Very powerful, Ken, a real jolt!
Thank you,
Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
> Started out as a few lines. Would not stop. I had to at points
> yesterday because I knew what I was about and it despise this particular
> impulse to write these Ancient Mariner or Ishmael writings: not a poem,
> but like getting in a plumber to snake out the pipes so maybe I can
> again write again. Give the final exam tonight, wave bye-bye, reclaim
> some life space.
>
> GROUP PORTRAIT
> (for Stephen Katz, 12/16/49-5/30/05)
>
> I cannot escape this, retelling, it is a curse.
> Two days of this hideous writing like a fever
> it cannot yield good and it cannot be stopped,
> it simply must be discharged. Begins--
>
> Jake has brought three pictures to my house.
> He has them, so I must scan and store them.
> Barry Levinson was right: If
> you don't remember, you forget.
> He left off: Even if you want to.
>
> The images are from 1992 when time was life:
> my mother-in-law's 75th birthday.
> My mother is not in the picture
> for the best of reasons: she is dead
> about a month.
> She is dead but she is there,
> I will not grieve her for another 8 years.
>
> But now the images are History, sour and clotted.
> The pictures could only have been taken by my son's aunt,
> who never met a camera she couldn't destroy.
>
> The Inventory
>
> 1. Jake with Ben his brother, they are far younger, but then as now my
> sons.
> 2a. Me.
> 2b. The woman who is their mother, and who once upon time in a kingdom
> by the sea, was Melisande to my Pelleas until we changed the story and
> killed each other.
> 3. My wife's mother, whose birthday party this was, and who died two
> years later.
> 4. My wife's brother who is my brother-in-law
>
> who was my brother-in-law who died by his own hand
> on Memorial Day 2005.
>
> Yisgadal, v'yisgadash, try not to spit
> and wear a silver cross to keep the vampire
> at arm's length.
>
> Stephen is my hungry ghost who summons me
> to share his despair or
> some days to wish to join him or
> (more likely) he is
> a 400-pound human sofa,
> Purcell's Dido singing "When I am Laid in Earth"
> with its idiot injunction "forget my fate."
>
> The aesthetic, the "objective" thing,
> would be to simply scan the pictures,
> refocus, fix the brightness and color.
> But who's an artist? Why would I care a damn
> for yet another lousy family portrait
> except this one is filled with the divorced
> and the dead who in those pictures
> still are married or won't lay down.
>
> My kids are still kids
> my ex is still my wife
> her mother is still alive
> who brother hadn't slashed
> the crooks of his elbows.
> As long as I keep gazing at that picture
> everything will be the same.
>
> True, true, true, crap.
>
> No, I have learned a bit at a time
> to live in reality or something like it.
> I can't forget your fate, Steve, what you did.
> I want to say with all the force of the reigning
> straight Drama Queen that if you were here now
> I'd kill you myself,
> but that's a lie, you have become part of History,
> I am your Dieu du Jour who can forgive you
> when even your sisters and nephews
> still think you should rot in Hell.
> I loved you, fatso, and when I get past the anger
> I let in the despair, the smell like earth
> of the darkness that wrapped around you
> that once too often has wanted me too
> and I cannot end this I can only stop
> because to keep on is not so much unbearable
> as it's simply yammer.
>
> KTW/12-16-05
>
> ----------------------
>
> I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where
> I needed to be.
> -Douglas Adams
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