Look out

I am being undermined by a poem.
I had a rigorous thought
and shoved the blame off
onto someone else’s shoulders.
Wallowing in self-righteousness,
I thought I’d try a poem;
but the poem took the thought
mulled it over and over
and re wrote it casting the blame
squarely back where it belonged
on my own shoulders.

Rule No 1: never trust a poem.

Drowning

I inhabit a watery
landscape;
like the man in the poem,
I am far too far out,
not waving, but drowning.

Drowning creates communication
problems; it’s difficult
for a bystander to know what to say.
She could venture a direct question:
“Why are you drowning?”
which might ellicit an equally
direct reply: “I’m out of my depth
and cannot swim.”
But the grammatical ambiguity
still remains: the present continuous,
“I am drowning” is never resolved into
the perfect tense “I have drowned”.
And an obscure answer might be better:
“With my crossbow, I shot the albatross”
or a metaphysical subtlety
“I am not drowning, life is drowning me”

Well, if you’re going to bring fate into it!
Fate never follows human timelines
No need to launch the lifeboat;
there’ll be no drowning today, tomorrow, not until the end of time.

Better just wave back and call out;
“have a happy day”.
If challenged later
to justify the crassness
of this remark
insist you’re not wanting to deprive me
of a moment or two’s happiness
before the final gulp.

Doubting

More than 55 years in one city
and only four earthquakes
until about six weeks ago
when there was a ferocious one
followed by, so far, 2000 aftershocks.
The earth, like an injured animal,
is containing within itself the pain
but from time to time
rears up against it.

With the earth jerking
and shuddering under our feet
and our houses cork-screwing
upon their foundations,
how are we to maintain
we are of any account
in the scheme of things?
We can rebuild our houses
but how are we to restore our shattered confidence?

At odds

My poetry-writing self is wily
and very observant;
she’s in cahoots
with my dreaming self
and together they delight
in the mischief of undermining
my practical, everyday self.
Like Jung, they do not need to believe;
they know, whereas my agnostic self
lumbers from doubt to doubt.
They know that at death,
the body disassembles
its carbon, nitrogen, oxygen
into compost but they also know
that death is an enlarging horizon,
that the essence of self
cannot be destroyed.

I would like to die when I am dreaming
or writing poetry
instead of living
this incomplete fugue
where one part follows another
only to be interrupted
by a discordant jangle.

Memories that clutch and cling

The house did not contain a memory
of him arriving unexpectedly,
our sharing a meal,
listening to music together,
sitting on the floor giggling foolishly
as we played childhood card games.
These memories belonged
to a different house
in a different country.
But it did contain the memory
of his ringing one birthday
because as he said, correctly,
I would prefer a phone call to a present.
It also contained
the anguished-ridden calls
as his health leeched out of him.
When, after his death, the house
was up for sale,
I had no choice but to buy it.
How could I leave a house
where I had last heard his living voice?

Euridyce

The story is indubitably one-sided:
look up Euridyce
and you’ll be directed to Orpheus.
That’s the problem of marrying
a famous musician, who charmed
people, animals, birds, fish,
set stones and trees dancing
and stilled the punishments of hell.

We know very little about Euridyce,
so let’s shift our point of view:
she was still-born,
her near-life experience mirrors
near-death experiences:
groping through darkness
towards a threshold
beyond which there is light,
warmth and brightness
only, at the last, to be drawn back
into blackness and delusion.

Life and death are not opposites;
it is birth that opposes death.
Birth and death
book-end our life’s story;
we call one a miracle
the other a travesty.
We do not mind not knowing
where we’ve come from
but we dread not knowing
where we are going.
It would be better if like Janus
we could face both directions
with equal grace.

Stolen

It must be the most consummate
burglar of them all.
At the beginning, the thefts were basic;
walking, dressing myself,
turning over in bed.
But later, it removed my ability
to feed myself, to sing in a choir
and play the piano.
It seems the thieving is systematic;
when I spasm, I either go rigid
like a corpse or curl into a fetal ball;
my very beginning
and my very end are intact;
it’s the life in between
that is being dismantled.

Some weeks ago I had friends around
to honour a young man’s death.
Shubert’s “Winterreise” was sung.
The room was full of beauty and pain;
the human need to give comfort
was expressed by my friends
holding one another in close embrace.

Entrenched in my wheelchair,
like an armadillo,
I sat watching.
I could neither give
nor receive comfort.
The M.S had stolen
my human connectedness.
I was left with only words,
but words were not appropriate.
It was a double grieving
and brought with it the fear
that one day, even my words
might be taken away.