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Ken, So clear. Acute and Raw. -Peter Ciccariello -----Original Message----- From: Ken Wolman <[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Thu, 15 Dec 2005 13:56:49 -0500 Subject: Day-late snap/"Group Portrait" 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