What to Do with Rage
The icy Sunday morning found me in bed, engrossed by a book of John Singer Sargent’s watercolors. The thought of lingering under the covers all but overwhelmed me. Once a reticent sun crept over the hills, though, our three dogs began their whoofing and baying.
Now, having taken them out to empty themselves and romp, I’m somewhat daunted. The first of December: I stand in the blow, beholding a too-early snowfall. I steer the dogs away from our pond, whose ice won’t hold them yet.
It supports other weights: I see the prints of a pigeon-toed porcupine, and somehow reflect on Sargent’s crucified Christ, how His feet alone convey the pain of the scene. Then I suppress the association, thinking of the porcupine’s essential invulnerability, his boldness in venturing across that open expanse of ice, fearless of predators.
I think too how that animal would gladly spare as many quills as they wanted from its cassock of spikes for our dogs. The very idea invites the gelid wind right into my soul. I consider the hours I’ve spent in the past year either extracting the quills from our pets’ snouts or waiting hours on end after our vet has sedated one or the other and begun the professional removal service. The fee is always high, but that’s not the worst of it.
This particular porcupine has shunned our Hav-a-Hart trap since September. We’ve often fooled his like with melon, apple, bark steeped in saltwater, or all at once. This one, however, keeps mauling the boards on our backyard porch, studiously ignoring whatever bait we choose for the trap.
As I shiver, I visualize another Sargent. “Mountain Stream” shows a placid day of summer, and just now I long for such calm, the cold and the tracks having moved me to anger. It may be some obliquely kindred rage that moved one of our neighbors to fly a flag saying Fuck Joe Biden. Whenever we pass his place, we always pray for no wind to be blowing, so the venomous slogan will be hidden in the fabric’s folds. If our seven-year-old grandson had ever been with us, he’d have had no trouble parsing the words of the brutish sentence.
Precocious, he might even sense the meaning of some other words, ones from an old-time critic about the painter I’ve been pondering this forenoon: “His every touch was individual and conveyed a quick unerring message from the brain… a kind of shorthand, but magical.” The boy, without the least affectation of braininess, seems intuitively to grasp a lot that would escape even the average adult.
There’s an NRA sticker on my neighbor’s pickup. I loathe that crowd, but our profane neighbor’s family have lived here since before our town was founded. They have some droits de seigneur. And believe me, I’ve thought about taking down a shotgun and shooting our spiky invader.
However you look at it, fellow-feeling can be a challenge. To think of those gnawed boards irritates me so that I could rip one up for bait. Maybe that would get the porcupine! I’d take him to that rotting old lumber pile by the river, as I’ve done with a dozen others. Let him chew there all he wants!
I recall how I was taught as a child to revile the sin but to love the sinner, so I tread thin ice here. Perhaps we all do. I know I shouldn’t detest anyone or -thing for being what it is. And I know I force analogy– with doubtful success.
But I’d gladly learn our nemesis was a corpse.
eleven-line stanzas, but i still don’t have the hang of formatting here
(from What Shines, Four Way Books, NYC, September 2023)
Stories of the Fall at Eldercare
His collapse may not have produced a thud, though later
there’d be several witnesses who swore it did.
We’re easily seduced by our own narratives:
the truth, to call it that, can quickly become
no more than a concept. Those who heard him fall,
or assert as much at least, were there at PT.
The therapist didn’t turn around, she supposes,
because the sound of his topple had been so subtle.
At that very moment, she claims she was demonstrating
a stretch that eases pain in the lower back,
and as she did, she faced away from the group.
What, I think, if there was an audible thud?
Maybe the therapist needs a story herself
to justify her slowness to respond.
She says he crumpled back at the rear of the room,
which likewise might account for her not hearing,
despite the fact that several men and women
insist they started shouting right away.
The therapist concedes this may be true,
but reminds us that what might well feel like shouts
to aged folks can be whisper-quiet to others.
More than a dozen souls in that small space,
including the leader, which means a dozen stories–
no, even more. I look down onto the river
from the small café in which I sit drinking coffee
with my friend, the firstborn child of the elder who dropped
to the carpeted floor, with or without a noise.
Nothing quick would have saved him anyhow,
he concedes, it seems without rancor. But now the State
will send their inspectors here to poke around.
Yes, I muse. Then they’ll contrive a list
of so-called facts. For me just now, the facts
are these: the water looks as flat as a mirror;
a distant mountain is standing on end within it,
swathed in the muted red of April buds
spread across its flanks below the tree-line.
So beauty prevails, a truth that’s oddly linked
to the grief, however prosaic, I see on the face
of my tablemate, who mutters, It was coming
sometime anyhow, then resumes his silence.
Perhaps he’s formulating the tale he’ll tell
to his own three children about what happened to grandpa.
composed in tercets
Spring Visit to Henry’s Shed
That very last day I saw him, he laid one hand
across his forehead to cover his eyes. He’d been doing that
a lot by then. Old ironside Yankee, he wanted
to hide his tears, though I’d seen them often enough.
He didn’t know I had, but he’d been my friend for an age,
and you notice things. He mumbled, All them stories I’ve gave you...
His voice trailed off, but then he barked abruptly:
Half the time they’s about our boys: that June when the trout
bit like crazy for us, that time at deer camp
when we caught the bull moose straddle-legged of a cow.
That-like. I never spoke of Hat’s part, no matter those boys–
why, they come out of her! I hardly to mentioned her name,
just spoke of her as “my wife.” She was Harriet,
but people just called her Hat. She never liked that. For a while,
she tried to insist, but Harriet wouldn’t stick.
I hardly said her name, he’d repeat and repeat.
Their two middle-aged sons were driving her down to Georgia, a week
by the sea, which she’d never seen. He wouldn’t go.
He’d be okay all by himself, he claimed.
But he hadn’t meant forever. A drunken driver erased
his family on that bridge across the Potomac.
They wasn’t many knew Hat, he often told me.
She never went far. Our house was everything. The house
and the kids. I offer no conclusions here
beyond plain pay attention– which I mean to do,
then don’t. I usually travel unthinking. Like most of us maybe.
What’s precious is never more clear than after it’s gone.
As the old tune has it, you don’t miss your water– and so on.
And now he’s gone himself. Well spared, I’d say, although
I miss him badly. Lives can just tear away.
The following lyric is by my dear Slovene friend and translator (he has also, I should say with due humility, translated PARADISE LOST, THE CANTERBURY TALES, BEOWULF, Robert Frost, James Joyce, and others.) Marjan has also helped me to curate a series of poems by some of his fellow Slovenes, which will be featured next fall in the superb online poetry journal, PLUME. The translation here is the author’s.
Zinnias in Bloom
(Six Looks at the Rain)
Zinnias in bloom; a train
moving on, departing: maids’
work on the balcony.
An electric pole – a hedgehog
trying to climb it: a palm tree
by night. The branch of an elder
bush dressing itself up in black.
The scent of its inflorescence
quietly glowing. Among the wild
rose petals a spider hiding from
the rain. Had it not gone into
hiding it would have stayed hidden.
Night gathers; the starlings flock
onto a signboard: in the sky
a child from the long gone past
happily singing. Rain rushes down
the heavens; fire licks the star
at its edges. One me coming down
to lie on the earth.
Nice work as always, Syd. I particularly enjoyed the evocative essay. With so much rage bubbling these days, the loving the sinner message is well taken- hard though it may be. Also, it was generous of you to include the very nice guest piece.
Ed