A Poem and an Essay

The poem (in 8-line stanzas, invisible here) is from my recent collection, What Shines; the essay is from my collection of same, published last month, Such Dancing As We Can.

     Zach’s Mystery, and Others

We remember Zach’s hating himself so much toward the end

he became a walking– no, a stumbling cartoon:

he left his apartment, say, to look for a brick,

not some handier thing like a lamp or a frying pan,

not just any rock– he left, and found his brick

and used it to smash his grubby bathroom mirror.

Cartoon Bible-thumpers would likely have shouted,

The end is near.  Dirt-poverty, that was one thing,

the lack of beauty in life was quite another,

and people turning away wherever he went,

the ones still willing to hear him sore as hell

they remained so. And something else: he couldn’t count

the years that had passed since somebody called him dear  

or whatever. Well, I guess that’s a lot of things.

Those Bible folk I imagined would have been right

if they’d meant the end of Zach’s pathetic world.

We remember how we’d drink with him, and more

than half our gang are dead as he is now.

But some of us gathered those thousands of little shards

and managed to fit them together again like puzzles,

and so we all had mirrors that we could inspect

without thinking of bricks or drinking. But we kept thinking–

not all-day-every-day but plenty– of Zach,

of how we were like him and how for sure we weren’t heroes.

We just woke up one day and we were alive

and it wasn’t because we were smarter or God knows better

to look at than Zach. (And I say God, by the way,

because what the hell else do I have for explanation?)

Before it all shattered, Zach had a movie star’s features

and smile, an athlete’s body… I could keep listing.

Not beauty or brains or courage– none of that saved us.

But we did get saved and Zach and some others didn’t.

Earthquakes and Angels

So there I was, training again for a flat-water kayak race near our beloved camp in Washington County, Maine. August of 2016, a great interlude in my life:  I was 73, but to churn the water for five miles in fifty-odd minutes, and to feel strong enough meanwhile that I could notice the lavish splendors of the neighborhood– well, it all but gave me the illusion that I’d never grow truly old.

I could maintain racing speed at the same time as I noted, say, a cow and calf moose plunging their heads into Picnic Cove for its spatterdock. I’d hear loons shriek when eagles soared into sight, so great a bane has the resurgence of these raptors proven to their young. One evening, the wind entirely in my favor, I passed within yards of a young coyote as it drank from Oxbrook Lake. Waterborne, I could dream that those landlubber deerflies and mosquitoes were mere figments of fancy.

The race was canceled for fear of lightning. A good thing, maybe, because two weeks after its scheduled date I had a heart attack. Insofar as my symptoms didn’t closely resemble any I’d ever read or heard about, when I visited the tiny clinic on the New Brunswick border, the nearest facility to our remote cabin, I was more than surprised when the blood test indicated ischemia. Within a few hours, I’d arrive by ambulance at Bangor’s medical center to have a stent placed in my occluded right coronary artery.

Three weeks thereafter, I found myself in rehab, pedaling a stationary bike and hauling on a rowing machine, keeping my heart rate near 120 or so for three quarters of an hour at a time, feeling better than I had when I didn’t know there was anything wrong with me except for a geezer’s occasional stiff back and his ever more creaky knees.

Almost exactly a year after my crisis, I entered the 2017 race and came in third. Of course a win would have been more gratifying; on the other hand, the ages of the two men who beat me, combined, amounted to less than my own, and I established a personal best for the course.

I was a lucky fellow, and am.

One reason for my adopting a passion over a decade ago for the two-bladed paddle lay, precisely, in the degeneration of my knees. For a few years, with the aid of plenty of Tylenol and the occasional cortisone shot, I could still hike reasonably well, but less and less could I do so with the unmixed pleasure of older times. I began to practice the kayak regime, which entails no impact, ever more avidly.

Again, there’s the benefit that, especially when there’s a bit of covering breeze, my progress remains quiet enough for me to witness all manner of natural wonders. I’ll never forget the eagle that, as I plied the Connecticut River here in Vermont, stooped so hard onto a Canada goose that the poor bird might have been shot: a faint quiver or two, and then utter stillness. As the predator tore at the corpse, ravens drifted into the cottonwoods, waiting their turns– patient, soundless. I recall thinking, scarcely for the first time, How do they know?  They always do, almost immediately. Uncanny.

Black bear and black duck. Otter and osprey. Beaver and bittern. Nighthawk and newt. Teal and turtle. I could go on.

My thoughts here, however scattered, may well be motivated by the notion of new knees, the first replacement slated for ten days from the time of recording all this. At my sanest, I’m aware how fortunate I’ve been, particularly as a lover of the outdoors, to live how and where I do, and thus, again and again, even as my undercarriage has made fun of me, to witness so many wonders, natural and otherwise. I also understand the advantages of existing in a medical era when procedures like the one I face have become pretty routine. Lord, nowadays the medicos can actually print your joint replacement by way of a computer command! And the stent inside me now might have saved my beloved father, dead of a coronary at 56.

