You can only miss someone when they are still present to you.
The Isle of the Dead is both dark and light.
Henry Miller told Anaïs Nin that the real death is being dead while alive.
The absent will only be absent when they are forgotten.
Until then, absence is a lie, or an oxymoron.
Sometimes I want to be famous once more, and then I think about the paparazzi. . . .
I value my solitude. But I fear I am dead while alive.
To avoid living, worry about all you’ve forgotten.
When I miss my daughter, it’s as a kind of idea. Then she comes to me:
in her corduroy red parka, hair sticking out,
smiling at the geese, eating her shoelaces,
pointing, crying, More!
When I saw the movie, in the dark center of winter, I thought:
The son wasn’t trying to say goodbye to his dying father. He was trying to say forever.
Alone so much, I think about the people whose stories I learn in books.
The lover of Picasso who didn’t understand why her grandmother
went so often to the graves of her children and husband.
Just wait, her grandmother said. You will see.
No, what she said is, There comes a time when, past your moment,
you live for external things: a slice of sky through your window,
a painting you’ll see only three more timesa painting
where the colors are everything.
Poem of Regret for an Old Friend
What you did wasn’t so bad.
You stood in a small room, waiting for the sun.
At least you told yourself that.
I know it was small,
but there was something, a kind of pulped lemon,
at the low edge of the sky.
No, you’re right, it was terrible.
Terrible to live without love
in small rooms with vinyl blinds
listening to music secretly,
the secret music of one’s head
which can’t be shared.
A dream is the only way to breathe.
But you must
find a more useful way to live.
I suppose you’re right
this was a failure: to stand there
so still, waiting for—what?
When I think about this life,
the life you led, I think of England,
of secret gardens that never open,
and novels sliding off the bed
at night where the small handkerchief
of darkness settles over
one’s face.
Mistaken Self-Portrait as Meriwether Lewis
In the spring of 1804 Meriwether Lewis and William Clark left their camp near St. Louis, Missouri, to map the unknown West. Lewis was known for “depressions of the mind.”
Strange morning. I woke without remembering
who I was. A minute passed. Blue glass beads
hung on a string beside me in the tent.
I lay under a buffalo robe covered with ink sketches
resembling the path of a crow on wet sand.
I knew what a “buffalo robe” was.
I did not know who I was.
The wind, which almost moaned, I knew—it reminded me of something:
myself? Then emptiness, the gut-drop
into the abyss of the self, the most silent fall
of a stone before it hits the water:
My name is Lewis.
•
The doctor told me faults run through us all,
that scars extend far beneath the skin, cruder
in repair, but stronger, too. He has always tried
to make me feel my sickness as a strength.
Sometimes it does seem to me there is water
in those faults, that if scars
catch the light at the right angle
they pull the sun within—
something wants to pull me.
Something must want to pull me. I feel it pulling
and widen like want:
a day, a day of daylight,
instead of this dogged night.
•
Tall as a fir tree, slippery and hard to hold
as a far fish in a near lake, ablaze with resentment,
a corpse that will not forfeit dream,
a corpse that lives like a lantern.
And goes on, like that, for a long time.
•
Today I am my own shadow—
the sun is always overhead.
•
A hard week with the men.
Yesterday’s road was excessively dangerous—
along this creek a rocky path,
so steep that if man or horse were precipitated from it
they would be dashed to pieces.
The men were nervous, high-strung.
Then Frazier’s horse fell from the road
& rolled with his load near a hundred yards
into the Creek—. We expected
the horse was killed
but to our astonishment
when the load was taken off
he arose to his feet & appeared to be but little
injuredGalloping along the grass
which blazed beneath!
Were my own path so
green, were I to know it so—
•
When you are mapping
the future
you see a path to what?
—to water, a kind of resignation
to the inevitable; an old man
who is thinner than you, with frail
bones, has heard more music, never
stopped loving the inevitable
rush of nights with spirits and whiskey’s
self-undoing—
to have an acute need is to be hungry;
to have an illness that never makes itself known
nor absent is to be
in a constant noon, the almost dead of day.
