160 Illness poems

Always just one demon in the attic. Always just one death in the village. And the dogs howling in that direction. And from the other end the new-born child arrives, the only one to fill the empty space in that wide air. Likewise also cells infected by a virus send out a signal all around them and defences are mobilised so that no other virus has any hope just then of taking root or changing fate. This phenomenon is known as interference. And when a poet dies in the depth of night a single black bird wakens in the thicket and sings for all it is worth while from the sky a black rain trickles down like sperm or something, the song is spattered and the choking bird sings sitting on an empty rib-cage in which an imaginary heart awakes to its forever interfering futility. And in the morning the sky is clear, the bird is weary and the soil is fertilised. The poet is no more. In Klatovy Street, in Pilsen, by the railway bridge, there was a shop with quilted bedcovers. In times when there’s a greater need for a steel cover over our continent business in quilted bedcovers is slack. The shopkeeper was hard up. Practical men when hard up usually turn to art. In his shopwindow, open to the interior of his shop, its owner built a gingerbread house of quilts and every evening staged a performance about a quilted gingerbread house and a red-quilted Little Red Riding Hood, while his wife in this quilted masquerade was alternately the wolf or the witch, and he himself a padded-out Hansel, or Gretel, Red Riding Hood or grandmother. The sight of the two old people crawling about in swollen billows of textiles round the chubby cottage was not unambiguous. It was a little like the life of sea cucumbers in the mud under a reef. Outside thundered the approaching surf of war and they conducted their quilted pantomime outside time and action. For a while children would stand outside but soon they would go home. Nothing was sold. But it was the only pantomime at that time. The black bird sang and rain poured into a rib-cage wearing the Star of David. But in the actors under those quilted covers l'anima allegra must have just then awoken and so, sweating and rapt, they acted their undersea commedia dell’arte, thinking there was a backstage until a scene was finished, jerkily they moved from shopwindow to gingerbread house and back, with the exuberance of Columbines stricken by polio, while the music of fifes and drums did not reach them. Or else they thought that such a deep humiliation of the customary dignity of age interfered with the steps of gentlemen in leather coats and with the departure of trains to human slaughterhouses. It did. The black bird sang and the ruined sclerotic hearts leapt in their breasts, and then one morning when they didn’t play and had not even raised the blind - the sky was clear, the soil was fertilised - the quilted bedcovers were confiscated for the eastern front and the actors transferred to the backstage of the world, called Bergen-Belsen. No trace is left of the shop today: it’s now a greengrocer’s with woody parsnips. Always just one death in the village. Always just one demon. Great is the power of the theatre, even if it always does get knocked down in the end and flung backstage. The dogs howl in that direction. And the butterfly pursues the man who stole the flowers. When we did autopsies at the psychiatric hospital in Bohnice, filled with the urban exudations of relative futility, the car would tip us out amidst the ward blocks whose inmates waved from windows with some kind of May Day pennants, and then one went, hugely alone, beyond a spinney to the solitary morgue, where the naked bodies of ancient schizophrenics awaited us, along with two live inmates; one of them would pull the corpses up from underground with a rope hoist and place them upon the tables as a mother might an infant for baptism, while the other was lurking, pen ready poised, in a dark corner to write up the Latin protocol, and he wrote faultlessly. Neither of them uttered the slightest sound, only the hoist shaft moaned...and the knife drawn over skin and dermis made a sound of satin tearing...and they were always enormous and unprecedented pneumonias and tumours big as dragons’ eggs, it rained into the open thorax - and in that roaring silence one had to break the line of an angel’s fall and dictate the logical verdict on a long-sentenced demon... and the schizophrenic’s pen in the corner busily scraped across the paper like an eager mouse. We need no prompters said the puppets haughtily. The air of that anatomical theatre was filled with interferon, it was a great personal demonstration against malignant growth, it was a general amnesty for the walls, entropy was abjured for the moment because there are no bubbles at the bottom to burst under the breeze. The red balloon outside rose up to an unsuspected sky, its chains strained by the certainty that the nearer the inferno the greater the paradise, the nearer the prison cell the greater the freedom. Cantabit vacuus coran latrone viator. And that is the weird essence of the theatre that an actor stripped of everything mounts to the very top of the conflagration and everything else dies down, falls silent like a long-hunted animal, its muscles still twitching but with endorphines and an infinite peace in the brain. Yes, even a whale will sometimes leave the school, hurl itself into shallow water and perish in the sun like a levelled cathedral, with pushed-out penis, and death is instantly buried in a grain of sand and the sea laughs. Go ask the tree-stumps; in broken language they preach about saplings. And in the jargon of galactic white dwarfs the stars of the main sequence shine forever. In the non-Euclidean curved space, which eludes understanding as much as the interference of the theatre, you ceaselessly hear the voices of children from the primary school of death, children from the puppet tragedies of the kitchen and children from the junketings of war, when skewering them on lances with their wriggling little legs provided spice like curry for the mercenaries, voices of children eluding understanding - But we’ve washed behind our ears, we’ve stopped pulling the cat’s tail, we’ve stopped shoving our fingers into electric sockets - What else is there left in the universe of hominisation, slow as the decay of tritium, than the doctrine of the growing sense of shame of demons: since Aztec times high priests no longer offer up sacrifice while dressed in the skin of a freshly flayed prisoner. We need no prompters, they said - Once on St Nicholas’ Day, the man acting the Devil, dead drunk, fell down some stairs and lay there, and a child, experiencing that embarrassing joy mere inches from terror, ran out after the thump and called: Mummy, come here, there’s a dead devil - And so he was, even though the actor picked himself up after another tot. Maybe the dogs howled, but only by a black mistake. In the sky shone the stars of the main sequence, the bird was getting ready in the thicket, the child shivered a little from the chill of three million years, in that wide air, but they prompted him, poetically, you’re only imagining all this, look, the butterfly’s already bringing the flowers back...and there’s no other devil left...and the nearer paradise... He believed, and yet he didn’t.

