Some Medical News (written 2008)

I have not done much writing this year. Bill, my husband has been near fatally ill and I just haven't thought about much else.

Here are a couple of medical poems:

Testing the Heart

The doctors want to see if my heart is broken,
if I was born with a problem
other than that of loving and dying.

I lie calm and restrained,
a needle strapped to the back of my hand,
marked on the front of my feet with indelible stigmata
indicating where else I could receive input.
I am a bag of waterborne chemicals,
potassium, calcium, iron, with traces of zinc and chloride...

The source of my pain is a ghostly landscape,
pulsed with unrelenting traffic that bursts
into the corkscrew branches of trees
and a secret eddy of perversity, flowing backwards.

The curve of beauty
for Stephanie

Day by day a slow withdrawal of strength
from the knee to the hip,
from the hip through the curve of beauty,
the small of a woman’s back,
now unlimber, doll-like, askew.

Rigor stilled neck and jaw.
Speech slurred. Hands would not hold,
mouth would not be fed:
then the humiliation of silence.
In her trammelling flesh she would arch
like a baby crying, mouth stretched,
but I heard only the hissed whisper
of wind in a chimney.

She was afraid of sleeping–
not that she might never wake
but that she might dream–
dream of her old life, stepping out
in the mall, running for a bus...

She fell into sleep as I handled her,
rotating joints, massaging
feet, hands, face, lending her a lifeline
to dip into unconsciousness.

No-one dare say what she felt,
bargaining with an unfamiliar god,
the local priest as wordless as she.
Her need went unanswered
as she died, withered with fever,
eyes that had held all that remained
half shut, lips parted.

I prayed, often. For me, lord,
let it not be like this, not for me.

In the Children’s Ward

"How can you bear to let them touch you?"
–Administrator, Leavesdon Hospital

In a six foot crib,
a man lolls, his head thrown back showing his shaven throat.
Beside him, infants with swollen heads, propped in their high chairs,
their temples rest on terry cloth cushions,
pale blue eyes warmed by the sun in the skylight
unblinking.

A girl floats by on her toes, looks through you as if you aren’t there,
flicks her fingers in front of her eyes,
tears paper into long even strips, lays them on a pile,
going through the empty motions of making.

Sometimes a smile comes,
but there is always the sound crying:
sometimes like paper being torn,
sometimes like a flock of starlings, sometimes
like an old doll being rocked - maaah.

Cape Ann Mystery ch 1 Digital

Alexis Feridge had arranged her bedroom in her house in Folly Cove so that the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes, across a steep meadow and the end of Folly Point, was the changeable water of Ipswich Bay. Today it is milky blue, with a light canopy of pale gold clouds overlaid with silver. It is late in September and there is a light frost. Alex follows her morning routine: pull on a tracksuit and sneakers, slip out with the dog, and don’t disturb the neighbors. Alex and the dog go pretty much the same route every day, up the hill, past Hannah Button's shack of a house, past Nilsson’s quarry, down the path past an empty A-frame, where the raccoons have made a home, through the low bush blueberries, over the granite scree to the broken down milldam. There they stepped across from stone to stone as the brown water curls over the edge of what is left of the dam itself, then up the trail into a beech wood. The ground is clear of brush and carpeted with deep green mosses. The first fallen beech leaves are honey colored and crisp underfoot. Many-colored mushrooms reminded Alex of early Disney cartoons. She was climbing up the side of the stream towards the old railway embankment when she saw the finger.

The dog had passed it by completely, having been distracted by a chipmunk that had hidden in a nearby dry stone wall. The finger lay on the right hand side of the path, looking like a plastic toy. That’s what she thought it was, one of those joke fingers that a kid would mail order from the back of Mad magazine. She stared at it. It had too much detail to be plastic. The nail was rough and ridged, with dirt underneath it. The end looked like old meat, but cleanly butchered. She turned and ran hard up the path to the road where the railway used to run. As she stood at the top of the embankment fighting to calm her pounding heart with some logic, She realized she had to go down and get it. She couldn’t leave it there. What if a raccoon got to it before the police did? If it was necessary to take it away, how could she touch a thing like that? Something dead. Something that perhaps had been parted from its owner in a way she didn’t like to think about. In her pocket she had a plastic bag designed for picking up dog doo. She told herself it would be no big deal, no worse than picking up one of the mice that the cat brought as a gift - different, though.

