36 Healing poems

Onward is not a victory it's just: still going which is what it looks like most of the time still going not fine necessarily but still going

And this my hand, against my self uprear. — William Shakespeare I took the crooked, arcade-overshadowed road off the main square built by de Chirico and chanced upon a watch repairer’s shop which might have been painted by Bhupen Khakhar for whose summer show the London weeklies have just prepared such a frosty welcome. Wait. Is this ekphrastic or oneiric? The site Bologna or Bombay? Are the hanging watches, so sure of their gender, Bulgari or Janata? Too early to tell. But there he sat at his workbench working at what looked like tiny jeweled bits of time laid out under his eye loupe in magnolia light. These fragments he seemed to be reassembling into a perfect circle, or a sphere seen from above — it was like a miracle obligingly performed in slow motion, or the flight of an arrow broken down into ever smaller fractions of advancement. He took his time, and my time, to acknowledge me — clearly he didn’t crave an audience, as though the slow work that so ravished him required if not secrecy at least discretion. Could he mend, I wondered, the cracked glass on my watch before I had to leave tomorrow? His black eyes rested on the old Omega as though bemused such a watch should belong to someone so importunate, then he cleared the air with a lenient, experienced smile. Certo. But it will have a different bombatura not quite as fine as this one was. Though the word was unfamiliar, it conjured up at once light skating the rim of a sheer bevel. Va bene. So long, I thought, as I can tell the time, and don’t have to squint through cracks as I had since fending off a drunken punch which I’d provoked myself enough to throw. I would have paid extra to watch him clean the face with the wad of turquoise putty he had to hand, paid double to have Devanagari numerals replace the Roman, but he wanted me out. A domani allora. Then as I left he said it needed una revisione completa before it got too late. A watch like this deserves — he changed the tense — deserved a lot more care.

Promising myself  I would not do this again Is what kept me going A friend told me to And I listened Taking a thing to the end of its life Is what I was made to do I think I am not attuned To the things that breathe Well that’s not true I am in tune to breath and life And little falls of  flowers When the moon was high I went out to the stream And brought in the water For my folks, my kin, my brethren I brought in the greenish milk To feed the ones who were already dying Oh did they go Oh I do not know

If thy own hand . . . offend thee —Matthew 18:8 Self-hatred? No, no dear: that seems inflated — chagrin: the shame you feel when friends withdraw for reasons they leave tactfully unstated, leaving you to guess at your faux pas From all you did and didn’t say for ages, as in some vast congressional report, your sin, at last, is lost among the pages; a snow of detail cuts inquiry short. In downtown windows where late sunlight glares, you see yourself, as if you’d never met. Who is this rumpled lookalike who wears a blouse like yours, the armpits dark with sweat? Your eighth grade diary still makes you cringe saved—for what?—that you might now despise pages time has lent a jaundiced tinge pouring forth their daisy-dotted

I wanted to give you something for your pain. But not the drug du jour or the kind word this side of cliché. Something you wouldn’t find on a talk show, in a department store or dark alleyway. I wanted to give you something for your pain but I couldn’t imagine what. Frankincense, myrrh—even gold seemed too plain (too plain and too gross). I needed something that wouldn’t have occurred to you or me, or even Nature: a creature more fabulous, more imaginary than you’d find in a rain forest or tapestry or pixel-loaded screen. Some exotic anodyne an alchemist or astrophysicist would be envious of: a chemical reaction, an astral refraction, an out-of-body, out-of-mind, one-of-a-kind transport from your pain, that would last longer than a day, go deeper than the past. I would have founded a whole new religion if I thought that would suffice. As for love—sacred, profane, or both— I wanted to give you something that didn’t arrive with a roll of the dice and was hard to maintain and had a knack for disappointing. I wanted to give you something for your pain that didn’t smack of a sorcerer’s trick, or a poet’s swoon, or a psychiatrist’s quip. Nothing too heavy or spacey or glib. I’d have given you the moon but it’s been done (and besides, its desolate dust and relentless tendency to wane might have only exacerbated your pain). If I could have given you something you could depend on, could always trust without a second thought, I would have. A splendid view, perhaps, or a strain of music. A favorite dish. A familiar tree. A visit from a genie who, in lieu of granting you a wish, would tend subtly to your every need, and never once tire, never complain. But when all was said and done (or hardly said, not nearly done) I was as helpless as you. Could you tell— or were you so overcome your pain was all that mattered? It seemed to me we were a kind of kin: willing the mind its bold suspensions, but the heart, once shattered, never quite matching its old dimensions. And yet you persevered in spite of pain, you knew to hold hope as lightly as you held my hand (a phantom grasp, a clasp that seemed to come from the other side). And your genial smile made it plain: you were pleased by my wish to please. And then you died.

Listen, you who transformed your anguish into healthy awareness, put your voice where your memory is. You who swallowed the afternoon dust, defend everything you understand with words. You, if no one else, will condemn with your tongue the erosion each disappointment brings. You, who saw the images of disgust growing, will understand how time devours the destitute; you, who gave yourself your own commandments, know better than anyone why you turned your back on your town's toughest limits. Don't hush, don't throw away the most persistent truth, as our hard-headed brethren sometimes do. Remember well what your life was like: cloudiness, and slick mud after a drizzle; flimsy windows the wind kept rattling in winter, and that unheated slab dwelling where coldness crawled up in your clothes. Tell how you were able to come to this point, to unbar History's doors to see your early years, your people, the others. Name the way rebellion's calm spirit has served you, and how you came to unlearn the lessons of that teacher, your land's omnipotent defiler.

when shall your wounds welcome their scabs? daily your kingdom squeaks and leaps to the starlight it wants all of you you of all and the music of the pastures of midnoon a little boy's kaleidoscopticon you are the one the music has chosen and whom strings call twilight moans behind you all you are you are all it is the boy in black talking how civil is the civil war?

One day I wake I walk     forward         carrying a narrative carrying an end a hole    ten years deep and sleep has made for it           a lid fragile thin plastic wrap                          a skin graft         a patch inside the hole is dark and full of stars is dark and full of scars this body grows a garden of badly barely healed feelings I mean skin I mean go ahead touch me now for I am wild

Once more the bright blade of a morning breeze glides almost too easily through me, and from the scuffle I’ve been sutured to some flap of me is freed: I am severed like a simile: an honest tenor trembling toward the vehicle I mean to be: a blackbird licking half notes from the muscled, sap-damp branches of the sugar maple tree

How I’ve changed may not be apparent. I limp. Read and write, make tea at the stove as I practiced in rehab. Sometimes, like fire, a task overwhelms me. I cry for days, shriek when the phone rings. Like a page pulled from flame, I’m singed but intact: I don’t burn down the house. Later, cleared to drive, I did outpatient rehab. Others lost legs or clutched withered minds in their hands. A man who can’t speak recognized me and held up his finger. I knew he meant One year since your surgery. Sixteen since his. Guadalupe wishes daily to be the one before. Nobody is that. Sometimes, like love, the neurons just cross fire. You don’t get everything back.