At my most loathsomely self-pitying, though, I mope like a convict facing life. I moan about the imminent operations, and even more about the time that recovery will take, much greater than the program following my heart attack. My wife reminds me that I’ll be paddling as hard as I want to before I take vigorous hikes again, but that the hikes will come too. Yet I maunder.

Some believe God sends them signs. I don’t automatically reject the notion, feeling that I too have gotten signs from somewhere at crucial moments in my life. (Sadly, these are frequently ones I don’t recognize except in retrospect.) I object to claims of supernatural guidance only when they evidence a disgraceful self-regard. I remember from some years back, for example, what a certain American pop star told an interviewer after he’d survived an earthquake in Japan that killed thousands. The disaster, he proclaimed, was the Almighty’s way of telling him he’d been touring too much.

Of course. That must have been it...

That I like this twerp’s music has taxed my ethics for what seems ages: I listen to his tunes even as my contempt for him abides. I should govern my judgment, though. Too often I’ve let myself be caught up in my own solipsism. How can I forget that intervention saved my life two years ago, and that modern medicine will more than likely enable me to climb the Green and White Mountains again, at however modest a pace? 

Just recently I heard from my oldest friend on earth, a man I love and can’t remember not knowing. He has stage three tongue cancer. This is a person who has been a model of healthful behavior: careful diet, no tobacco, very moderate liquor, all but obsessive exercise.

“It’s not fair!” I shouted, for all the world like a five-year-old, into the receiver.

“Whatever happens, it’s been a good life,” Jimmy  responded. Then, to my surprise, he broke into a lusty laugh. I felt as if he’d slapped me. Why, yes, why hadn’t I thought of that? It has been good– every bit as much for me as for him, maybe even more so. He married a fine woman indeed, but he did so too late to enjoy parenthood. With his reaction as our cue, Jimmy and I shared some further laughter, thinking back on monkeyshines from the course of our long-shared coexistence.

You should know –this will prove relevant– that I’m two-finger typing as I write these words. Because this pal’s father was a prison warden, I never learned to use a keyboard properly, some white-collar inmate always looking for ways to be on the warden’s good side. Happily, that involved typing papers for his son. Because we were closest schoolmates, my own work came along for the ride.

In our tenth-grade year, though, we were getting nervous, since the embezzler who’d been serving us since middle school was about to get sprung. And then my buddy came in one morning, bouncing like a puppet. A forger had just been admitted. We were saved! Jimmy had vetted the new prisoner and reported that he, an even better typist than his predecessor, would be at our service right through graduation.

Now as it happened, this forger set about rehabilitating himself by making greeting cards– the whole deal, artwork and verse. Not so long after his arrival at the joint, the warden underwent a gall bladder operation, providing our bard a first opportunity to put his skills to the test. 

A day or so later, Jimmy came in with his début effort. The front of the card looked quite professional. As a forger, after all, the fellow had some skill as a draftsman; but the stanza inside read as follows:

               Sad to hear that you’re sick.                                                                                                                                        Hope it’s just for a spell.

               Would love to come see you,

               But can’t very well.

We chuckled at some length over the memory. On hanging up, I felt instructed by my beloved chum, as I need to be by whomever else, that humor is among the very best ways of spitting into mortality’s face.

Sam is another friend and a formidable poet, who quite some time ago lost his young wife to cancer. More recently, as if that caused him insufficient suffering, he was diagnosed with stage four cancer himself. He endured a robotic proctectomy, but there were apparently some gross medical blunders in the procedure. (Can one tongue-lash a robot? Perhaps not yet. I can’t say I look forward to the time when one might.) He lapsed into renal failure and sepsis at his Connecticut apartment, where he was living alone. When he failed to answer phone calls for two days, one of his daughters made a call from New York to the Hartford police, exhorting them to break her father’s door down.

Sam has since written to me that, after emerging from coma, he beheld that daughter and her sister sitting beside him in intensive care. He claims to have seen light rising behind their torsos in the shape of angels’ wings, and I trust his testimony. My friend has known angelic intercession, and I have too.  I recall that something like an aura surrounded my wife after that stent was installed, and that I thought, exactly, She looks like an angel. She was the fair one of our bogus Sunday school texts; his were African; but all three were angels, yes.

I need to remember how divine energies can manifest themselves in people who care about us. This poet friend’s daughters are good for that. And needless to say, so is my life partner.

But what has been manifested to some other friends? How will any laugh again, as Jimmy and I did? Who will play the role of that poet’s daughters for those bereft of children? How in God’s name, for instance, does Robert avoid pure madness?

Robert. He’s another pal from school days, though the word pal won’t quite fit itself around someone like him. Back then, he was, well, eccentric. I suppose he still is. In our teen years, he dressed as somberly and formally as an undertaker, and while the rest of us boys had the typical obsessions of witless, hormone-driven adolescents, he had keen interests in contemporary poetry, art, and music. He also commanded an extraordinary awareness of the local and national political scenes, to which his classmates paid little if any attention.

