More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
A quick list to poets featured in this issue:
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Contact
Muriel Zeller
Self,
Time and External Circumstances
1.
The disconnected self cut
the filaments
that held up my life.
You are sick--very, very sick
The hospital psychiatrist asked
a question. I answered correctly,
"Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey
Oswald on TV."
You use your intelligence in negative ways
I have lied in each
different life, covering
tracks of the last.
I saw you when you were someone else
I laughed
when I told the story:
my father held a gun
on my brother.
Your laughter is inappropriate
I took the opiates
as prescribed and wanted
less and less
to be flesh.
You may refuse your medication at any time
I made lists
of what I wanted
to recall.
You could benefit from electroconvulsive shock therapy
My body refused to release
urine. I became sick:
searing ache and longing
to take away the pain.
Your past is the reason you can't urinate
She arrived in a black dress,
one of a long line
of therapists. She began
You don't like black, do you?
as I watched light stipple
her dress through the iron
mesh on the windows.
Tell me about the abuse
In a corner of night,
I hunched and hunched
to make myself small,
invisible.
Where are you?
2.
I passed each day,
clutching a pillow
rocking back and forth
as gently as I would
on Charon's river.
Tell me, then, what do your tears think?
I paced the halls, hid
in my closet, made a collage.
The attendants cooed.
I smiled at them with rage.
This is very complex
I threw a strike.
"The bowling pins are my family,"
I said. The other patients
cheered. I did it again,
and the chaperones grew uneasy.
I think its time to leave
I was released from the hospital
after a month--just
when my insurance ran out.
Reconnect with your therapist on the outside
I am scary. I scare myself.
I scare my outside therapist.
She doesn't want me anymore.
Once, I thought you were going to attack me
At home, I have my own riot.
I scream in the shower.
The walls bruise my body.
My head pounds back.
I will make arrangements for you to see someone else
The telephone can change
shape. It will lie to you.
My memory reeked
of the black dress.
She won't talk to you unless you make the call
I moved on to the next
recommended therapist
with my own psychotic symmetry.
I'm counseling a group of sex offenders next
3.
I got pregnant.
My husband's form
fathered fetal tissue--
I was too old.
You cannot abort the baby
After-birth I mothered my daughter:
bathed, dressed, nursed and loved,
all the while knowing nothingness
waited for me in a clutch of medication.
We have a pact. You won't kill yourself.
Cross my heart
and hope to die.
What kind of pills, how many?
The doctor didn't hide
his contempt as he guided
a tube down my throat.
Where is her underwear?
After a day,
angry and sullen, my husband
took me back home.
I had to nurse the baby.
What do you think you were doing?
The baby bit down hard
on my nipple with her tiny teeth,
punishing me
for risking her life.
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Impossible
I close my eyes to find the world
that is not this world outlined
so distinctly nothing bleeds its borders.
There are no marred images
to suggest something recondite
that persuades me to make a poem--
I want the sheared light of the shut lid:
where impossible cities live and hive,
where impossible forests grow
and we are lost in them as in the cities,
their pleading green hunched over the ground,
where impossible people imbibe
and speak as if their lives depended on it,
where all the impossible is as it claims
and we love this about it.
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Crisis Line
Telephone rings.
I center myself, pray
it will hold.
A 41-year-old woman
from Wilseyville.
Her husband is in jail.
He beat her.
She has black eyes.
"He'll kill me
when he comes home.
I'm afraid."
There it is.
"Afraid," the refrain.
Refrain from beating her.
That's a change.
I'm falling apart.
I think of Adrienne Rich:
poets are not marginal
members of the community.
Poetry is in everyday life.
Poems are the making
and breaking of order.
I look for a poetic energy field.
That's what a poem is
she said,
an energy field,
not elitist either
but made to share.
How can I tell the woman
from Wilseyville
about poetry? Maybe
she would understand
the making
and breaking
of order.
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