It’s summer, and just the sunniest of afternoons. Outside the sanatorium, in the arboretum, the attendees are served their teas. The strudel is toothsome when Herr Stumpf, from the lectern, contradicts the consensus that I is for ice cream. No, now he’s proposing that I’s for spaghetti, all spaghetti, he avers, being once alphabetti, all spaghetti being once that capital I that it is when it’s dry, not the maddening doodle that it is when it’s done and awry. His audience listen, but once he has spoken, then beneath their applause that’s not fulsome but token, they don’t soften, no rather, they stiffen.

For A.J. Verdelle Those mornings I traveled north on I 91, passing below the basalt cliff of East Rock where the elms discussed their genealogies. I was a chaplain at Hartford Hospital, took the Myers-Briggs with Sister Margaret, learned I was an I drawn to E s. In small group I said, “I do not like it— the way so many young black men die here unrecognized, their gurneys stripped, their belongings catalogued and unclaimed.” On the neonatal ICU, newborns breathed, blue, spider-delicate in a nest of tubes. A Sunday of themselves, their tissue purpled, their eyelids the film on old water in a well, their faces resigned in their see-through attics, their skin mottled mildewed wallpaper. It is correct to love even at the wrong time. On rounds, the newborns eyed me, each one like Orpheus in his dark hallway, saying: I knew I would find you, I knew I would lose you.

