgotten it.
Then there was another huge,
idiotic dispute.
I saw people bowing down
to something.
There was a bursting forth
of gods that I missed,
but then there were some other
more indisputable gods.
I missed the bitter joke
some said it all was.
But then there was a darker,
funnier joke.
Lot’s wife did not intend to turn into
a pillar of salt as she had long ago.
She knew what extermination meant.
She headed toward the Polish border
and did not look back.
Psychotherapy
So these are the cards you’re dealt
in the definitive poker game.
You carefully fan them out
just in front of your chin
it’s not much of a hand -
you keep the queen of diamonds
and a ten, then
ask for three more.
But the three you draw don’t help:
four of spades, jack of hearts and a lousy deuce.
That’s the breaks. That’s
all you get.
But a game like this won’t come along
every day. Your mind tells you to fold
or you’ll lose a bundle.
Maybe you could bluff these players,
but then maybe they know you too well.
Sweat breaks out under your shirt.
In the dim, smokey light
you see the dealer’s face. At first,
she reminds you a lot
of your self-absorbed mother.
It’s the same old game
you’re always losing.
Then she looks hard
and sees you and says:
“How would you like three more cards?”
Poet & Baby
-for Annie
You were at the crawling around stage.
You’d so swiftly through the room
and then suddenly stop to examine
an object or possibly a speck of dust,
a dead (or live) bug, a pebble caught in the carpet.
You, tiny archeologist of our four room flat,
which you inspected with baby diligence every day.
And in the small room where I sat at the typewriter
pounding out those earliest poems; so many drafts,
so many images coming from - where was it?
- the woods, the huge winter clouds,
the familiar loneliness, the amazement
and weariness of new fatherhood?
So many drafts, digging over and over
in my own archeology to find just
that image and then, struck by futility,
pulling the sheet of thin typing paper out,
crumpling it up and tossing it to the floor
where you would pick it up, try tasting it, a
strange new toy, interesting for maybe a minute.
You pressed your tiny lips to those failures.
And sometimes you would hold one crumpled
page up and make a sound as if to say “Here”
and offer it back to me, as if maybe I could
improve it. Because we were playing
really; becoming known to each other. I,
the one who sat at the clacking machine and
threw wads of paper to you. And you, who
carefully tasted a few, and offered tenderly
to let me have them back and finally
gave up and scooted out of the room
because you knew that something that tasted
much better existed in another place
where there was the calming song of the bottle
and milk could be detected warming the air.
Lot's Wife
Lot’s wife,
she knew.
But how little
we learn about her.
Some say
she was named Edith, but later
she may have
taken a different name, a
different language,
in another country. Was she
sad, as they claimed,
and disobedient to turn and look?
Was she punished, as they claimed,
and became a pillar of salt?
Some say she
and the others
had seen it coming,
long before the two angels
appeared
with their warning of
catastrophe.
God would try and fail
(again).
The old methods, napalm,
mass slaughter,
would lead where
they usually led: guerrilla war,
resistance that lasts for
centuries; underground
networks
where pleasure makes its own
rules, identities are hidden and
the labyrinth of tunnels grows
ever longer and
deeper.
I leave it for you to decide. The supposed winners
write these tales.
Some say
she was part of the underground
and her disguise worked and she
vanished into history leaving
behind only a story still taken as a warning
and a truth.
The Loneliness of Men
I caught a cab to the Montreal airport
and the driver, a middle-aged man,
weary looking and badly shaved,
asked how I was. “Tired,” I said,
“haven’t slept well. Too much family.”
We stopped at a long light.
Men were arguing in French. I saw a young woman
in a purple skirt who was smiling at someone.
“O,” the driver said, “tried sleeping pills?”
“Yeah,” I said, “and they weren’t all that effective.”
He turned: “I haven’t gotten much sleep in three years.”
People started blowing their horns.
He pulled into the slow lane.Then came the story:
his wife’s breast cancer and how
she wanted him to sit by her at night during the treatments.
She lost one breast then the other.
Two years night after night, she cried
and held his hand. They’d never had children.
The airport came into view -
curved glass and hubbub.
“How is she?” I asked.
“She died a year ago,” he replied.
“I still can’t sleep. I lie there
listening to the radio and I can’t let go.”
He turned toward me again.
“Have you tried Xanax,” I suggested, “or Ativan?”
“Definitely, he said, “but I got addicted,
used more and more and it scared me.”
“Yeah,” I said, “yeah.”
“It’s the lot of men to be lonely,” he said,
“that’s just the way it is.”
“No,” I said, “maybe you can talk to someone.
You’ve been through a lot.”
“Sure,” he said.
We were there. I checked for my ticket,
took hold of the suitcase. We shook hands
and I rushed to the security line.
When I got home I was unpacking
and thought of writing him, but realized
I had not even asked his name.
The Sessions
“We paint on a vanishing canvas.”
Jim Carpenter, psychotherapist
Here’s a moment -
this sparkling resonance.
and suddenly
it’s gone.
The blank canvas
splattered with globs of red and black
then rubbed away by the stained rag
of confusion.
One day, I sense we are making
tiny pastel
brushstrokes -
subtle understanding words -
and suddenly it comes
together in the clarity
of a bright Impressionist moment.
Or there may be hours, exquisitely sensual:
a Renoir figure
enters the room
lies down and makes herself known
- the body accepted
in its adorable and ferocious needs.
And sometimes as the early dark
comes on, there’s a somber winter landscape
- a Brueghel canvas evolving
with dog and hunter coming out of the woods.
And we are forced to step back
and become aware
of the distant village
and the bare trees
of an entire life.
And of course, so many failed canvases,
misunderstandings,
the half-started,
the endless doodle, someone
refuses to speak,
or puts the canvas on the floor,
stomps it and forgets it.
But maybe that was for the good,
maybe we can recover,
come back together, make
the small gestures,
sessions of listening
and questioning
-the deep cobalt
of insight, stinging white of grief.
And if we paint well, the careful
underlayer may form, slowly,
colors of trust,
perhaps a glowing silence.
Then suddenly, unexpectedly,
after weeks of waiting,
you make a bold black
brushstroke -
and I follow -
- a Chinese ink drawing:
two restless, dancing spirits,
playing with destiny.
And no one will see this.
We ourselves
will barely recall.
It will pass through
into our bodies,
charcoal networks of memory:
mutually created
and gone,
unrecordable,
yet there
- intricate, healing, open,
puzzling, hopeful....
what's the word?
Freud, 1938, Vienna
“...men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved...; they are on the contrary,
creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned
a powerful share of aggressiveness.”
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Vienna, 1938, Freud, 82.
Nazis and their allies parade in the streets,
flag after flag and those raised arms,
ceaseless enthusiasm and hatred of the Jews.
Incoherent fury of centuries alive once more.
They called the old analyst’s work
”a pornographic Jewish specialty.”
He’d worked fifty years in the exquisite old city
struggling to free the human spirit.
Lately, he’d become more pessimistic.
Neurosis was the price of civilization.
The Nazis insisted he absolved the police
before they allowed him to leave.
“I can heartily recommend the Gestapo
to anyone,” he wrote.
And the old Jewish pessimist,
leaving Vienna remarked: “Today
they are content with burning
my books. In the Middle Ages
they would have burned me.”