•
I am not Meriwether Lewis, I think.
I wake to a body that hangs on me
like bad tailoring.
The seconds arrive as if in delay—
it is nature to forget we are nature,
the aching-toward-extinction of flesh.
I have never seen such animals as this gray squirrel,
ratty but voracious, rooting
at the beech’s base today. The body
I read to at night is voracious, it wants light
to blind it; breathe, I say to myself
Meriwether Lewis. The candle burns.
I hear it being consumed. It keeps
the little animals away.
—But how strange
that it is not my eyes that make the world!
To be consumed or else to be nothing!
•
I am Lewis, I know, but I forget myself. . . .
Our diet is very meager, whale oil and biscuits.
The crane I shot fed only
three of us, but was divided twelve ways;
a flaw within widens
a cacophony a concatenation
a catastrophe;
Do they think they are natural men, my comrades?
•
To make a map of this country
is to make and mark the wounds—
it is strange to be the oppressor
when you don’t even know it—
his knife is my knife, his mouth mine,
but here in the wild all I mean to do is
look, measure, take stock—
•
Before I left I walked into the woods
near our settlement
and saw him on his horse—
he wouldn’t let me
take
what I needed, what needed to be taken—
I sense it near, the meaningful end.
But t
he men turn back, the dog Seaman
has died; on we go to the end where the water
rushes over the edge
and into the borderless pool
widening and widening—
•
A sickness that got into the water,
—it made the others ill
and now the spring we camp beside
is suspect. Later they will ask me if I think
ignorance is an excuse—
I am a past tense that is
always present,
I must walk on
to where the borders will be
the scars that tendril
beneath the land.
I walk the sickness with me,
dragging my viral cape
across the earth and through its waters.
—I am glorious,
and wrong.
Unnatural Essay
1.
For many years I lived a normal life. Normal to some. Hotel Privilege. Etc., etc., as they say.
But when I became sick,
I discovered what I had always naturally called I was really no longer an “I.”
It changed all the time—in fact, entirely receded as a coherent notion—according to something happening in my cells that no one could identify.
I felt dispersed, lacking a center, my eyes plastic.
Walking, teaching, writing, I experienced myself as categorically fraudulent. (Or should I say “I” felt categorically fraudulent.)
I had a face but it was like a mask. Language torqued, unusually murky. This was not an observation about semiotics, the gap between word and thing. Now I was living in the gap.
In the past, I had quoted Emerson: “Our moods do not believe in each other.”
“I” had also quoted, with theoretical admiration, Rimbaud’s “je est un autre.”
I saw how wrong I was: the very fact that I’d been able to think this way suggested an unappreciated coherence.
Now, “I” was tired. Almost unable to walk down the block. My body was melting, distorted, like a Gaudí, or a—I can’t remember his name. Fatigue so extreme, I no longer had any real desires.
It took a long time, strangely, to realize this was not normal.
Once I did I sought help.
But because no one, not even the doctors in white coats, could identify the source of the problem, “I” wondered if it was all in “my” head.
Then one day, after months, the lab work showed something a little “funny.”
Aha! I thought. I’m not myself. Like a computer
infected by Internet malware.
2.
A capture of a capture,
a name not sweet.
Running commentary in my
pain-disturbed sleep: “Thou art thyself.”
“What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man.”
So maybe just:
Be some other name—not
sick. Not pain.
3.
Some days I did well—the mask fell away, I tried to pinpoint what had allowed me to recover my I-ness, even as I was buried in subreddit threads and Yahoo groups about ATP processes, mitochondrial diseases, neuropathy, MTHFR mutations.
4.
A woman in a white coat with a small dachshund under her desk told me my immune system was malfunctioning.
“Antibodies to cell DNA.”
I had “sticky blood” because my body was attacking its proteins.
I was not absorbing iron.
My metabolic processes were not functioning correctly.
I was failing to “clear” viruses.
And so I became absorbed in the medical details.
The body began to seem an inevitably fragile, miraculous organism, full of mutations and bacteria and viruses and poor DNA repair.
