Skywritings

One morning,
after a night of restive distress and confusion,
you said,
with fear and resignation,
“There is a chaos in my head.”

And I saw it,
with dread,
the monster which was thereafter only to keep growing and growing,
till it overcame you
almost entirely.

And I could not help,
only tremble.
Could only yearn that you would fight it off,
defeat it,
as you always had mine.

What an unwise, unworthy investment I was.
How alone you were —
more alone than I am now,
for I had had your sustenance, lifelong,
and you had never had mine.
Or anyone’s.

2010-05-25

Resisted loving your cats,
feeling it would be a betrayal of my dog,
long gone,
who so loved you.

Fancied also
(oh so fatuously)
that caring for them
(like carrying on teaching Tai Chi —
another wrongful suspect)
was diminishing your diminishing life
rather than preserving it.

Now you’re gone,
only their mute daily yearning for you,
relentless, perplexed,
to be witnessed and felt,
and all resistance is dissolved.

Remorse alone,
irremediable remorse,
for having denied you
(and them)
my love for them.

Fidelity’s a false friend.
Even an instant
may become an eternity.
Feeling alone,
immanent feeling, felt,
matters.

Few the wrongs
that can ever be righted
posthumously.

2010-05-23

You can write a humorous book on laughable language laws, but not on anti-semitism, nor aboriginal rights, nor even on Franco-Canadian grievances and aspirations. Richler’s (now much-dated) book, though it contains some relevant truths and insights, and is no doubt driven by some genuine anguish on the part of the author, is, in the end, an exercise in superficial stereotyping, insensitivity and bad taste. Everything that is true in it could have been said in an uncompromising way without the gratuitous offensiveness (but then it wouldn’t have been good for laughs). But to keep it fun, most of the real core of the ethnic problems of Quebec would have had to be omitted. Perhaps a genuine outsider like Bill Bryson could have written about some of it in a detached, good-natured way. But clearly Mordechai Richler was not up to it. [And no, it does not help the book, nor the author’s understanding, that he cannot speak (only reads) French, hence can only banter with bar-buddies, one-sidedly.]

Yearning, daily,
impossibly,
to feel your presence.
Dreading the day
I can no longer feel
even your absence.

You’ve detoxified death
for me.
Your land was ever my land.
Whither you went
was where I ever meant
to follow.
Nowhere you were
was ever alien to me.
Nor, now,
is where you aren’t.
Alien now
is only here,
where you were,
without you.

All my life —
her life —
near or far
mostly far
wherever I was
I dwelt in her land
motherland
whatever I spoke
spoke in her tongue
mother tongue
my source and fulcrum
her life
gone now
stateless
speechless
jabbering poetastry
but what matters
is not that
what matters
is what is not
no
who is not
the meaning of life
you learn it
when it is no more

Verse: well-spoke banalities
sometimes animated
by heady rushes
of infectious affect

Only now,
that I’ve taken over your maternal duties
meeting your cats’ diurnal needs,
do I see how much that had been exacting
from your shrinking powers and days.
What was left was devoted
to not showing how your own daily needs
were mercilessly growing, unmet.

Nurture — less material than mental, moral —
was in your nature to give.
Not to every mortal, just a select subset:
your progeny,
your progeny’s progeny,
your proteges, your pupils,
your paramours,
your pets.
I was in this elite corps from my very beginning
till nearly your end.

My last fall from grace would perhaps have counted less,
because you had given me enough to sustain countless lifetimes
— but not the loss of yours.
That exceeded even your boundless powers.
And your sense — for once, so far from fact —
of having lost me: No number of lifetimes
could ever atone for having let you leave me
with that.

For me the mourning after
came close enough to nightfall
that I really feel no yearning
for yet another dawn.

But, had the darkness
befallen nearer daybreak,
would the photophilia
have spontaneously resumed?

Empty counterfactuals.

The answer’s in my nature
begot by
and beholden
to yours.
More to do
with meaning
and maternity
than melancholia.

And all of this I know
because I’m not the only one
who misses you so.

Everything hurts,
pleasure and pain.
Pleasure more,
because you’re not.
From my first breath,
hope meant you.
Now it’s just
ruthless awakenings.
Pain’s easier.
Already there.
But not about me.
Not about me.
To express
the ineffable:
It’s not about me.
Hope’s not a state.
It’s a mortal.
You here, I,
a fool,
thought:
It’s about me.
Now I know it’s not,
never was,
nor could have been
about me.
Nor would I ever
have wished it
otherwise.
Wishing I only now understand,
now it’s become unfulfillable,
because not about me.
The cats,
who so miss you, as I do,
knew all along,
and know it still,
that it was not about me.