Myth of Arrival

Some weeks ago I wrote about my adoptive city (in so much as a city can adopt anyone), Gyumri, Armenia. It's been ten years since I've been there, during Peace Corps and I was not happy with the sonnet I had posted along with my memories. Perhaps at a later date I'll re-write it? Perhaps. It speaks of needing a different form than I used. Anyway, I am concerned about my inability to bring my private public in my poems. The question I keep raising is how does one speak of things that are still unknown to us? If trauma is, at one level, an inability to deal with an event, then by its very nature of being unspeakable (and by the poet's need to work only in words) we fail at writing a good poem. Perhaps that is why so many poems that try to capture terrible events waste away into nothing? They fall back on cliched images and do not do any real work of myth making? Perhaps.

And yet the experience is still inside me. It doesn't go away simply because I have not found a way to express it. It is a true parasite; it lives in me but does not give anything back. Virgil Suarez write about it slightly differently. In his poem "Garabato" he describes his failure at trying to protect himself many years ago against the school yard bullies. Since he copied Chinese characters off fortune cookies he told them he knew martial arts. When that didn't work he prayed for protection but:

… The elementals didn't work. My mis-
fortune cookies always came through: You will

make no friends. You will always be an outsider.
Not knowing the price, you will pay much dues.

Nothing has helped heal the mental blows, except
for this poem now …

Why do we write? Why do we burn with misery over obsessions no one else cares about? "Because I burn," is what the romantic says. Or is it because I have yet to find the right words to heal my own mental blows … yet? It all comes down to that "yet," down to this: one day I will figure out the right combination of words, like a spell, that will release me from this guilt, make living with my past easier, then I can stop this whole world turning daily into a terrible cinder. Until then I write. Please let me write. Let me write because annihilation by fire is not how I want to go out.

I.

Near your hut you could count the stumps, all ten
of them, imagine the street leafy. Ash
and pine make a city. You were young when
you left, taking all this with you and rash
enough to think only your city — trash
in the streets, broken blocks, caved-in rail yard –
– could have suffered so. Later, this mishmash
you call memory grows and you reward
it by replaying each horror, unmarred
by time, in your head. No Messiahs walked
those streets. They burnt their libraries. They charred
each book then each tree to keep warm. Shocked
you grieve, not for them but for the stumps, burned
for heat; for what you learned. What have you learned?

II.

To sit still. Sit and wait and
count the dust motes. Call it
indignity. There are always
dust motes on summer days when
the spring mud has finally dried
and those few precious months
bring fresh apricots to market.

You always liked apricots and frost,
if frost could be called easy, forming
on the window at its ease. No
where else have you seen someone
sit still in the dark of middle day,
the packed-floor frozen, the dead
voice faintly calling out. We are
perfect with imperfection. Still
this is where he was born, this is
where they are all buried, this

is where he will be. The room,
this hut, the world was corrugated
tin and the rain made a sound
like torturous birds battling flight.
The snow made a shlump noise as
trucks rumbled past. I do not
recall if the sunlight could speak,
there was so little of it. My neighbor
would trill against the emptiness
of sound, he sat with the radio
chugging out static, anything
was better than silence

because in silence you could hear
them, his children or his wife or
something I could not and could
not believe in — isn't that what you
go back to? this inability to wander
between two worlds? — but of course

you were not there
and this whole thing relied
on belief, didn't it? You knew
that as a child
only certain people
could follow you
into the kingdom
under the stairs;
an iron gate will take
you anywhere. A dead pear
tree is a god to some. Then
why is this so hard
to imagine? Because it requires
a will for listening?
A willingness to admit
others listen too?
Others listen too.

III.

Sit still. To sit still
and listen. Listen to what?
Even now I am impatient
and up and pacing and they
are no longer here. Not the man
drinking vodka all day, fat
the way a cancer, its cells,
are fat from feeding. Not
this heart stuck inside this chest.
Not his wife, the children, people
you never knew. Not this brain,
the messages from this brain, the call
it gives, the response I take. Sit still.
Listen. You want answers.
Conclusion. The end. You want
the man to leave, get up out
of that hut, walk among the ruins
praise to movement, praise to the ears
and all they bring to us, praise to lungs
filling with air, praise to heart and
its comely blood, praise to the brain
and all the songs it knows. You want
so much. There is nothing harder
than sitting still. Listening. Memory,
a short grievance, like indignity, you
sit until one of you asks did you
hear that? Yes, did you?

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 5th, 2006 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Original Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.