Perhaps she had just imagined that it was a human finger. Better check. When she got down to the bottom of the embankment it was still there, lying on a luxuriant patch of sphagnum moss. An ant ran excitedly over the knuckle. The cut had been made below the second joint and the skin was very pale, white with the slightest tinge of pale yellowish green. She slipped her hand into the plastic bag and used it to acquire the finger. It was lighter than she thought it would be. She ran all the way back to the house, with the dog dancing around her, excited by her haste. She picked up the Jeep keys, scooped out some kibble for the dog and managed to shut the door on him, preventing him from following her as she left. He was grinning as the screen door clapped shut: what fun! Tell me all about it when you come back, Alex!

The road that runs round Cape Ann is like a roller coaster. She drove it rather faster than she would have done normally, putting cats, squirrels and a neighbor’s lame cockerel to flight as she went. The day was getting brighter and warmer. To her left, she could see in between the small frame houses. Each house has the sea in its back yard, colored a deeper blue now, with bright sun shimmer. By the time she got to the police station in Gloucester, she had become almost used to the feeling of the finger in the front pocket of her sweatshirt.

It reminded her of a story her father used to tell. He had been a motorcycle cop in her home town in England in the seventies. He was called to the scene of an accident and accompanied the injured driver to the hospital. In the emergency room, the EMTs found that the driver had lost an ear. Could the constable go back to the scene and find it? It was in the gutter a few yards from the crash site. Constable Feridge picked it up. Because it was a cold, rainy day, he tucked it inside his uniform jacket to keep it warm. When he got back to the hospital, a surgeon sewed it back on, and it took well enough. There was something about the finger in her pocket that made Alex Feridge believe that the owner would no longer be able to accept a graft.

She parked outside the police station and court offices and paid the meter. It was a newish brick building with an interesting circular stairway, and a good view of the expanse of Gloucester Harbor. Cops, lawyers and criminals are lucky to enjoy such a panorama while waiting to make a court appearance. For various reasons, she had been in police stations in Britain, Holland, Australia and Sri Lanka as well as here in Massachusetts. They seemed to have some of the same characteristics: a strong smell of human beings, mingled with cigarette smoke and Lysol. The battered paint, concrete and reinforced glass were all familiar. There is always a cop at the desk with an expression that says: go ahead - shock me. This one was built like a grizzly bear. She took out her plastic package. “I found this near the old Imperial Quarry railway this morning. I expect someone will be missing it.”

She reached up to the raised counter (she was barely five foot tall) and laid the white plastic bag down open, to show the finger. He looked down, not touching it, his face blank, as if he were looking for distinguishing marks. He then looked down at her, seeing what appeared to be a young girl, with a very white face and a shock of red hair. “You realize that you should have left it where it was?” “I’m sorry, no I didn’t.” She was quite taken aback. If it had been a whole body she would have left it alone. She felt her effort to be brave and bring it in was being slighted. It only occurred to her now that she been unreasonably confident that the rest of the body wasn’t close by. “I think I was worried that some animal would have eaten it if I had left it in the woods... I was also pretty shaken up. I wasn't thinking straight.” “You’ll have to fill in a incident report.” She was surprised that he had a pat answer to the situation, but reminded herself that policemen are bureaucrats for most of the time. Paperwork had practically driven her father from the Force. By the time she had filled in the form and returned it, he had taken the finger, still in its plastic bag, out the back door to his den.

“What will happen to it?” she asked him on his return. “We’ll take a print, see if it’s anyone we know. Try the local morgues for a match.” “Will you tell me what happens to it?” She felt proprietary about the finger and almost regretted letting it go. She was annoyed by the sergeant’s businesslike manner. It was in high contrast to her current adrenaline shivers. Did people come in with severed fingers every day? “You’ll be hearing from us. If you don’t get a call in the next few days, call this number.” He gave her a card. She smiled at his unresponsive face and said good-bye, wondering what she’d got herself into.

