Myth of Arrival

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It is nice to have amazing friends. Ekaterina Evseyeva has been sending me photos of her life in Sahka/Yakutsk, in the former Soviet Union. My poem does not do justice to her photography … but as they say, "a photograph is worth a thousand words."

Perhaps I best write a little faster.

Tell me that pigeons have it easy, my
dear, someone must. The sky is vast. I love
the sky, though I am pale. The antennae
of those apartments all rise up, they glove
the whole world in their messages. They shove
old God out of bed, they must, and I think
through this door lies Rome. It rises above
the clouds. You can see it all purple-pink
in the winter sky. Or Paris? The stink
of this life — sore, wet and smog — makes it tough
to tell. Pigeons know. They are my far link
to the beyond. And this door. It's enough
to know I can go. Rise on ruddy-gray
wings. Wild pink delight in a wild pink day.

This morning at 7 o'clock sharp I was at the voting office casting my vote for a straight Democratic ticket. I'm not too hard to guess. I'll vote for anyone Pro-Choice. It's all about the right to choose and I choose to help continue the system of choosing. Then, later, I read Gerald Stern's poem, The Dancing, with all that terrible beauty in its lines. To be both beautiful and frightening is an impossible act sometimes. Gerald writes of his family dancing in their little apartment, all those he loves, all his joy:

… the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us
screaming and falling, as if we were dying,
as if we could never stop — in 1945 –
in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home
of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away
from the other dancing — in Poland and Germany –
oh God of mercy, oh wild God

I think of all of us and the choices we all make, the need to continue in the face of others who do not like us, hate us, want to silence us. I think of all my friends and even though many might not agree with me, even though some of my friends would give away their own rights, gladly, happily, I am filled with a terrible burning to continue. All of us, together, we all must continue or perish in flame.

I.

Stop the reel of the news of
the girl in the mosque
blowing herself up. A flash,
a spark, entertainment. We debate
and debate when life starts. So
what? It ends here: a slash
of hot sun, she is gone turning
into salt, ash, god. How hard.
To love your friends and not
other people's friends. To want
what is best for them. We want
what is best. Of course we want.
Needing. A hunger. An anger.
Why do we turn to anger, to ash,
to god why do we turn
when we love turn to love
your god and not how hard
other people's gods we
do not love other people.

II.

If you cannot remember then go in
peace and sin no more but you should.
Back when Charlie controlled all this.
This is about control. This is about Charlie
and all the crazy things he said, "I speak
for the god." Come on now, we all know
the truth. Charlie spoke for Charlie just
like the two young men at my doorstep.
Salvation, they cry. It's a big word. I love
these young men, but in a off-handed way.
If they should perish in flame I would not
be too surprised though I might wonder why.

I might. I want to tell them about Charlie,
about a time, just like this, just like now
(it is always now, it is always like this)
maybe you were there? maybe you and
your friends? and first they wouldn't let you
in the school? right. and then not on
the street? old Charlie said and we wore
armbands and marched and sang it was good
to sing wasn't it? it is always good to sing and
Charlie said the god was in certain things and not
others it's all about the god and the others that we
didn't like we could get rid of those others
I mean because we didn't like them
couldn't we? yes we could we did and I
want to tell these young men all this but
what do you say to young men
when they come to the door? I don't know
it is a sad world sometimes because I think
I should know if I only had the right
combination of words it's all about words?

no. There is fire too. Fire that you look into
while it consumes I love that verb "to consume"
they are always talking about fire how the body
burns how we must pay how we must burn
for salvation. Salvation is the word to be.
If I was going to be one word and not fire
and not consume and not friends I'd be salvation.
I'd tell these boys to come on in sit down
have a beer kick loose grow out that hair
and laugh a bit. I'd tell them to not worry
about other people we're always worried
about other people about them falling
into fire Oh that fire I'd say Oh that
Charlie I'd say don't worry about that
fire, don't worry about that Charlie. But
they do and so do I.

III.

It sounds like a joke the way she said it
some guys were sitting around arguing
about women's reproductive rights, yeah
right like guys ever worry about women
or their rights and I just nod my head
when we talk to the choir because I am
the choir and she is singing and I can't
think of anywhere else I want to be
or be with or do and what effects her
effects me and in the end it comes down
to that and she says that it's odd
how many talk about conception
at birth but don't take care about the living
and I nod and she says maybe
if there was a voluntary nuder/ spay program
for all who don't believe in women's rights
just so they wouldn't contribute to the general
misery we'd see how ballsy these guys
really are and I nod and — wait she didn't
say that I did and she nodded — we turn
on the radio and a voice is talking
about a teenage girl blowing herself up
somewhere else just like that in a mosque
somewhere else and I want to say something
here for my sister, your daughter, our
mothers, I want words here

in this sad world sometimes
I think I could stop all this if
I only had the right combination
of words anything can be explained
any crime the worse you can think
of to those you love
to your friends and those
you love it's all about
words? yes. and friends
I love like you it's all
about those who love.

