"Withdrawal," "Elegy," and "At the Foundry"

Withdrawal

The nurse seats me in the withdrawal chair to take my blood and the banquette with the fat arms seems benign compared to my many other sites of withdrawal from memory and love. If I were my grandmother, I would be out of my mind at this age, soft down on my chin mimicking a beard, slight snoring like morning mist in the woods, but I am in uncharted family territory now, having not gone mad or stroked to mute. The relations on my mother’s side had fragile genes for heart attacks and strokes, alcoholism and dementia. So far so good, I tell myself each morning, Gelid is a good word for my mental state. Frozen, waiting. How many more springs? How many more insomniac nights? Slumber is said to allow the brain to rest and form memories. I’m like a tuna swimming continuously in my worrying thoughts. Bonito too, sleep like I do, with one eye open listening for small disturbances of the dark water. In the morning I rise from sleep as from a blank ocean, withdrawn from the surface of a dream, remembering nothing. Should I look up the cause of my stricken recall. Could it result from years of being roused from finny sleep over and over? I have begun to snore lately. Does this mean I am becoming my grandmother? How much longer will I be able to give blood?

Elegy  

It doesn’t matter how I start out these poems

they end up as laments for my strays—

the ones who wandered off and the ones

who traveled to New York or to Chicago,

where my childhood bestie ended up.

The ones I know died; ones I imagine speak to me—

the musician who blew his head off

with his therapist’s gun and the poet

who tried to save me from history.

We’re not in touch but I keep them

in living memory with the gymkhana pony

who went to glory with her head in my lap

and my granddaughter, atomized on a two-lane

by a lumbering eighteen-wheeler.

What a dinner party we have when I call them

to the table, each beloved face shining with appetite.

And you, others, so many dead or dying, whether or not

I know you, all I write now is your elegy.

At the Foundry

The artist’s widow says,

condolences are enough.

You can’t take care of me,

she says, “sorry for your loss”

goes right out the window.

She is an artist, too.

In the studio they used to share,

she paints a ram,

paints a goddess.

She goes to the Berlin Bar

for tea. We linger over

her paintings.

We are so sorry, we say.

Sorry as we can be,

lucky as we are, still being

alive together, and concerned

for someone else’s loss.