May 23, 2018 | Blank Verse |
I understand very little but the hordes coming behind me know so much I admire them and fear them perhaps a few have kinship to me are baffled as I was, as I am I count myself fortunate to see the light that I see, to see by my own lights The illusion of ownership barely lingers in me, I belong to my body, not the reverse There is tenderness for what is and can be easily abolished. The dark of violence frightens me The hordes coming behind me know so much, but do not yet know how little it is, we...
Mar 10, 2018 | Free Verse, Tries |
In the night he played the organ of sorrows whose vast pipes spanned continents and whose music was time, the sea in which he swam and dissolved to become a wail sounding the deep where beginning and end are one note...
Mar 10, 2018 | General Fiction |
When morning comes, I will not see it. With not even a pang of loneliness the sun will rise without me. This is the night of my death, for which I have waited all my life, never knowing when it would come, only sure that it would arrive. This is a night full of pain and terror and wrath and fatigue and just a hint of the tip of the wing of the wild white bird of tenderness, surcease and peace. I can feel that, too, in the midst of my amazement that I still have a voice with which to try to say goodbye to myself and to my world. No one is listening and that provides my own version of haphazard and flimsy truth with the thin shelled egg of privacy within which it can struggle to be born as I am dying. Now I need to pause to catch my inner breath which is running away from me. I can’t stop struggling, but the struggle has changed as the ingredient of hopelessness has been added, not just spoonful by spoonful, but heaping spoonful by heaping spoonful. I am neither young nor terribly old as I face forever. If I am more old than young, the core “feel” I have of myself, strangely, has not changed since I first knew myself as a little girl. I have not been someone who loved or lived an inward life. The interior frightened me in ways I never had much interest in defining. To have undertaken that task would already have been to embark on a voyage of exploration leading...
Oct 17, 2017 | General Fiction |
I write from beyond the grave. My children will not want to hear what I have to say and they will certainly not be quick to believe me. I want them to know that I did better than my best. I had to invent from scarce to non-existent resources inside myself the fumes on which I ran. So why am I writing? Why do I trouble the peace of eternity? It is not a matter of self-justification but rather of clarification. While living I was somewhere else. I was held captive in another realm, not precisely against my will, because I was complicit. My fascination made me complicit. To break away for even an instant required heroic effort. I seemed to be a mother in the world. My fascination was with something indefinable, but dynamic, perhaps even non-existent, but nonetheless real to me. When I say that to break away even for an instant required heroic efforts – which I made – I am not flattering myself. It took intense, painful spasms of the will to light my face up with something resembling a smile for even a brief instant. The vast majority of the time my face was not exactly dark, but abstracted, empty. In short it was a face that was not quite a face. Yet not a mask because it lacked that measure of definition. That realm, that other realm, was cruel and subtle. There was, possibly, a split second upon awakening when the light of the world, the remarkable ordinary world, was not affected, but this instant was never prolonged, so it seemed only yet...
Mar 14, 2017 | General Fiction |
OLD AMOS I. Old Amos Old Amos stood in the southeast corner of the garden, the corner closest to Jerusalem, the city of gold. The sour cherry tree behind him was in full bloom. When the breeze stirred, white petals floated down. It was the middle of June, spring going into summer. It had rained for almost three solid days, then turned fair as a high pressure system swept down across the Great Lakes from the northern reaches of Canada, wild country. Three lazy clouds drifted like lost pieces of cotton in a blue sky. Momentarily, they lined up in a row… Jerusalem was still seven thousand miles away. In all his eighty-one years, Amos had never been there. Yet he had not forgotten her. He had obeyed faithfully the Biblical injunction, “Jerusalem, if I forget thee, may my right hand lose its cunning.” He longed to let her clasp him to her bosom. A scruple kept him from taking his longing quite literally. Each life was both lucky and unlucky beyond measure. When it came to souls, scales failed. You knew for sure that you didn’t know what was coming next, wouldn’t quite know what it had been once it was gone. Whatever you planned changed in the making. If you thought of yourself as its author, you sinned. You might as well lust after the making of graven images. Also you were a fool. Oblivion was the privilege of fools, an enviable one at that. A little bit of vision, no great amount, took a man a...