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?

We have triggers that hold back memories. The mind, the soul if you believe in souls, puts up psychic dams and holds back floods so we do not go crazy. We do not destroy ourselves. Yesterday, walking through a grocery store's produce section, I came upon apricots. How strange that that fruit woke up so much in me? No, not strange, the apricot is one of the national symbols of Armenia. The sun is another. "May the sun put you in your grave." A curse I heard one of my fellow teachers use.

Memories suddenly surface. Memories you didn't know you had in you. Or, rather, you knew all along but ignored, carrying them like cancer. An alien lump you think is part of your very soul.

You did like apricots as a child, you
are told. Apricot puree, pudding, spooned
into your mouth. Now the fruit pains you, few
memories pain you like that. Here the wound
stays raw for years. Let the fruit be festooned
with your secrets. Let no lover see it
and think amorous thoughts. It is marooned
in a place you cannot even admit
exists. Shriveled little ear, you emit
memories I cannot deal with, pain caught
in your pulpy flesh. Please teach this half-wit
boy that everything can spoil. Apricot,
cities, memory. Even you boy, and
you are no stranger in this foreign land.

Of the few nurse aides to write about their experiences perhaps the first and the most famous is that of Walt Whitman, “the Good, Gray Poet.” His book, “Drum-Taps,” written during the American Civil War, describes his role as a nurse tending to the wounded and dying that came back in floods from the battles that were raging all around him:

The results of the late battle are exhibited everywhere about here in thousands of cases, (hundreds die every day), in the camp, brigade, and division hospitals. These are merely tents, and sometimes very poor ones, the wounded lying on the ground, lucky if their blankets are spread on layers of pine or hemlock twigs, or small leaves. No cots, seldom even a mattress. It is pretty cold. The ground is frozen hard, and there is occasional snow. I go around from one case to another. I do not see that I do much good to these wounded and dying; but I cannot leave them. Once in a while some youngster holds me convulsively, and I do what I can for him; at any rate, stop with him and sit near him for hours, if he wishes it (Loewen, 24)

It is this sitting near the dying, keeping watch over them, that strikes a chord for me. Little has changed, really, since "Drum-Taps" was written. Part of my job as a nurse aide is to keep bedside death watch; monitoring the slow progress (if progress is the right word) as the body shuts down. That is one of the downside to working with a geriatric population – their bodies are always shutting down, the end of their lives is always near. Whitman talks about this care in his poem “The Wound-Dresser” (1865). Here he states:

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On, on I go, (open doors of time! open hospital doors!)
The crush'd head I dress, (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away,)
The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through examine,
Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life
struggles hard,
(Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death!
In mercy come quickly.)

From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand,
I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood,
Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv'd neck and side falling head,
His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the
bloody stump,
And has not yet look'd on it.

I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep,
But a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and sinking,
And the yellow-blue countenance see.

I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound,
Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening,
so offensive,
While the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray and pail.

I am faithful, I do not give out,
The fractur'd thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen,
These and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in my breast
a fire, a burning flame.) … (Cowley, 285-6)

And even today, as I and my fellow nurse aides try to make the resident's last moments of being alive as comfortable as possible I see that the “sweet death” Whitman writes about is not always merciful and not always quick but in the end it finally does arrive.

These two drops of morphine under the tongue
forces the body to relax, the heart
to still, lungs to slow, slowing. And what clung
to life now let's go. Let go. There's no art
to death. No skill in dying. The small part
I do, bedside death watch on volunteer
basis, is to watch for pain. I will chart
just what I see. At times we interfere
with death; strap the body to machines, cog
and pump forcing circulation. It does
for a while. But infinity's fabric,
that gray hue, still takes over. So we slog
on in post-mortem care. We work and buzz
and joke like this is art; our own sick trick.

Works Cited

Cowley, Malcolm (ed). The complete poetry and prose of Walt Whitman: as prepared by him for the deathbed edition. New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy (1948)

Loewen, Nancy (ed). Walt Whitman. Mankato, Minn.: Creative Editions (1994)