It Is A Continuum, Chained Archipelagos In Time, Which Doesn't Mean It
Still Doesn't Shit Broken Glass
1. Let's Go To The Videotape
Among my souvenirs and VCR tapes
yesterday I remembered La Boheme,
a Met broadcast from early '83.
I watched it again because the air
in the room was standing still
and the retrograde motion of backdraft time
might (oh the power of prayer!) suck me right out the door
toward a sweeter moment.
2. A Whore's Working Vacation
I remember the night of the broadcast
because of the day itself.
I was supposed to be selling life insurance,
getting in touch with my Inner Whore,
but my wife was in the hospital,
our kids were little, five and two,
and the younger, Ben, was gut-sick.
For two days I worked to be a stay-at-home mom.
Ben stapled to my back, I dropped Jake at preschool,
then ran the machine in reverse at 3:00,
and finally it was over: 8 PM,
they were fed and in bed, I wasn't hungry,
only that thirst for a large tumbler of garbage Scotch.
I whined "When are you coming home?"
to my wife on the phone in her room,
and she burst out laughing for she knew
I'd had no clue about what she did all day.
"My wife doesn't work, she just stays home with the kids"
became grounds for a verdict of Justifiable Homicide.
I put on PBS and there was Boheme,
the lovers Jose Carreras and Teresa Stratas.
I think my love for Stratas started in high school,
and surely outlasted my marriage.
Boheme was perfect and it still is.
Except there's that thing about Time:
archipelagos of memory, how it all changes
and you have to swim through it--
unless you're in an opera. So "Deal with it."
You deal with it. Nobody else could unless
they could deal with time at a distance:
not safe, just as someone else.
3. Ventriloquists
Eight years later, Carreras was the one-in-ten
cured of adult leukemia in the same Seattle hospital
where they'd lose Jane Kenyon five years later.
The tenor said later that in the year of his agony
he discovered that singing was secondary
to the joy of merely breathing, that
a visitor was a glory, a smile was a treasure,
that even with a voice shredded by chemo
and sickness itself, he could not care.
He divorced his wife, sang what he was able,
and gave his Three Tenors earnings to leukemia causes.
Stratas's sinus surgery was botched
by Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York,
and she has become an out-of court
near-recluse who has not performed
since December 1995.
She could sing Kurt Weill's songs to
make Ute Lemper sound like Betty Boop.
God or Whomever gave her the gift
and she clutched it, cold and dead, to herself,
and would not give it back.
When I saw Boheme with my ex way back in 1974
she said "When this broad gonna die already?"
Even after a half-century, I still cry in the same places.
It's nice to know some things can be counted on
never to change,
that suffering and smallness in others can be that
famous mirror held up to my own disnature.
KTW/5-26-06
I long since stopped asking "Is this a poem?" I really did sit down
with a Met Boheme yesterday afternoon because unemployment brings
supreme boredom. The whole "is this a poem" thing stems from a complete
absence of clever lines, zingers, imagery, or much of anything except a
narrative. Yet I like it and worked rather hard on it. So what? Have
fun with it.
ken
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Ken Wolman kenwolman.com rainermaria.typepad.com
Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
--Jane Kenyon, "Let Evening Come"