Feb 25, 2017 | General Fiction |
I. It started with the generator. Kenneth walked into the office just after lunch one day at the very beginning of the long rains. It was too hot. The air wasn’t stirring at all. Moko, the vice-principal, was yelling at Henry. “Henry, you can not always be making these silly and frivolous requests. You must plan and anticipate needs. One order every six months or even every year should be quite sufficient, indeed. I must impress upon you that, without foresight, nothing of lasting value can be accomplished.” Moko turned away from Henry, who sat immobile at his desk, his face totally quiet. Dressed in short-sleeved white shirt frayed at the collar and grayish green slacks, Henry was a slight man in his middle thirties. While Moko was working under his white shirt on a mild rise that would, with a little encouragement, boll out into a full fledged pot belly, Henry’s frame lacked even a hint of fat. The articulation of every muscle was visible.† The skin was a wrapping that revealed their workings more than it cloaked them.† Underneath the desk, Henry’s ankles were crossed. In the drab office with its old wooden furniture, the bright yellow of Henry’s rubber clogs made an accent, like hot mustard sauce. “Henry, you can not always be getting the idea that you’re indispensable. You know what the President has been saying about all this feather boating held over from colonial times. He say, ‘Pay for performance and only for performance.’ That’s official now, not just one man’s whim, although some of us, we have been thinking the same thing for...
Apr 28, 2016 | Clinical |
I took on the inpatient care of an African-American woman in her later thirties after her previous psychiatrist was banished for misconduct and terrible judgement. I was a resident just about her age and the small extra amount of money I got paid for adding her to my case load made a difference to me. She was intensely suicidal, but without vegetative signs of a deep depression. She had more children than fingers on one hand. It was her avowed purpose to treat each one as if that child were an only child. She felt that it was her job to give each child everything that child might need or want. These requirements were absolute, as she saw them. It was all too easy to see the shortcomings of such a model for practical child rearing policy. From the point of view of psychological economy and personal energy it was obviously not viable. A real effort to implement it could not help but leave a mother in a seriously depleted state. This was a grandiose project that demanded a regime of self-oppression that was virtually unthinkable. It had no limits. Here she was wanting to end her life, refusing to make concessions to reality, as if any concession would be a source of boundless shame. The degree of harshness against herself, the all-or-nothing features of her thinking were striking. She was beautiful and quite used to being envied because of it, not that she ever avowed either of these. Her beauty was striking. It was something it was literally impossible not to notice. She was intelligent. She was quiet,...
Apr 23, 2016 | Clinical |
Why am I so tired at the end of the day? What do I do all day long? I sit in a handcrafted cherry wood rocker whose flexible staves provide exquisite lumbar support and talk with people. I listen and I talk. More than one patient has remarked that it is good to have a shrink who is on his rocker. Probably most of what I do is inside myself. I ponder. I simulate. I take in and I take on. I call on my own experiences to help me which means they come to life again. In this second (or third or fourth, but always from a slightly different angle) coming there is both joy and pain. Most of the maneuvering I do is inside myself. Some of it has shape that I can describe, but most of it is well below the surface of declarative awareness. It has to do with who I am and the road (or roads) I have travelled to get to myself. It is implicit in each breath that I take. Why am I so tired at the end of a day of being with patients? In one way seeing patients is absolutely ordinary. I open the door to my office. The patient and I greet each other. We sit down. There is nothing so special about the furniture, the windows, the light, the rug on the floor. Yes, my office is in an old brick building at the top of a hill. Yes, just outside the window is an old cherry tree which bursts into glorious bloom each spring. Its...
