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
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I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
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