Hi, Anny—   I know you don’t like to pick and choose, but I’m sending a batch of things here and hope that you will sift them thoroughly. This was surprisingly difficult for me. When I first thought to pick some things for you I thought it would be simple, as I think of myself as having attended repeatedly to illness and disease among my family and friends, and in myself. What I found on looking closer was that for the most part I’d shifted this in the direction of elegy—an interesting non-decision, since it meant, in many instances, in some sense waiting too long (i.e., waiting through an illness for the stability of retrospect). I can see that (with a couple of exceptions) I’ve required a stabilizing metaphor (again, that dis-ease cries out for stability is clear enough to me now) to replace the confusions and disruptions of actual sickness—but it’s also clear to me that more or less, for better or worse, like it or not, that’s fundamental to the way I use poems to address the world. Where I don’t do it, I still do it—I just find more ways to resist or disguise my own deeper impulse. But there’s no question: this makes me more accurately a poet of elegy than of illness.   I think, too, that thinking about your topos in the abstract inevitably disintegrates: imagine it as an assignment: write about illness (or democracy, or love, or injustice). Nothing will come of that until a process of concretization takes place—in my case, a process that tends to lead me towards instances of coming to grips with failing health in a particular person, with a particular ailment at a particular stage. That particularization (towards and in response to a body losing integration) is another necessary function of my symbolic process—it situates my poems with reference to the kind of things they are and the kind of things they're not, and no doubt it means that they comment on generalities and abstractions only analogically. Indeed, I hope that’s the case. At the same time, this movement may drive some of my poems towards a more explicit emotional engagement than most of us (including me) can feel quite comfortable with, an engagement that feels sentimental or, at least, inadequately distant from its subject. I certainly can’t quibble about issues like that.   So here’s a group of poems in which illness has mattered as a problematic of the symbolic apparatus. If none of them suits you, it won’t surprise or trouble me. If one or more of them seems like a good match for your project, I’ll be delighted, of course—it’s a very worthy project, and I’ll be happy to be associated with it. But please don’t let that steer your process; I don’t feel at all confident that my poems belong in this mix.   Best wishes,   Jerry   PS        It’s also the case, Anny, that the several poems (the first two, below) occasioned by the illnesses and deaths of friends with AIDS describe symptomatology and medical treatments that are no longer typical (which is all for the better, of course).

SYNDROME, SEVENTH AVE.

  

I don't know

what I think. I know

I don't know what wild

moon has set

itself high over Brooklyn

this ordinary morning

as if to say I have to

see morning, I will

see the morning.

                        Pure

emblem—lemondrop,

gumdrop, skull, anything

but moon, and yet a wash

for this wreckage, milky

bath of desperate light

wholly not its own.

 

On these green pears, so

still in life, yet shining

with the life in them:

green pears, green pears,

nestled in the oranges,

each a fountain, no, a mirror,

both fountain and mirror

for green light it never knows.

 

7:20, the city's eyes have popped

open like blisters. Where

the light hits is sore, every morning

a painful opening, every energy

a disturbance for something. There's

been a death. My friend this time.

Not the first to hurt, one of many

quieting this city of noisy light, but

this is the one I know. As if all

this wreck were mine.

Because at the end was coma

and (we think) no great pain,

we manage to hold up, just tough

enough in the brand new dark.

 

And now one holds one's breath.

And practices invisibility.

And ducks the blasted feelings

crippled in the air.

 

Perturbances of light.

Grieving. Pairs of people weeping.

No one about to fix anything.

Pounded air, rattling underground,

muscular trucks, amplified everything,

money changing hands, Koreans

polishing their fruit, Dirty Girls Deli,

bullies on the corner, high noon:

 

all a system set on breaking

down, dear hearts, please don't quit, keep going.

 

 

                        for David Paonessa and Wayne Cummings

 

 

 

From Vulgar Exhibitions (Eastern Washington UP, 2000)

 

 

A CHRISTMAS POEM

 

 

There is a corner framed by two axes heading nowhere fast,

disappearing into far‑off nothing as they hurtle away from each other

and also into each other where they sharply meet, which is

another kind of nothing. Such a corner! All the dead

might be there reading magazines as if this corner were

the waiting‑room of a Bulgarian train station, which is to say,

they cannot read the writing here, and even the pictures

twist away from their eyes like thin angry people

who live in another place and see your helplessness and do not care.

