“American Beauty”
Writing poetry...
April 12, 2022
COVID Sequence
I. From My Hospital Bed
… for when I am weak, then I am strong. St. Paul (2 Cor 12:1-10)
So I’ve wandered this far into the breath-
taking woods, nothing but darkness ahead,
nothing behind except what I think
I remember. Or perhaps made up. I don’t
know. Also, I don’t know how I know
but I know now there is no path out
of this infinite forest nor why I am
certain there is a fallen tree trunk
up ahead that I will come upon and
sit down, lean over and, pressing my bare
forearms onto my weary thighs, gaze out
through the inscrutable thicket: branches,
leaves, choking vines, waiting for whatever
comes next: animal, rain, morning, hunger,
faith, love, the hunger of love, the everything
and nothing that arrives when prayers
are but childhood wishes, when we know
in our scarred and perfect souls
that what is sacred is profane, profane
sacred, that there is merciful strength
in closing our eyes and welcoming
this illness
of being human
with an unknowing smile.
--SL, Port Royal, SC, May 2020
II. Through My Hospital Window
Ten inches. That is my view of the outside world, the ten inch
space between the bottom of the window shade and the sill…
--Neil Selinger, 1953-2011
i. March 2011
My dear friend Neil, being buried alive in his fading body, wrote
with breathtaking bravery and grace during his last year of life
through computer-trained retinas about an ever-diminishing world,
every morning a ten-inch gap he’d see through the bedroom
window, eyes peering down past his feet, unable to move a toe
until the nurse would come to wash and turn and dress him.
ii. March 2020
I think of Neil now, trapped in my own mechanical hospital bed,
IV drips in my arm, oxygen canula up my nose, intermittent pneumatic
compression cuffs on my legs, a kind but unrecognizable nurse in a mask,
gown, and gloves turning me one way then the other so she can change
the sheets, then giving me unidentified pills, which I swallow obediently
like a hapless child or a dispirited rheumy-eyed old man, agreeing
without protest to anything I’m offered: jello, Mucinex, thermometer,
dry chicken, the daily shot in my stomach.
iii. April 2020
While I was on my back in the hospital bed, time seemed to pass or
not pass as in a dream or a hallucination; and even weeks later
as I lay at home in a weary convalescent isolation I hardly remember now,
I recalled peering vacantly out the hospital window when Neil appeared,
sat down beside me, not to offer the usual clichéd consolations, only
to share the narrow view, the private and solitary darkness illuminated for both
of us by the ten inches he once described so unforgettably with his eyes alone.
Maybe I imagined it. Perhaps it was a dream. It’s even possible I conjured
it up through this hazy recollection in poetry, but as we watched cars slowly
passing on Ribaud Road, Spanish moss swaying languidly from the live oaks,
I know I took one shallow inspiration after another after another, chest rising,
falling, each drawn from the sweet breath of his long-silenced voice.
--SL, Port Royal, SC, May 2020
III. Three Elements
Something lifts our wings ….
–Rumi
When speaking of birth and death
and the everything in between,
the doleful beginnings, the middle,
the ends of these harrowing days,
there are only three elements:
the female, the male, the holy other,
each one beholden to, flowing
through, the other two, what
the early mystics must have known
in their hearts but misunderstood
its eternal embrace, leaving out
women in their narrow, selfish
view of the immemorial triptych
of the planet: earth, water, the wind
that dear-dear-dear Emily whispered
through her own trinity: First – Chill –
then Stupor – then the letting go –
and so here I find myself in this poem,
still seeking blessed air, each breath
a gift for the aching lungs, the tender
heart, oxygen for rivers of blood
flowing through these arteries,
each exhale a grateful surrender
to the everything, the sum, the all
I misunderstood, I seem to almost
understand now, yet still
have no earthly idea why
I did not drown in the roiling
waters. Maybe it just doesn’t matter.
As my dear friend Larry told me,
“Where you stepped in the river
is not across from where
you are crawling up the bank.”
SL, Port Royal, SC, May 2020