The Third Person Bonnie Naradzay
For months I visited him once a week, in the morning – before
pressure built up from cancerous fluids as the day progressed.
He and I shared memories from the poetry salons
we’d held for years with the homeless people downtown.
He would let me know when it was ok to stop by. Never
did he mention the pain.
A hospice nurse showed up weekly to see how he was
progressing, is the way he put it.
When I saw him that last time, he told me to try writing poems
in the Third Person to distance myself.
“Pretend it happened to someone else,” he said.
That last time, his wife chatted about Madame Bovary,
which she listened to at night. The awful ending.
After he died, I went away and crossed the Tweed River; it’s part
of the border between England and Scotland.
On the first day of fishing season there, I saw a priest bless the river
with whiskey as the salmon swam home.
Elegy with Contrails
to my father
As I hold the phone and strain to hear that you
have died, I look out the window. Cardinals
weave among the barren limbs, and contrails
blur in the indifferent sky. Christmas Eve.
Your French wife, with her loaded revolver, hoping
you’d shoot yourself instead, had told me Don’t come
in September, but I did. Don’t cry,
she warned me then. He’ll think he’s dying.
Mother, here for the holidays, wears her fringed shawl
with hand-sewn Chinese asters. She lounges on the couch
near the angel-topped tree, frowns when I share the news.
He should have given me more money.
Soon I will take her shopping, prepare a feast
for people I hardly know, beans amandine with goblets
of wine, and I will celebrate you. Mother can still
feed herself, act charming, use a fingerbowl.
I hold what you gave me for the children:
your pilot’s wings, pinned to dried leather; the faded
piano medal wrapped in pale satin and the watch –
still faintly ticking – from your large, bony wrist.
Paradise in the Day Shelter for the Homeless
What they like best today is the poem I brought
about a paradise you can conceal in your pocket, so
no one will steal it. Queenie, who keeps hearing aids
in a Ziploc bag in her pocket, asks what free verse is.
It’s verse you don’t have to pay for, Chuck tells her.
Is paradise a place? Paul asks. Mo shakes his head
and says, It’s a sleeping bag at night that turns into
a jacket in the morning. Leon, who sleeps on steps
outside St. Paul’s, muses that Paradise could be
a place to live – a tent or camper. I say, You’d need
a big pocket for that! Robert wonders, If I see it,
will I recognize it? Carl says, If you speak of Paradise,
you must consider Hell and the duality of existence.
Well, Jimmy Buffet sang of cheeseburgers in Paradise,
Eugenia replies, and a slice of onion is heaven on earth.
Lament for a Mentor
For Stanley Plumly
Like every other griever, I choose a flower, a violet – from “Brownfields”
He said to put myself in the poem,
though I had written about the potato famine.
Have you been to Ireland? he asked.
Yes, to Dingle, I said – on the peninsula
where sheep graze, and the Blaskets,
where seals bob in the shadows
of the tide that will take us away.
He asked if I could film that scene.
Stay in the moment, he said. Be a guide,
for you can’t disappear in the poem
or let your mind get lost in memories.
Poetry is meditation and a looking back,
he said. And don’t be in a hurry to send out
poems. Let it take years. It’s awful when
you can’t get what you want.
What matters most is how the pain
can try to weigh you down.
Then you must start all over again –
Ghazal
with a Phrase from Dickinson
At last, the snow. I shoveled the walk before disappearing inside
my black hole; the snow kept on falling anyway.
The hospice worker said the dying regret not having
lived true to themselves before slowly fading away.
Genesis starts over and tells two different creation stories;
we can’t even get this right without losing our way.
Earth is close to losing its second moon, and black holes
obliterate galaxies – the stars disappearing, just going away.
Prisoners at Guantanamo, never charged, wrote poems
on styrofoam cups until guards took even this writing away.
I told my friend I don’t think I have a self. He said we all do.
So I tried to say it’s somewhere else – not inside hiding, anyway.
White of forgetting, sustenance of despair. To find my son, I’d sail
past the pillars of Hercules if I could stop drowning this way.
Presence
In the middle of my journey through Cornwall on the Atlantic side,
six hours by train from Paddington, though I was there
during a lonely time in January,
I grew to like it without meaning to:
standing at the shore near the wharves, taking ferries
all day, ordering fish and chips – though you could say
a rootless, solitary life can last for just so long.
I thought of Ovid,
the poems he sent home after he was banished far to the north
of Rome at a Black Sea outpost, after his urgent pleas to return
went for naught.
Old man by then, he was reduced to simple gestures
in Tomis, which made him the barbarian, not them.
His Latin verses being worthless now, he began
to enter the language there and realized the people valued friendship,
as he said in Tristia.
For me, friendship was a small church next to the seawall
on a cold and windy afternoon. Opening the rough-hewn wooden door,
I saw a kindly gentleman standing near the altar;
he was sharing his thoughts
about the gifts the Wise Men had brought (it was Epiphany Sunday)
to three old people sitting close to each other on a pew up front.
He gestured to me: Come in, abide with us.
© Bonnie Naradzay, all rights reserved.
