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POETRYETC  2005

POETRYETC 2005

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Subject:

Re: Day-late snap/"Group Portrait"

From:

Peter Ciccariello <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and poetics <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 22:35:13 -0500

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (124 lines)

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

   

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