Outside the snow is covering the peasant streets as if life were

a glass ball that an unknowable hand turns upside down

whenever it gets bored. Turn, shake, shake again,

and watch it all swirl and settle in the loveliest disorder.

This is one of those scenes where the train probably isn't coming

and the people will be there forever and what happens

is that nothing ever happens, or so it seems. In fact,

a train does come, and some get up to take their leave

while others move closer to the fireplace or shift around

on their walnut benches or take a sip of brandy from a thermos.

And a few more come in the door with a feeble gust of snow

and sit among the people there like glacial islands

until the fire melts all their differences into one lazy dream.

The girl whose scene this is shifts on her bed,

and her bedsores bring her back to a clear and constant hurt

that she'd forgotten. She sees the monitor with its tubes and lights

and beepers beside her, and hears the special quiet

of the hospital late at night. She wishes someone

would come and massage her sticklike leg, or that at least

the cramp would disappear. She feels a new infection brewing

in the hole they punched in her chest to pour the medicine in,

and two old infections in her throat and rectum.

She thinks, Peggy will come tomorrow, the K. S. is a mess,

I hope I can keep her cookies down, she better not bring

that mopey Sandy again. Somewhere down the hall a sleeper

moans twice and then it's all simple and still again.

In the corner she sees that the pretty little spruce seems somehow

twice as big as when they brought it in, and it bristles

and blushes in the firelight. It is hung

with ornaments made of painted wood and paper,

with a pipe‑cleaner angel here and there. No one could say

who made these things, tiny images that call to mind old stories:

three little pigs, a tricksy spider, a beauty, a beast, a woman

made in the image of all the soulkilling agonies of the world.

Tinman, scarecrow, lion, scruffy mutt. Bats and snakes

and creatures with no heart, and some so pure of heart

they seem to throw more fire than the fire does. The tree

has put down roots there, its deep‑scented crusty branches shake themselves

as if to show that they are wild, always have been wild. The corner where it stands

more and more fades away to nothing, and as it gives way to the tree

it shows how little nothing means. And now the waiting‑room

turns out its lights, and the tree and fireplace embrace

each other in the dark, each moving only as the other moves,

the one all warmth and light, the other warmth and shadow.

Together they glow and give off a perfume that clouds the room.

There is a crackling, a low rustle, the sound of ash settling, and then

one of the men has started singing. He sings:

I came here and the train was late

and so I watched the wall and drank a bit

I saw a woman hitch her skirt

and smelled a dirty baby.

I watched the wall again

and drank some more, and then

something happened,

who knows what?

and the room was happy

all of a sudden, all of a sudden.

I did not see what made it turn that way

I'm not sure that I haven't just gone crazy.

I think that it must be the tree.

I think that it must be the tree.

The girl comes to again, one of her everpresent aches erupting.

She thinks: all my life I've looked beneath the tree.

That is not where the gifts were! She wishes she could reach the bedpan.

She hopes, as she often does when something wakes her late at night, .

that holding onto life so tight, so long,

doesn't cast her in the end into complete delirium.

Or if she is cast out, she thinks it might be easier,

to find herself at last at rest in a place like this,

in which the tree grows larger and more dense, and darker,

and yet pulses in the firelight and gives off ever

more and more the breath of a simple pine grove,

mountain air, birdsong and echo, inexpressible hum of life.

And she sees then in the lower boughs a thing she hadn't seen before:

her mind is turned to little girls and boys in overalls

who climb like caterpillars all among the branches and around

the trunk, who pull themselves from one limb to the next

and pause only to breathe deep where the scent is stronger.

The tree has grown now far beyond any hope of seeing its end.

It seems to fill the room, to take up everyone,

and they all climb on (she cries out without knowing, these are the gifts!)

and they all move like love‑stunned children from ornament to ornament

taking a little time to admire. They all pull upwards,

though the tree seems now to have blown itself beyond all sight,

beyond imagination, even beyond hope. She loses sight

of them all, one by one, as they become too tiny

in their amazing heights, or simply choose a hiding‑place

and disappear. There is a bit of noise, a bit of pain,

and the nurse is saying something, but no, no, it was only

the wind, the calming light, the breath of a brown squirrel in the tree.

From Vulgar Exhibitions (Eastern Washington UP, 2000)

© Jerry McGuire