Sheffield and The Yorkshire Ripper

I had been with the travelling circus for a couple of weeks. I was actually helping to dig a latrine, almost over my head in a 6x6 foot pit, when I heard the voice of the director from above. "You swing that pickaxe like a girl." he commented, grinning. I leant on the haft of the pickaxe and frowned up at him from under my bandanna. He added "Do you want to come to the pub for a pint?" I looked down at my dusty dungarees and work boots. "It's not that kind of a place" he reassured me. "No one will notice you." So, I climbed out of the pit and shortly a group of eight of us was crowded into the circus personnel vehicle, the ancient Bedford hearse that was featured in one of the acts.

The pub was in a poor area of Sheffield, which was at the time, a redundant description, since Sheffield was the heart of the Yorkshire rust belt. We disembarked outside a run down looking building with bars over the windows. We stood around while drinks were ordered, and I noticed that the furniture, wooden tables and chairs with steel legs, were bolted to the floor. Just as I was sinking the first delicious taste of bitter after a hot, dry afternoon, the barman came over to us. "You've got a woman there?" he asked the director. The director straight away assumed his most charming manner, and said "Why do you ask?" Somehow I recognised that his voice, with its pristine Oxford accent, would have a most irritating effect on the bar in general. "Women have to go to the Ladies Lounge." the barman declared. "House rules." said a deeper, gruffer voice from the back of the room. "Don't worry. We'll go with you." said the principal performer. It was not until this point that I realized that I was the only woman in the group.

Under the disapproving glare of the customers, mostly out-of-work steel workers, we took our cissy Southern selves to the other side of the pub, carrying our pints with us through the street and round the corner. The Ladies Lounge was a deeper shade of decrepit than the main bar, which had a workmanlike scrubbedness to it. There was a woman with a pram sitting with a friend, both with vodka and lime. A group of older women were at a long table at one side of the bar with bottles of stout or barley wine. But most of the customers were a different kind. Next to me, stood a fleshy girl with very black hair and carelessly applied black eye makeup. She wore a thin red sweater and a black leather mini-skirt over fish-net tights. An older woman sat behind her, in a sequinned knit cardigan and a tight white skirt, again with the black fishnets, this time with holes. Both women had large handbags that they clutched defensively across their bodies.

The director whispered close to my ear "I think I know where the whores are now" and giggled. I was not sure how to react. I was at once angry because I had been thrown out of a place just because I was a woman, which had never happened to me before, and scared and humiliated to be grouped with prostitutes. What I didn't know was the extent of the terror that the serial killer known as the Yorkshire Ripper had cast over the area in which we were playing. I didn't know that the Leeds football fans had taken to chanting "Ripper 12, police nil", nor that men in bars sometimes sang an adaptation of an old pub song which started "One Yorkshire Ripper, there's only one Yorkshire Ripper." as if he were a folk hero. If I had asked one of the locals if I should be scared, he might have said, as was reported by others, "Don't worry - he's only doing tarts." No wonder I felt vulnerable. The atmosphere of misogyny was tangible. The liberal, feminist, hippie "love peace and understanding" in which I had lived in for more than four years had insulated me from this sexual real-politik.

Dirty Competition in Lanesville

This evening, in the amber gloaming of a September day, as the Simpson's writers put it, I looked over the Gary "Zeke" Seppala Softball field to see someone stirring the garbage in the can near home base. I had walked past the can earlier on this 85º day, noting the contents: many pounds of large fish heads, swimming in their own blood and wrapped in plastic. "Good Lord." I thought to myself "I wonder what the DPW will think of that when they next come to empty it." It's a difficult disposal problem, because you can't put offal in the town dump, you can't really do anything with it except bury it under your corn seedlings in the spring. It was definitely too late for that.