My friend was in a coma, so I dove Deep into his brain to word him back. I tried To sing Hallelujah, I Just Love Her So in Ray Charles’s voice. Of course the silence grew. I couldn’t sing the alphabet song. My voice Couldn’t say words I knew:Because I Could Not Stop for Death, He Kindly Stopped for Me

Sorrento, at night the long fingers of your orange lights Prick me in the sizzling streets, where the pinnacles Of other people ring tinny and papier-mâché. Is this the way Up to the murderous cliff? It’s most important that I get there And leave no witness. Ah, is this the majolica medallion Which marks the grave of girl abducted by a stallion Whom she gave a lump of maple sugar? For that was in an autumn, The time of year when young girls get hopeless and feel like Giving it all away, the way a matronly merchant Might brush off her lap, at the iron end of the market day: It’s over, it’s worthless, without deserving and without Purpose have I nourished this hope in my small patch of earth, A sickly weed whose nodding sun’s gone nova.

My mother was in the hospital & everyone wanted to be my friend. But I was busy making a list: good dog, bad citizen, short skeleton, tall mocha. Typical Tuesday. My mother was in the hospital & no one wanted to be her friend. Everyone wanted to be soft cooing sympathies. Very reasonable pigeons. No one had the tie & our solution to it was to buy shinier watches. We were enamored with what our wrists could declare. My mother was in the hospital & I didn’t want to be her friend. Typical son. Tall latte, short tale, bad plot, great wifi in the atypical café. My mother was in the hospital & she didn’’t want to be her friend. She wanted to be the family grocery list. Low-fat yogurt, firm tofu. She didn’t trust my father to be it.You always forget something, she said,even when I do the list for you. Even then.

Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss; This world uncertain is; Fond are life’s lustful joys; Death proves them all but toys; None from his darts can fly; I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us! Rich men, trust not in wealth, Gold cannot buy you health; Physic himself must fade. All things to end are made, The plague full swift goes by; I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us! Beauty is but a flower Which wrinkles will devour; Brightness falls from the air; Queens have died young and fair; Dust hath closed Helen’s eye. I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us! Strength stoops unto the grave, Worms feed on Hector’s brave; Swords may not fight with fate, Earth still holds ope her gate. “Come, come!” the bells do cry. I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us. Wit with his wantonness Tasteth death’s bitterness; Hell’s executioner Hath no ears for to hear What vain art can reply. I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us. Haste, therefore, each degree, To welcome destiny; Heaven is our heritage, Earth but a player’s stage; Mount we unto the sky. I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us.

Poor thing, she holds him on her lap, the godless hidden god, causing the lips of   those that sleep to speak. Cold shadow of   the white acanthus in its tiptoe dance. Buy the truth and sell it not. A lion is in the streets, there is a lion in the way. My niece, the little siren, taught her the slang: mad   married   fiancée. Dido has a quiver, she wears a spotted lynx skin and a belt. My undefiled is not herself tonight, but one thing’s forever: I just saw the video explaining the neighborhood applause, a book of anthems where sirens plunge into the gold of the initials at that karaoke party for her boyfriend. We cooked up all the goodies and fauns come through the windows. That’s her thing. “I like this path to darkness” she keeps saying. Whatever party fame's doing to her chances for a quick trial. Barbarella can’t touch her Goldilocks. That dog don't bird for she coming back or not.

The innocents all dress the same Their mouths open Their mouths close They flush and bleed and wonder where they are Happy to be leaving Hesitant and unprepared for the departure when it comes to them like penicillin Are you pinching yourself? What I want and how I want it That is what they told me They were right Skin is just like fabric All violence is in defense of something I lay on my back and wish I do that now I wish for good things, all the good, good things Why not Fabric rolls out like a cloud of paint A moan into a square of gauze I don’t know and so I write about it I care about life and the ones who never say a thing We are in the hands of providence who is unqualified There are those who would protect us from the possibility of good

My heart was suspect. Wired to an EKG, I walked a treadmill that measured my ebb and flow, tracked isotopes that ploughed my veins, looked for a constancy I’ve hardly ever found. For a month I worried as I climbed the stairs to my office.  The mortality I never believed in was here now.  They say my heart’s ok, just high cholesterol, but I know my heart’s a house someone has broken into, a room you come back to and know some stranger with bad intent has been there and touched all that you love.  You know he can come back.  It’s his call, his house now.