30 Saturday Nov 2013
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our story
is to always be torn apart
you take the best pieces parts with you
I don’t mind
missing, waiting, wanting–
it’s a good thing
27 Wednesday Nov 2013
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An hour had passed before Harry walked to the bedroom door and stood there watching his wife sleep. It would not be he who would wake her.
In a few minutes the phone would ring and on the other end would be the mother of the young man who found her son’s body in their shared apartment. Harry would remain standing and watching as she answered the call and tried to understand the news. Eventually, he’d go to her, sit down on the bed, and hold her in his arms.
After hearing the details of the morning and his ability and willingness to console her, I originally assumed the reason Harry did not wake his wife was so she could sleep one last time the sleep of one who has been untouched by tragedy: deep, sweet, fully given in to it. I admired him.
Soon, I would not.
As a psychiatrist, I know one of the first things to be affected when patients experience deep loss is their sleep, and I asked Harry’s wife if this was so with her. It was. I asked if she would like something to help her sleep. She did.
There are several theories about sleep, but one is that we have evolved to conserve energy when it is most dangerous for us to be awake. Lions, for example, at the top of the food chain, sleep upwards of seventeen hours or more a day. Prey animals, on the other hand, like white-tail deer, barely sleep at all and must be somewhat alert when they do.
I turned to Harry and asked the same, assuming he would need something, too. Harry’s wife answered for him. She told me Harry was having no difficulty with sleep and, in fact, was sleeping better than he had before, with no aids whatsoever.
I was surprised, and looked at Harry for confirmation; he had an odd sort of smile that seemed to agree and confirm he caught the irony.
In the end, as is so often the case with my patients, I don’t have an answer for why Harry didn’t wake her, and I would caution anyone from simple explanations of human behavior. The mind is not simple. We don’t know ourselves, how could we possibly know each other?
Sleep is not simple either. Whether it’s performing an evolutionary duty, organizing itself like a computer, or removing neurotoxins, what happens in those hours of rest is profound and tells us profound things about who we are. Indeed, I believe dreams are the closest explanations of ourselves.
Harry and his wife continued to see me for three months, at last conceding neither one wanted to continue the marriage. His wife, alternating between feeling numb and feeling profound guilt that she could have prevented her son’s death if only she’d done this or that thing, never did sleep well and, eventually, for whatever reason, rejected any pharmacological intervention.
Harry saw me by himself one more time, and it seemed as if he wanted me to say something to absolve him or to give him a simple answer to the unasked, but obvious question.
I did not.
26 Tuesday Nov 2013
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Stems reach up
Like a witch’s broom,
Grow hair
Like a witch’s chin:
Hair, scutch, twitch,
quake, cough grass.
In June, I picked a blade
Swished it under your chin—
Tickle grass,
Soft as skin.
Soon after,
Its bristly panicle:
Brittle branches
Easily broken,
Carrying weed seed,
Devil’s grass,
Thousands of acres,
Thousands of miles—
As far as the devil.
Tumble and panic grass
Flitters and flies
To where you are,
To where I am,
Through my gates,
Through my walls,
Witch
Grass.
What is weed,
What is not weed,
One word.
25 Monday Nov 2013
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Witch Grass
Its baby stems reach up
like a witch’s broom
And grow thick hairs as thick
as Like a witch’s chin
Hair, scutch, twitch,
quake, and cough grass
Once, in June, I picked a blade—
Swished it back and forth under your chin
Tickle grass—
sweet as rain,
Soft as skin.
Soon after,
It sent up a its bristly panicle: of seeds
Fine, brittle branches
Easily broken, and blown away
Carrying weed weed seed,
devil’s grass,
For thousands of acres,
Hell, thousands of miles—
As far as a the devil
can reach.
Tumble and panic grass
Flying Flitters and flies Flies upon its wooden broom
To where you are now
To where I am now-–
It walks through my gates,
It walks through my walls,
Whirls through my mind—
Witch
Grass. Grass.
What is weed weed
And what is not weed weed–
As simple as Separated by one word.
23 Saturday Nov 2013
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In school, we carried eggs like babies;
All of them broke cracked broke
Now, at midlife, we small talk around our fears,
We drink a lot, and laugh, and drop “F” bombs,
We wake at three a.m. from terrible dreams,
Where their broken bodies are leaking leak whites,
And their precious, unseen yokes
Scramble to pour themselves out.
22 Friday Nov 2013
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Small talk has a mercy of its own.
Thoughts about why Harry may not wake her:
What does the narrator know and not know? What does the narrator assume? What validity can we give his assumptions?
What is the difference between wake and sleep? Is your sleeping life as important as your waking life? Is one more real than another?
There are times I’ve woken up and my dreams were so vivid and the emotions in them so painful–it was as if I lived it. I did live it, didn’t I? I wake up and tell myself, “I don’t have to do this. I can wake up and stop.” But can I? If those dreams are in me, than what is this? Am I waking or just waking to something new?
