I wish you weren’t coming back. Ever. I don’t want to see you here again. I drive down to the beach thinking never. If your car was there, I would park you in. That makes me laugh out loud at how absurd my stupid heart is longing all the time. Hurt and vengeful, all those words for a heart in tears. You won’t change your mind. My pessimistic side growls I don’t care. And thinks up gruesome ends for you. It’s sad that you’ll be torn up by a bear or eaten by Sasquatch in a stew. Just think, at last you’ve managed to be free From one thing always. It happens to be me.
I wrote this in 2009.I don’t know why this gentleman comes to mind today. Partly because I have a friend in the hospital. She is in her 80s. When the doctors ask how she is, she says, “Fine.” I want to yell “Liar! She is NOT fine!” Luckily she has her daughter-in-law and me and her sons saying “She is NOT fine!”Sometimes people are very stoic and will not tell you that they are not fine.
When I was in residency we rotated through the Veterans Hospital in Portland, Oregon. Most of our patients were either very elderly or they were alcoholics or addicts in their 50s, starting to really go downhill medically.
One elderly patient is particular vivid in my memory. He was in his 80s and black. He was weak and had various problems. I was not doing a very good job of sorting him out.
He wouldn’t answer questions. Or rather, he would give a reply, but it was not yes or no and I couldn’t figure out how the answer related to the question.
On the third day he gave a long reply to a question and I recognized it.
“That’s Longfellow,” I said. He nearly smiled. “We did a bike trip around Nova Scotia and read Evangeline aloud in the tents at night. The mosquitos tried to eat us alive. That’s Longfellow, isn’t it?”
He wouldn’t answer but the twinkle in his eye indicated yes.
So our visits were cryptic but fun. I would try to guess the author. He knew acres of poetry, all stored in his brain, no effort. I tried to relate the poems to my questions to see if he was answering indirectly. I wondered if he had schizophrenia and these were answers, but I didn’t think so. I thought he was just stubborn and refusing to answer.
I challenged him. “Ok, you are the right age. Come up with a song with my first name that is from early in the century. My father used to sing it to me when I was little. Can you?”
The next day he sang to me: “K-k-k-katy, beautiful Katy, you’re the only beautiful girl that I adore. When the m-moon shines, over the cow shed, I’ll be waiting by the k-k-k-kitchen door.”
We sat and grinned at each other. Soon afterward I moved on to the next rotation. I don’t remember his medical problems. But I remember him and remember wondering what he had done in his life to have a memory and a store of poetry in his head. A teacher? A professor? A man who loved poetry? I started matching him with my own store of poems, the Walrus and the Carpenter, songs, bits and pieces. I felt blessed and approved of when his eyes twinkled at me, when I recognized an author or even recognized the poem itself. I looked forward to seeing him daily on rounds. And he seemed to look forward to my visits. I was sad when I had to say goodbye and the next rotation was out of town. And since he had never told us his name, no way to stay in touch. Farewell, poetry man, fare thee well.
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We were not doing nothing. He would not tell us his name, so we were awaiting an opinion from neurology. Waiting.
The photograph is not as old as the song. The young man holding the ball is my father, in the 1950s. My Aunt and I think this was at Williston in around 1956.
Oooo, I put orientation up as the Ragtag Daily Prompt today. Then I wondered if disorientation is a word and it is! A mouthful!
This is a series of poems or meditations or arguments I had with myself last week. I was thinking about love and how to handle people that I love that have stopped behaving in a loving way or have actually been cruel or cut me off. Do I stop loving them and hate them? Do I love them anyhow? What would that love open me to? Abuse? It is disorienting to think about. Here is the series.
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The Fall
I am small. The adults love me and give me away. I grieve each time. It doesn’t matter if I behave well or not: they leave me. I decide that the adults are confused. They do not know how to love. Why don’t they know? I want to understand! Babies should be loved! We are innocent!
All babies should be loved and protected. I do, with my sister. The adults continue their mysterious crazy doings. I recognize that alcohol does not help, nor other choices.
All babies should be loved and protected. All adults were babies once. Sometimes they were not loved and protected and they are damaged. I train and then I doctor them. Healing is slow.
All babies should be loved and protected. All adults were babies once. All adults hold a baby that should be loved and protected: themselves. I try for a long time.
All babies should be loved and protected. All adults were babies once. Each adult makes their own choices, to heal or not. To grow or not. To love themselves and the Beloved or not.
All babies should be loved and protected. All adults make choices. The Beloved loves them all.
I am not the Beloved. Nor an angel. I dream of falling.
I am not the Beloved. I let go. I fall.
I do not love them all.
Rise
Yesterday I fell. I let myself dislike four people that I loved.
But no, I choose not. Angels fall and rise again. I choose love. If that means distance, then I choose distance. For now I will love the cruel ones from a distance. No contact.
The Buddhas laugh at the needy ones, the angry ones, the ones who press. Some will be enlightened, some wait for the next life. The Buddhas laugh because they do not control it. It may be the quiet one who says nothing who rises, while one who wants and wants and wants may have to want for longer. Why, Beloved? Isn’t wanting you enough? Isn’t longing enough? How much must one want? How deeply must one long?
I choose love.