The local softball league is a fiercely followed institution. This year the Wainos beat the Mudhens in a surprise upset. After having ceremonially dunked the team in Plum Cove, the teams retire to the parking lot and grill hot dogs, smoke and drink Bud. The conversation gets louder and louder, and eventually dissipates with the sound of screaming tires around midnight. We would complain to the police, but since the police constitute an equal force on the teams with firemen and DPW workers, there's really not much point. We've come to enjoy it. Sometimes a slugger will hit something onto the front lawn, to great applause.

So what were the fish heads doing on the ball field? Another great Lanesville tradition is the annual bluefish tournament. Lane's cove, the hub of Lanesville, is a tiny fishing port. It is shielded from the north easterly winds by a mighty granite wall made of uneven blocks probably weighing half a ton to a ton. The No-name storm of October 31st 1991 removed a couple of feet of those blocks from the top of the wall, but they've been replaced. The big celebration at Lane's Cove is July 4th, when a huge bonfire used to be built and an eccentric and seemingly disorganized parade. There are plastic buckets and cola cans for percussion, the odd trumpet and car or boat horn, a man dressed as Amy Winehouse, a giant papier mache lobster with moving claws and long feelers that have to be lowered to pass under the utility lines. The parade usually ends at the bonfire, twenty vertical feet of waste wood, palates, a piano perhaps, topped off with a small shed or outhouse, and decorated with a nasty sign excoriating NOAA and especially Jane Lubchenco, who believes that fisherman are piratical, anarchistic criminals who should be driven out of business. The bonfire is no longer built, because last year's event attracted a lot of outsiders who started fights (probably by standing around not looking like locals) There were incautiously lit fireworks and a couple of quarter sticks of dynamite, a remnant of the quarrying days, thrown with sparking fuses, at the last moment into the cove waters.

The locals are mostly lobstermen and tuna fishers (mostly both) for whom the bluefish runs are a recreational opportunity. "The number of entrants have been increasing each year and this year it was 540. It was an exceptionally beautiful day--no clouds until late afternoon, light to no breeze, flat calm seas, and moderate temperatures." This was fair weather sailing for the fishermen, who fish in appalling conditions in most seasons and impossible conditions in the winter. "The winner of the tournament brought in a fish that was 10 lbs, 6 oz. Not really a big Bluefish--15 pounders were common in the last few years. One entrant commented that though the fish weren't large they had stopped counting because they caught so many."* So someone from the tournament had dressed the fish and dumped their remains in the sandlot can. This may cause a tiny friction between those who dumped and those who will have to clean up, but there is such closeness in this village, it probably won't last.

Lanesville has been an isolated community, developing it's own ways of getting along, and preserving their traditions with jealous pride. There has always been an admixture of summer people, who are important to the local economy, but they leave after Labor Day, when metaphorical tumbleweeds drift down Washington Street. There are those who consider the village to be an unusually weird place. Kory Cucuru, from the urban center of Gloucester, calls Lanesville "Gloucester's Area 51" in his book "St Peter's Fiasco", a knowing parody of "The Perfect Storm". It is full of writers, architects, potters, dancers, artists of all kinds. It has had this adjunct population since the middle of the 19thC, when the railroad opened up the Cape. It has a very large number of AA meetings for such a small town. It is reputed to be a center of witchcraft. Many folks practice Oriental religions, martial arts and yoga. The woods of Dogtown, the little known (until recently) center of the Cape have always seemed mysterious, though they are little more than a hangout for teenagers to light fires and get drunk or high. Hunters, tree-huggers, housing developers - all kinds of interests are fighting to change Lanesville's ancient and shabby innocence. I hope it preserves itself and its eccentricity. I wouldn't want it any other way.

*Report from "On the Cove" blog, http://lanescove.blogspot.com/2005/09/lanesville-bluefish-tournament.html

Some more poems

Courtyard of the Museo des Belles Artes

She’s brought January rain to San Miguel.
The poor people here are wearing
garbage bags to keep out the wet cold

and at night they are dying. Despite this
men in the square still call out Hey, chica
to the blond northern whore as she passes by.

She sits in the courtyard, skin dead-white,
served tea by a Mayan with blue-black hair
thick and strong as a cable-tow.

Four cobbled paths converge in the courtyard
from the points of the compass to a stone Lamb
of God, bathed by a fountain.