There are 24 hours in a day–are the 8 we’re asleep as valuable as the other 16?
The reason I ask myself these questions is because Harry’s a waker—when he wakens, he gets right up. When he rests, either to sit and watch t.v. or in a plane, for example, he falls directly asleep. Sleep and wake are clear cut to him and waking hours are the only real hours.
His wife, on the other hand, is one who pushes the snooze button. She values sleeping hours and the information from dreams. She sees sleeping as living and doing.
Harry is about to go to her door and stand there and contemplate these things. He knows she’ll never sleep like this again. She’s about to transition into the world of the non-sleepers–the sharks–the ones who have to constantly be at movement, and this life shift will happen to her in the moments between sleep and wake–when we comfort ourselves that we can wake.
“This is only a dream. I can wake up and stop it.”
–those moments. We all know them well.
22 Friday Nov 2013
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The seagulls at seven am wake me
(If you’re not inland, what is this outland?)
Whatever it is, I love the sound of seagulls
Honking cars, sirens, traffic
This hotel must might be cheap
judging by Because there’s graffiti outside the window
Rival symbols On the building’s white bricks of a building so tall
I can’t tell for sure if the sun’s out.
Something about cheap and graffiti appeal
As if Maybe I’m paying penance being here.
Can I confess?
I’m feeling like cheap and graffiti
21 Thursday Nov 2013
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Poetry Vs Novels, Short Story Vs Novels, Thoughts, Writing a Novel, Writing Poetry, Writing Short Story
In this life, there are tragedies that pale shame.
That sentence is exactly why I’ll never write a novel. I find more of interest in it than I might in ten chapters of a book.
There are so many possibilities which I haven’t explored.
Here are a few:
In this life, there are tragedies that pale shame. [The Sentence I chose.]
In this life, there are tragedies which pale shame.
Shame is sometimes paled by our deepest tragedies.
Some tragedies pale shame.
In my experience (bringing the narrator in again), many times tragedy pales shame.
Or, if he/she wants to wax wisely: The answer I’ve found to the many heinous acts men commit: our tragedies pale our shame.
I could go on and on and love every minute of it.
And that is why, I will never write a novel.
Here’s an article I read today about the vulnerability it takes to write. Well done.
I would add to that we are all writing non-fiction even when we say it’s fiction. There is so much of people close to me in this little piece about “Why Harry Didn’t Wake Her” that I feel a little embarrassed I borrowed (lifted) so much.
But how can we write anything we don’t know–or allowed ourselves to feel vicariously?
If a reader close to us (say, a family member) finds themselves in the characters and doesn’t like what they see, whose fault is it? Mine, or theirs?
The reality is that all our lives can be written a thousand different ways depending on the perspective. I can think of five close friends of mine who would write my life differently, and I can almost predict the direction in which they’d write it.
I pride myself on being a straight arrow–what you see is what you get–but one of my friends compared me to one of my sneaky pets. Am I that sneaky pet? Should I protest that comparison or see its truth and laugh about it?
Damn, I am that sneaky pet. I guess. Maybe. Sometimes.
There’s very little of the hero in any of us, but we do have moments.
Which is why I like “Harry” so much and would love to tidy up this little story and give him a heroic exit. But I haven’t written the ending yet and stories have lives of their own and come from places in us we think we’ve never seen.
Or, have we?
21 Thursday Nov 2013
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I believe that’s why he was able to relate the minutiae of his morning so precisely, knowing full well what those details might reflect back of him.
With every conversation, every sentence uttered from our mouths, we are all writing our biographies. We cunningly size up our audience: their sympathies and prejudices, their wit, their attention spans, their need for truth and our obligation (or lack of obligation) to give it to them.
Harry was a smart man. He was a man of careful consideration and polite manners. He knew as well as you or I or anyone, that returning to eat oatmeal after hearing your step-son has killed himself is the most crass and heartless action of the very many different ones a man could take.
All at once, by admitting he’d done these those simple things: made his breakfast, picked up his the paper, ate his breakfast and drank his orange juice and coffee, it was as if he was admitting he’d pulled the trigger and killed him himself.
20 Wednesday Nov 2013
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In this life, there are tragedies that pale shame.
19 Tuesday Nov 2013
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In my experience, deep, peaceful sleep is a privilege enjoyed by a rare few.
Harry had never slept as soundly as his wife. There was a restlessness in him even he could not fathom. Sometimes it seemed as if he lived the life of two men: what he could accomplish in those early, semi-dark hours, when the rest of the house slept, was what some people would struggle to accomplish throughout an entire day.
The night before, he and his wife had enjoyed dinner and a full bottle of wine before she conceded to fatigue and retired to bed. She’d forgotten the cellular phone near her empty glass, as people are inclined to do when the hour has passed the phone’s purposes.
