The BlueIris Semi-Nightly Poetry Break, 2/7/08

[BlueIris]

"How Some of It Happened"

My brother was afraid, even as a boy, of going blind—so deeply
that he would turn the dinner knives away from, looking at him,

he said, as they lay on the kitchen table.
He would throw a sweatshirt over those knobs that lock the car door

from the inside, and once, he dismantled a chandelier in the middle
of the night when everyone was sleeping.

We found the pile of sharp shining crystals in the upstairs hall.
So you understand, it was terrible

when they clamped his one eye open and put the needle in through
     his cheek
and up into his eye from underneath

and left it there for a full minute before they drew it slowly out
once a week for many weeks.  He learned to, lean into it,

to settle down he said, and still the eye went dead, ulcerated,
breaking up green in his head, as the other eye, still blue

and wide open, looked and looked at the clock.

My brother promised me he wouldn't die after our father died.
He shook my hand on a train going home one Christmas and gave me
     five years,

as clearly as he promised he'd be home for breakfast when I watched him
walk into that New York City autumn night.  By nine, I promise,

and he was—he did come back.  And five years later he promised five
     years more.
So much for the brave pride of premonition,

the worry that won't let it happen.
You know, he said, I always knew I would die young.  And then I got sober

and I thought, OK, I'm not.  I'm going to see thirty and live to be an old
     man.
And now it turns out that I am going to die.  Isn't that funny?

—One day it happens:  what you have feared all your life,
the unendurably specific, the exact thing.  No matter what you say or do.

This is what my brother said:  Here, sit closer to the bed
so I can see you.

—Marie Howe

[BlueIris]

1. Some information about Marie Howe, and the series of losses which inspired her to write

her second book of poems, What the Living Do, from which the previous poem is taken:

http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmArticleID=3450

"In 1987, (Howe) visited the MacDowell Colony for a residency. She was shown to her cabin and assured that no one would ever disturb her unless it was an emergency. Less than ten minutes later, she heard a knock on the door. There was a phone call from her brother John, who was being treated for cancer. The emergency, however, concerned their mother. She'd had a heart attack. Howe went home to Rochester and stayed for a week. Her mother was still in intensive care but better, and Howe was about to leave. But then John spiked a high fever and had to be admitted to another hospital. Howe accompanied him, waited with him for hours while he lay on a gurney in a hallway as the hospital tried to find him a doctor and a bed. Finally, a nurse came with a clipboard and asked the standard series of questions—only this time: "How long have you had AIDS?" John had told no one that he had the disease, and Howe promised she would honor his privacy. She visited her mother at the other hospital, maintained that John was fine, that it was simply the chemo, then went home to her family's empty kitchen to eat dinner and call her answering machine. There were friends' voices, all concerned about her mother, then: "This is the National Poetry Series. We are looking for Marie Howe . . ." More beeps and clicks and friends, then. "This is the National Poetry Series again. We're still looking for Marie Howe. Is this her? Where are you? You won." Margaret Atwood had selected Howe's manuscript of poems, The Good Thief, as the winner of the Open Competition of the National Poetry Series.

Howe remembers, "And now I'm weeping because my book has been taken, and my mother is in intensive care, and the one person who knows what the National Poetry Series is, who helped me arrange the manuscript to enter the contest for years, is curled on his side in a hospital bed, sweating out a 105 degree fever, without a phone installed yet.

"So I drive up to the hospital again, John's hospital, and walk up to the seventh floor because I'm afraid of elevators, and it's dark now and visiting hours are over . . . past the nurse's station and into the ugly green room where he is lying as I left him, sweating and weak and smiling to see me. 'Maria,' he says. And I say, 'John, I won the National Poetry Series.' And he holds out his hands and says, 'Good.'"

"My brother John died of AIDS," Howe says, "and so many friends have died since then. Stanley has said, 'We have to make our living and dying important again, and the living and dying of others. Isn't that what poetry is all about? Perhaps that is what AIDS is here to tell us. I wouldn't presume to know, but it is here to tell us something. And so many poets are listening: Thom Gunn, Cyrus Cassells, Melvin Dixon. It's breaking down the 'literary' walls that separate writers from everyone else, which is a great hope and dream." (From the journal, Ploughshares, more at link.)

[Tuesday Afternoon]

2. Blue,

I am still not 100%. I felt better this morning, but now I am worn out. Kicking this one for you and hoping I can read it in the morning.

[BlueIris]

3. OMG, poor Tuesday.

Remember—I keep all poems posted available in my journal. So you can read them whenever.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

4. Oh yeah...

Just checked it out. :D I like that set-up ;)


shhh...don't tell Retro, but his white on black his hard on my eyes. That is why I got used to finding the thread :blush:

[BlueIris]

5. Kick.

[BlueIris]

6. Kick.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

7. My dear BlueIris...

Oh, wow, this is a tough one...

So very tough, and yet tender and beautiful all at once...

—One day it happens: what you have feared all your life, the unendurably specific, the exact thing. No matter what you say or do...

Just lovely in all its pain...

Thank you...

[BlueIris]

8. Thanks, C-Peg.

[BlueIris]

9. Kick.