All around there are leaves like falling tears,
tongue-like, arrow-like, all pointing fingers–
there is the pagan, she who does not believe.

The church bell’s clang begins– single beats,
tranquil at first, familiar, but then
a furious alarm, a mad-man’s hammering.

Mexican Silver

In the back of every jewelry store
there is a girl who is kept busy polishing away
the taint of disappointed love,
spread through songs
of white-haired guitarists in the public park.

The corrosion of funerals
penetrates even midday in the square
with its heavy equestrian statue
flanked by papyrus reeds–

exhalations of the misunderstood,
the jilted, the abandoned,
effluvia that burn the nostrils

each adding a distinctive tinge
to the patina on the wide bracelets like shackles,
the yellowing waxen figures

Mexico

Bless her with pink
and bleak citron yellow of paper flowers
with the penetential green of funerary tiles

Bless her with onyx, glossy and faceted,
with verdigris and noble oxidized silver,
square paving stones of agate.

Bless her with blue jasmine,
with Madonna lilies and the grey pads
of prickly pear.

Bless her with flaking clay pots
and domes of eroded stone coarsened with lichen,
gold leaf and the crystal of chandeliers.

Bless her with fountains and with arches,
with palm trees and oranges hanging like lamps–
let black and silver mariachi play in the public park.

The Honey Jar

Aubade

The shutters shift on their hinges
in the dawn wind.
All night it seems the swifts have been screaming,
whipping between the ancient houses
whose stucco walls are pink, yet not pink.

Empty thunder woke me.

I am as I was last night
in meditation:
a channel of breath, a glass vase containing thoughts
swimming in harmless circles.

A flock of pigeons is blown across
the aperture of my tall bedroom window.
White muslin curtains lift and swell.

Can I be swayed by desire?

Hotel of Dreams

Welcome. This is the entrance hall. Yes, it is
grey and unprepossessing. We don't need
to be attractive. The dreams you see lounging
in the dormitories, slouched across old mattresses,
smoking unrecognizable substances by the pool,
are all unavailable.

Although it is difficult to understand
why anyone would want them
when seen up close, their very inaccessibility
and aloofness makes them desirable.
We often have break-ins.

The dreams don't want out, of course.
They get three squares a day, only
have to help cook and wash up every other week.
They are perfectly happy watching TV
or listening to baseball games on the radio.
Here they don't have to live up to anything,
are never a disappointment to anyone. Now,
would anyone care to make a reservation?


Exhibition

Your upper lip forms the couplet
to the octet of your nose.
Your lower lip droops, a ripe fruit
or not quite ripe, mostly carmine
red and firm to touch
with the tongue, but
your mouth is slightly open, dumbly
wondering at the machinery of perspective
with that most intelligent part of you,
the bitter black coffee of your eyes.

How sweet it would be
to investigate the slope of your shoulder,
to compare the monument
of your nape to that of the marble Apollo
we circle like opposing planets.

If I could only for a moment
make you stop thinking about art.

Mermaid

Tonight you watch me
from your porch, wondering
which house I have left, barefoot,
without a wrap.

Moonlight clothes me, my skin
blanched by it, eye sockets shadowed
so deep you cannot guess
their expression, pearls
on my neck thrumming with paradoxical
luminescence, passionate and cool. I sense each step
barefoot on wet sand, sea-smoothed: you watch
my unfamiliar woman-toes grasp the slip of kelp-fronds.

The sky sucks up wind from the ocean
landward, where I am exiled.
You are strong, warm, golden,
like nothing in my native country.

Will you not cover me
with your coat,
lead me back into your home?

The Selkie

They came upon a lake in the summer hills
and no sooner did he, the trickster,
scent the water, than he changed
to a brown otter,
slipped into a new skin,
to roll and dive in a fresh element.

She was left wading in the shallows
like a child, leaning to interrogate the sand.
But longing works on her like a spell
until it lifts her out
on the surface of the water and she walks
there, like no other creature.

She reaches him as he dives.
When he comes up for air,
he will see her
as she is.