Harry, on the other hand, took two Benadryl (a routine he’d established years before, but that continued to work) and sat in his study finishing paperwork from earlier in the day.
As was his habit, he worked until he could work no longer, until the frenzied mechanizations of his mind wound down adequately enough for him to join his wife in bed and fall asleep against her.
17 Sunday Nov 2013
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Harry Hirschkorn was always the first to wake. Before the sunlight broke through the windows, Harry was rifling through pans to heat his oatmeal, pouring his thickly pulped hand-squeezed orange juice into a stubby cocktail glass, and brewing his fresh roasted coffee.
Therefore, it’s no surprise Harry was the first to hear the news.
The funny thing about bad news is how it doesn’t affect the rest of the world. Just when our axis tips and we think the whole world must also be tipped, it isn’t. In fact, as the life-changing words were spoken through the phone the mourning dove continued to coo, the little brown jobs continued to chatter, the dog continued to wag its tail and ask for breakfast or to be pet, or both, the occasional car continued to drive by and the wooden wind chimes kept rolling back and forth against each other making hollow music.
It was those chimes (I believe he said they were made of bamboo) Harry remembered first hearing when he hung up the phone and stood there. Still.
On that particular day, in that particular moment, the chimes sounded ominous to him–like they were building up to some horrible act in a movie and were wholly placed there to create fear and foreboding in an audience. An audience of one.
But what happens after that is what she could not get over a year later when they came to me. After Harry had stood there for a good space of time. Still. Quiet. Listening. He walked over to the now-finished coffee pot, poured himself a bit of cream in his white ceramic cup and proceeded to fill that cup with coffee and returned to sit at his place at the island where his oatmeal and juice remained, so far untouched.
Something which puzzled her, as she mulled over the first moments of him hearing the news, realizing he did not have his paper, he got up again, walked to the door, (which was a good distance away from the kitchen and not too far from where she slept), opened it, stepped out on the porch and stood staring at the sun which was beginning to rise very prettily over the park at the end of their cul-de-sac.
He then reached down, picked up the paper, and returned once again to his place at the island where he sat and read and ate his breakfast, like he had a hundred times–no, a thousand times or more, as she continued to sleep.
Unaware.
…..to be continued.
16 Saturday Nov 2013
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The distance and being alone
North Dakota stretches– forever
Sunsets stretch, so does the snow
And you’re alone.
Thank God for your guitar
And your love of chords and lyrics
Who you are is the song.
I think I hear you singing.
15 Friday Nov 2013
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Please Don’t Kill Yourself
I want to say this to you:
Please don’t kill yourself,
But I don’t.
Every time you come in
I think, why are you here, why are you here,
You don’t belong here.
This place where people come to get of labels:
Dysfunctional, depressed, demented—
Borderline Personality Disorder, Addict,
She suffers from Suicidal Ideation.
But you’re look like me.
I talk, you talk, we laugh, you go in,
Soon, you begin to leave
And, as you leave
I want to say,
Please don’t kill yourself
But that’s exactly what I can’t say
Instead I smile and say
Have a nice day
And you smile and close the door.
14 Thursday Nov 2013
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Keeping the Mother Alive
I admit, all my mothers have died.
Oh, I had high hopes for many of them
Especially the one my mother gave me.
I said (to all who would hear)
I’m going to pass this mother down for generations!
Someone had told me someone had done that.
But the damn thing required real work
Every day, feed it, feed it,
and skim off the scum.
There were no short cuts
No, baby, no shortcuts for that mama.
I gave it a go for a few weeks
As if keeping that hungry lump of sourdough alive
Proved I was an ideal mother myself
Not the somewhat flawed one
My children were starting to tell me about,
The one I knew as saint and whore and more,
Like I wrote in one poem
When they were too young to read.
The one who traded ashes for burning,
Who unraveled woman strand by strand,
And choked on the limits,
The one who loved tulips, and daisies, and roses
And seemingly wanted to test
that the generations would not unravel.
(So far, they haven’t.)
In the end, the mothers died, all of them.
No amount of added flour or warm water
Could change that fact.
Like this poem,
I don’t know where it’s going
Or if it can be revived
Or if it can even be called a poem
I’m done feeding it.
It’s done.
Bye-bye, mama. Mama, bye-bye.
14 Thursday Nov 2013
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I am One.
I am what one is
And, what one is not.
One of us is wrong, or
Both of us are right
About the one thing.
One last time:
I am not yours,
You are not mine,
Though we will die
Trying to prove it.
Can I help it feels right
To think I’m one with him,
The momentary shared skin,
Then the frightening birth away.
Someone said we were halved
Long ago, halved,
And we are always seeking.
I am what one is,
And, what one is not
Though I will die
Trying to prove it.