Prayer to Kwan Yin
Kwan Yin, I am sorry. I cannot be a Bodhisattva. I am tired. I grieve. I want to love everyone. They hate it. If I love the small child within they are reminded of the hidden hurts and they lash out. I am tired. I don’t want to be the target of that. Kwan Yin, how to do you return and return again, loving these? I am not strong enough. I give up. I throw myself on your mercy, I bow to your infinite love and strength, I abase myself. Forgive me, I am not strong enough. I give up. I do not have enough love in my heart and I am so tired.
Beloved, I am sorry. I tried.
Every Being (Sonnet 9)
Keep the cruel ones at a distance far. Hold your enemies close in love’s embrace. None to hate, yet cruelty glints like stars. I hide quiet with cats in this home space. My heart opens like the universe. Projections batter me from head to toe. Why tear at me with their deep hurts? They project their pain: inside they know. They know, don’t know, choose not to learn. Dark rooms and texts and staring at the screen. My skin scalded, heart black with new burns. I think they’d like me too to turn out mean. I will hide here with Beloved’s dove. Each tear I cry sends every being love.
In spite of want
Sol set in my heart and rises again. I can love whoever I want. There are no boundaries to love. But I will not be abused or used, I will love quietly and silently and without letting my love know. And I will love who I want. No, I will love in spite of want, though I do not want to, though it is not deserved. But I honor my stubborn heart that does not let go of love.
I spend a long day wrestling with love arguing with myself back and forth I am no angel descended from above Those undeserving of my love make me wroth yet my core argues that it still loves them and agrees their cruelty’s beyond the pale I snarl and cough and choke on bitter phlegm Defend my self staying far away and hale My core agrees I shall not tolerate abuse Forgive yet we despair we’ll ever reconcile They show no guilt nor shame for their misuse My core says let them be: she is so mild Negotiation done: Agreed. I may love those who I love But I leave contact with them to the angels and Beloved.
What old deep wound causes you to hurt me and other friends you’ve had in past. What terrors hidden in that brew make you glory in making others sad? You boast to me of throwing people out of your life forever, never friend again. You don’t explain what crimes reroute your heart to where you never speak again to him or me. How many people discarded from your heart and at what interval? How many “friendships” have you departed? And yet you boast that others call you spiritual. “Friends forever,” you said. I wonder why you tell yourself and me that petty lie.
Heart of wood, by the sea
What do the spirits say to me?
His heart is stone not wood you see
And he’ll never come back, never come back, never come back to me
Tree torn from land by flooding water
bark and branches torn asunder
thrown back to the beach stripped and bare
bleached and dried lying there
grass and sand and stones on strand
I wonder how much a heart can stand
This doesn’t really fit today’s Ragtag Daily Prompt. I was looking for another photograph which fits and found this one.
I have neither roots nor wings nor love. I lie: friends gather round to talk each day. The early dark slides over from above. No one to warm my bed, for no one stays. The dark creeps up a sickening horrid thief. I have no heart to stay awake at night. It’s barely five; why this flood of grief? It’s only in the morning I’m alight before the morning is even close to dawn. Wide awake I clamber from my bed. I stretch, the teapot sings and I just yawn and wonder why the night brings on such dread. I tell my friends that now I’ll date a tree. He never leaves and he will stay with me.
I think of how you treat me with low dudgeon. Rarely and when fatigued I think of you. You hide away, a hermit like curmudgeon pusillanimous liar, unfaithful and untrue. We share a childhood full of trauma I work hard to heal from all the strife but you choose to elevate the drama and excise protestations from your life. I ask Beloved what I am assigned to do. You don’t believe in angels nor in me. The mystery of angels leads me here to you; like a bear you hide up in the trees. I find the change the loved Beloved grants. You refusing change, I ban you from my pants.
We mature at a different rate
than you humans
I don’t really pass as human
but since I am 5’4″
no one guesses I’m an ogre
I have been an Ogre since
before birth
my mother ill
attacked by antibodies in the womb
luckily the illness does not cross
the barrier of the mixed mother daughter
the placenta
but the antibodies do cross
I am born with my immune system
red hot and ready to fight
my maternal grandmother is an Ogre too she cares for me while my mother heals you are right to refuse help she says you may feed yourself and she lets me I am four months
Two grrl cousins are also stressed from birth
one arrives early and survives
smallest child to live in that city
all they have for premies is a warm box
her parents are warned
she might be slow
the other is born in Bangladesh
mother very ill
mother damaged by illness
she survives too
three Ogres?
No
different mitochondria
from three different mothers
different immune systems
different parents
Ogre, dark angel, and martyr
And the others wonder why we fight
A woman says “I like you when you’re well.”
to me when I am sick
and my partner disappears
he says, “I can’t have a disabled partner.”
I snarl, “I am not disabled.
I am just on oxygen.”
But it is not true
I am disabled
And very annoyed
I avoid the woman for a year
and think about it
I am never “well”
if it’s an antibody disorder
and if I got it in the womb
what would I be like if I did not have it?
no one knows
and I don’t either
So I have done well
in the end
to survive a chronic illness since before birth
Ogres take longer to mature
but once we do
we are hell on wheels
And at last I accept it
I am happy being an Ogre
and I will be the best Ogre I can
Discover and re-discover Mexicoβs cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - FlΓΌchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflΓΌchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
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