Halvard Johnson wrote:
> Sonnet: With No Known Regrets
>
> Proust consciously drifts from one dancehall to another,
> modifying Etruscan ruins as he goes. Forgetting where
> the bathroom is, he urinates in the foyer, as much to annoy
> his hostess as anything else.
Years ago I had a friend (isn't that always the way,
the past tense?) who had a forward-looking father,
a native Mississippi doctor who broke new ground years back
by treating Negro patients on the same footing as whites,
and the opprobrium he gathered got him not a cross on his lawn
or a visit from the Klansman city council
but a kind of grudging, distant respect from his patients
who came to him anyway because he was good at what he did
until he came down with Alzheimer's and began mistaking
the bathroom for the closet and acting accordingly.
His daughter tried to be matter-of-factual but the words she wrote
were of inner death, her mothers and hers, because her father
no longer gave a shit except in the cedar closet.
And when he died the Mississippi Legislature honored him
with a special resolution in his memory,
but that didn't make the house smell better,
and as the old doctor was laid to rest in the cemetery
of his Civil War-slain Confederate ancestors, no one
voiced the thought that crap in the closet was the reward
for virtuous egalitarianism even when it had been a risk,
and that suffering was the reward of this world
even if the old doctor got harps and lyres in the next.
ken
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Ken Wolman rainermaria.typepad.com
We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow...
Bernstein/Wilbur, "Candide"
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