It was just an accumulation of trillions of cells making mistakes all the time—and one day it would make too many mistakes.
One day it already had—
a plane’s contrails unzipping the sky.
5.
Kept thinking about how to put it:
Dead, but sleeping underneath.
Hence, some return possible. Some capture
of the past in the morrow.
Honeysuckle at the bus stop. Sudden hope.
(“O, that you were yourself!”—another self, a future self, a natural self; any self; self-possessed. Whispered to that none-self, that nonesuch: you had a mother,
let your daughter say so.)
6.
But I looked well, thanks to all the supplements, the raw pig glands, the N-acetylcysteine and sunshine bathing, the nerve blocks and the raw coconut oil, the glandulars, the shots of Nrf2 energizers, the mitochondria cocktails, adjuvant therapies.
7.
Now that I was sick, I looked back and saw that before—even when I thought I was healthy—I was already not.
For years, my energy had suddenly faded, a candle flickering out, a computer freezing.
Let’s put it this way: My sickness in some sense is natural to me.
So what is the natural old me I yearn for?
Reading late into the humid July night; jogging in the fog. Lying on the sloping floor and watching Star Trek reruns; conversations poured out of ourselves.
8.
Natural / unnatural: even if my sickness were natural it had clearly reached an unnatural point, a point at which “I” denatured.
9.
There had been an I
that had its boundaries—
there is a natural
from which we can be utterly estranged.
10.
Would a rose by another name smell so sweet?
I couldn’t remember.
11.
Sickness made me a good girl who couldn’t leave my house.
I snuck cigarettes under the roof’s eaves and hissed at the squirrels.
I dumped the green juice down the sink.
12.
A rose is a rose is sore is a rose is an or
13.
(During this time I had a dream I went to a desert where words were aflame and I was a very bad artist, hectic and febrile, unsure exactly what my desert looked like, because I kept looking at my own burning hands rather than the landscape around me. Flat sky, vulture eyes, prickly pear cacti, silt from China, spiders, scorpions, a fine white sand, rare cloud, involuted like a brain. I enjoyed being this artist.
I grew ecstatic at an hour of lead that became days of gold.
Death is metal used up, an element gone, the star collapsing: extended contemplation of it.)
14.
When, once before, I had a yearning I could not put in words, it was my slowly diminishing body (the clavicles and hip bones and back ribs) that articulated the pain (I thought). Although it did not. It said nothing other than underfed.
But I thought it expressed everything that language failed to express. A nonesuch self.Sweet and honorable and pure husbandry.
I was a misinterpreter of selfhood.
15.
When I got sick, I thought my body was speaking my own mess and that it was my problem to deal with.
For some time I thought I could survive by disciplining my mind and body.
As I suffered, I thought, obscurely, it was my fault—as sometimes it was, due to wine, and chocolate, and cocaine or sex.
I half-believed my sick body was a failed language, a private thrift gone wrong.
I was failing, and my body was showing me so.
16.
In the end, such a simple answer!
A bacteria had invaded me, a prokaryote. It was a tiny organism that had evolved to be able to penetrate tissue, shape shift, and hide.
But this answer was a story without an ending, a new problem. A conclusion I couldn’t deny but couldn’t live with: My I was purely biological.
My words we
re
a poorly structured building.
The soil where my roses grow is pH 6.0 to pH 7.0, or else no roses.
The honeysuckle blooms only in May.
17.
I wanted to write an essay for you, a cold, cool essay.
I wanted its facets to cut. To be a capture: your own self in it, self-shriven, ridden, forgiven.
I wanted to build an irrational castle of angles that made no sense—the kind that would drive one mad, eventually. One that had angels in it. Angels of desolation and gleaming torsos. They are the wind.
Instead I succumbed slowly to what I thought I’d walked away from.
18.
Was I merely flesh or something more?
19.
Or maybe I was making a mistake—I was still “I,”
but I was no longer the “I that was like such and such.”
20.
Wanting the chance of a return, I bargain with god, with God, with karma—
Sun in Days Page 4