Needless to say, he experienced a degree of bullying in those days; but while I could hardly claim to be a saint with regard to my own treatment of peers, somehow I always felt drawn to Robert and I stood up for him, even if he did a fair job of that on his own. The two of us see each other almost never, but we have stayed in touch for six decades.

Just recently I learned of the death, at 44, of his older daughter. I knew she’d had cancer. Bad enough: but this calamity followed a few years on the death by suicide of her younger sister.

How does Robert get up in the morning?

At school, he could recite the names and party affiliations not only of every U.S. senator but also of every U.S. representative. That Hawaii and Alaska had not yet swollen the ranks of states to fifty scarcely alters the breadth of that old accomplishment. I remember how our feisty, gifted teacher Dan Charles marveled at this trick of Robert’s, wondering why a young man with so capacious a mind could never pass his history course for want of completing written assignments.

In a chat with Robert many years later, I recalled Mr. Charles’s puzzlement, and reflected on the fact that, brilliant as he indisputably was, the boy failed to make the cut anywhere but at an arts college. Now that school was reputable, to say the least, but somehow it proved unendurable to the young painter before a single semester had elapsed, and not for any lack of promise on his part.

It was then that Robert revealed something to me, which had been revealed to him in his fifties. He spoke of attending an off-Broadway play whose male lead had Asperger’s Syndrome. “Halfway through the first act,” he told me, “I said to myself, ‘So that’s it.’”

It’s not that Robert had a less than respectable career. He wrote classical albums’ liner notes for a spell; he was the classical music host for Minnesota Public Radio; he continued with his artwork and still does; but most of his professional life was devoted to the American Friends Service Committee, and involved extended residences in Moscow, among other intriguing things. Still he has a self-dismissive bent. While I regard him as the very epitome of aplomb, a person who has always marched to his own drummer, Robert frequently describes himself as a failure.

Among his regrets is to have neglected to pursue a gifted high school girl whom we both knew well, and who felt real attraction to his sensibility, his intellectual and artistic endowments, and indeed to his every idiosyncrasy. Robert ruefully describes her as his road not taken. He married another woman, saw the marriage gutter, but cherished his relationships with his three children– two of them now gone.

I recall my mother’s saying that the worst part of growing old lay not in her personal challenges, mental and physical, but in the death, misfortune, and degeneration of so many priceless friends. I understand that very clearly now, the list of my own dear companions’ woes seeming infinitely extensible as of late. 

Will is another wonderful poet, whom I came to know, esteem, and cherish forty-plus years ago, after a poem of his won a poetry competition at New England Review, the quarterly I founded and edited. He and his wife are now grieving parents too, having very lately lost one of their three sons to the cursed opioid epidemic.  He assures me I cannot imagine what that loss feels like, and no doubt he’s exactly right. There’s winter in my soul as I contemplate such misery, even in the abstract.

Yes, I need to be taught and re-taught that, should I drop in my tracks right now, I’ll have had what the valiant Jimmy calls a good life, and then some. The fates of Robert and Will and Sam are acute reminders of this, though God strike me dead should I take any of these disasters as merely useful to me.

I recall the day that my wife and I attended a class for people with scheduled joint replacements, and for their caregivers. The nurse who delivered the segment on the surgery itself was clearly competent and well trained; but he gilded no lilies. I am farther from squeamish than many, yet even the hand-drawn illustrations he projected daunted me. The physical therapist proved a similarly no-nonsense type: she too exuded competence; she too emphasized the effort and time that rehabilitation would demand, and the inevitability of pain.

The weather outside the classroom was suitably dreary on that second day of March. Some hybrid of snow and rain slid down the plate glass windows, on the other side of which lay an unrelievedly drab landscape. Diminutive humans several stories below left blurry trails in the slush.  These men and women, both the well and the infirm, struck me as doomed– just like me.

I thought of none of the close friends to whom I just referred in my catalog of catastrophes.  I was too intent on how perfect a setting I’d found for my melancholic reverie. I should have seen that I was already a lucky man. In a sense, I could have looked at my looming operations as divine remonstrance. I began by mocking the vanity of a pop star, who saw that Japanese earthquake in a similar light– and my mood that afternoon was on the same continuum.

The earthquake I dodged in 2016, the year of my coronary, looks trivial as I consider the collective, seismic disasters encountered by some of my companions. If I further apply the labored metaphor to my own life, I’d say my most threatening earthquake comprised too many years of addiction, too many years when I was a mere vessel for the substances that sustained my psychic life– until they almost destroyed it.

This, I know, makes for abrupt closure. But the private enormity of dependence is the subject of another essay. Or perhaps, thank God, it will remain so vast as forever to lie beyond my rendering.

In any case, the main thing I must cleave to is this: looking back across years in which Jimmy and Robert and Sam and Will and a legion of others have hovered in my mental atmosphere, yes, like angels; looking back at enslavement to my compulsion; looking back near and far and deep, I must try to remember something utterly crucial.

One miracle a day ought to hold me.

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