Riddle

What is it that has been so long, waiting–
in a sidewalk cafe at noon with pastis and olives,

in a darkened room where fresh figs ripen
on the bedside table,

among lavender flowers that must be bruised
to release their essence?

It comes when it will, regardless.
It chooses to play with dangerous toys,
is never on time, interrupts decent people
when they are having a conversation.

It does not forgive, can
never be forgotten– in this evening
under a linden tree in a deserted square,
bodies resonating like tuned bells, our

hands may touch, grasp,
despite everything,

everything.

Figure of St. Francis in Bronze

He stands on a plinth of broken marble
his hands held outwards, cupping
an intangible gift. Thin streams trickle
from the moss under his feet to a basin,
and more: his generosity pours into a gutter
where all animals can drink–

like the brindled dog that drank from your hands
filled with water from a city fountain
on a sultry night of chattering starlings
when I first knew your touch
and grateful, shivering,
took what is more important than water¬:
gained strength to return love like a spring
unstopped, a flow, soaking,
swelling seed and bud into mortal
grass and flowers.

The Fig Tree

Before she left she stared down the fig tree
outside the bedroom window.
What right had it to be so fecund, so full?

She had let the summer in.
Flowers filled the empty basket of her ribs.

The green figs, ripe now,
give their red hearts to others.

Flagellum

Silversmiths of Avila made exquisite whips,
handle proportioned for female hands,
knopped with an acorn or a fleur de lys,
a mystical number of flexible strands
bound with a silver braid, each filament
bearing a cross or dainty heart, or spears
biting the naked flesh, bruising at first,
then drawing virgin blood, so scarlet tears

drop from each terminating charm.
Later, wounds will fester, glazing
pain with fever and rampant demons.
Then secret scars, the badge of blazing
limitless love, scars that tell of a vow
fulfilled, a whispered detail of the Passion.

Desire, sharpener of senses

Infuriated, she throws the soap
into the suitcase,
packing to leave.

Choked with silence,
humiliated, vulnerable,
she is as dangerous as an empty pan on a high fire.

When she walk past him
neither of them looks the other in the eyes.

She has no appetite, terrible thirst,
can’t sit down, can’t stand up.

She stands outside his door at midnight,
willing it to open.

The Petals

All my friends told me his smile was a lie,
his charm the blackest magic. The sound
of his voice was sunshine on a honey jar.

He arched over me, a ribbed shield:
the skin of his back smooth as milk
while I flowed under him, strong

as an April stream. It was an unlooked-for
blossoming, uncalculated, rash.
When he was gone, the petals, torn by rain, fell.

Looking Once More At The Photograph

When he moved in close to touch her hand,
slipped between parked cars to cross the road
beside her, arm around her waist,
she came into flower like night-blooming
cereus, once in ten years.

Later she kissed his forehead, his ear, his neck
and he claimed to have recited Aves to resist–

In this season her garden is full,
its skin splitting with gorgeous fruit.
She is writing better than ever

and there, out of focus, wearing
black socks with his shorts, is he,
a plain man, she sees now.

How the Mantis does it

Cut the head from a male in the act of mating.
It will not matter much. The female mantis
is looking forward to a romantic dinner
afterwards.

Relieved of nattering mantis thoughts the spine
remembers unhindered the deep rhythm of sex.
With the head off, it’s more reliable.

Our consciousness is made with memories
pulled from the giddy present. Without memory,
no fear, no regret, no guilt.

Aspire to lose memory in the service of pleasure,
that karmic sense of immanence. For us, a state of grace
can be achieved without decapitation.

The Loser in Love

Like the Commisioner hated Inspector Clouseau
(destroyer of my plans)
Like Wile E. Coyote hated the Roadrunner
(too smart for your own good)
Like Bluto hated Popeye
(more lovable than I)

You, Luke and I, Darth Vader
You, the Whale and I the Captain,
the obsessed, the vengeful:
You, Lucifer and I your jealous god.

I pursue you: injure, vanquish,
cast you out. This is how much
I hate: this is how much I love.

Love Poem

If anything changes
let me know

If everything remains
the same
Also let me know