36 Healing poems

Admit it — you wanted the end with a serpentine greed. How to negotiate that strangling mist, the fibrous whisper? To cease to exist and to die are two different things entirely. But you knew this, didn’t you? Some days you knelt on coins in those yellow hours. You lit a flame to your shadow and ate scorpions with your naked fingers. So touched by the sadness of hair in a dirty sink. The malevolent smell of soap. When instead of swallowing a fistful of white pills, you decided to shower, the palm trees nodded in agreement, a choir of crickets singing behind your swollen eyes. The masked bird turned to you with a shred of paper hanging from its beak. At dusk, hair wet and fragrant, you cupped a goat’s face and kissed his trembling horns. The ghost? It fell prostrate, passed through you like a swift and generous storm.

They staunched the wound with a stone. They drew blue venom from his blood until there was none. When his veins ran true his face remained lifeless and all the mothers of the village wept and pounded their chests until the sky had little choice but to grant their supplications. God made the boy breathe again. God breathes life into us, it is said, only once. But this case was an exception. God drew back in a giant gust and blew life into the boy and like a stranded fish, he shuddered, oceanless. It was true: the boy lived. He lived for a very long time. The toxins were an oil slick: contaminated, cleaned. But just as soon as the women kissed redness back into his cheeks the boy began to die again. He continued to die for the rest of   his life. The dying took place slowly, sweetly. The dying took a very long time.

With swift Great sweep of her Magnificent arm my pain Clanged back the doors that shut my soul From life.

When I was young, exorcisms were quite common, a remedy not unlike ice baths. Plus, devils were shorter in those days just as people were. They hadn't eaten enough fruits or vegetables, and lacked essential vitamins and iron, grew thin and pale, fell easily into brooding depressions. They looked more like deer than sheep, and when they possessed you it was usually because they were fleeing from someone else and didn't realize where they were until it was too late. It was more a question of giving directions than driving them out. "Turn right at the hairdresser's, go straight until you get to the abandoned schoolhouse, then turn left. You should see the exit from there." "Thank you. I was completely lost." "You're welcome. Good luck." "You too, and thanks again."

They explained to me the bloody bandages On the floor in the maternity ward in Rochester, N.Y., Cured the backache I acquired bowing to my old master, Made me stop putting thumbtacks round my bed. They showed me an officer on horseback, Waving a saber next to a burning farmhouse And a barefoot woman in a nightgown, Throwing stones after him and calling him Lucifer. I was a straw-headed boy in patched overalls. Come dark a chicken would roost in my hair. Some even laid eggs as I played my ukulele And my mother and father crossed themselves. Next, I saw myself inside an abandoned gas station Constructing a spaceship out of a coffin, Red traffic cone, cement mixer and ear warmers, When a church lady fainted seeing me in my underwear. Some days, however, they opened door after door, Always to a different room, and could not find me. There’d be only a small squeak now and then, As if a miner’s canary got caught in a mousetrap.

Maybe you need to write a poem about grace. When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt, and the heroine has studied her face and its defects remorselessly, and the pain they thought might, as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves has lost its novelty and not released them, and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly, watching the others go about their days— likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears— that self-love is the one weedy stalk of every human blossoming, and understood, therefore, why they had been, all their lives, in such a fury to defend it, and that no one— except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light, faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears. As in the story a friend told once about the time he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him. Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash. He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge, the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon. And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,” that there was something faintly ridiculous about it. No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass, scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs, and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up on the girder like a child—the sun was going down and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing carefully, and drove home to an empty house. There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed. A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick with rage and grief. He knew more or less where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill. They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,” she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights, a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay. “You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?” “Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now, “I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while— Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall— and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more, and go to sleep. And he, he would play that scene once only, once and a half, and tell himself that he was going to carry it for a very long time and that there was nothing he could do but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark cracking and curling as the cold came up. It’s not the story though, not the friend leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,” which is the part of stories one never quite believes. I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing. And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps— First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.

it’s good not to drink it’s good not to piss in the sink & it’s good not to think the clarion ring of   a glass clinking with ice good to hear it fade into a past you can’t sing your dumb blues is over. admit it was always borrowed. you paid no dues you did no time but the time spent sodden. what you thought I think. your higher power’s drunk. god’s the biggest alky in the sky the clouds are whiskey sours passing by

It was as if a flower bloomed as if Its muttering root and stem had suddenly spoken, Uttering on the air a poem of summer, The rose the utterance of its root and stem. Thus her beautiful face, the crippled girl’s, Was like the poem spoken by her body— The richness of that face!—most generous In what it keeps, giving in its having. The rose reserves the sweetness that it yields, Petal on petal, telling its own silence, Her beauty saying from its thorny stalk That what it is is kept as it is given.

They think she lives alone on the edge of town in a two-room house where she moved when her husband died at thirty-five of a gunshot wound in the bed of another woman. The curandera and house have aged together to the rhythm of the desert. She wakes early, lights candles before her sacred statues, brews tea of yerbabuena. She moves down her porch steps, rubs cool morning sand into her hands, into her arms. Like a large black bird, she feeds on the desert, gathering herbs for her basket. Her days are slow, days of grinding dried snake into powder, of crushing wild bees to mix with white wine. And the townspeople come, hoping to be touched by her ointments, her hands, her prayers, her eyes. She listens to their stories, and she listens to the desert, always, to the desert. By sunset she is tired. The wind strokes the strands of long gray hair, the smell of drying plants drifts into her blood, the sun seeps into her bones. She dozes on her back porch. Rocking, rocking.

WELL, what's the matter ? there's a face What ! has it cut a vein ? And is it quite a shocking place ? Come, let us look again. I see it bleeds, but never mind That tiny little drop ; I don't believe you'll ever find That crying makes it stop. 'Tis sad indeed to cry at pain, For any but a baby ; If that should chance to cut a vein, We should not wonder, may be. But such a man as you should try To bear a little sorrow : So run along, and wipe your eye, 'Twill all be well to-morrow.