Poems, thoughts, and stories.
New doctors are like puppies. They have to play with all their toys and can be wildly cute. Fresh out of obedience school, all they know is rules and cutoffs; they cannot yet lay by the fire because they are the fire and have trouble being still. Old doctors, like old dogs, aren’t so eager. They know our secret heart, the love we’ve spent against coming back and smile as we wave So Long.
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The coffee pot sticks a little to the warming plate. Sliding-glass door’s a bit rusty. I love it cracked open, lake-smell gets in, grass and summer rain, trees on the breeze — maybe the morning doves will come again. It’s good to feel stiff old shag, see stacks of books we’ve partly read, stacks and stacks. Your grandpa’s kitchen table, Ruth’s worn chair, dusty Mantovani on the player. Paintings hang crooked, curl on paneled walls, fading in memory and slow-days, that other house, the city one, already forgotten.
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All we’ve talked has burned, embers smoothing silly me, impatient you — until we ease into each other to enthrall Dark.
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I couldn’t help it, leaving. It must be the way I’m made. They spoke God, said I'd wreck my soul with that abomination — so I chose the other tree, blue-green against the same sky, splashed its dark on my face and fell sound asleep as they raged beneath an equally good tree preparing for my salvation.
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What you discover after — after the battered “Yes, okay” to your heart’s direction — is that all of your guns that once shot enemies and fools are now trained and aimed at you. One Last Chance to apologize to recant to come home. So you write another poem as familiar bullets speed toward their mark.
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“Quick! They’re coming for you! Call down your god!” Oh, buddy, if you only understood. My god runs towards me, bayonet in hand, trying to scare me off, see if I turn. “Some god!” Yeah. My god. As I take a run at him.
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You remember it from somewhere: “The only place now I can hear myself think is at the bottom of a swimming pool.” So you try sitting down in the deep-alone. Soon, no more bubbles to the top; soon, eyes caressed in water’s well, arms held — strange elongated creatures above, splashing and splaying toward cement shores, over and over, eager frogs fascinated by wavy light — and you wonder whether evolution was such a good thing.
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You know that game where you walk around chairs to music? “Musical chairs?” and one is removed, leaving someone standing? “Yeah?” I’m the one left standing, looking at this dumb game, this violence-inspired mirror of the human need to hurt and wondering “Why you ever started to play?” Yeah. “You think too much.”
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Come make love with me, my friend. Show me your self, whether you’re fast or slow loud or soft — curtains opened or curtains closed — let me know, if only for a minute or more, you’re just like all the others with a few tricks up your sleeve.
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They laughed and hollered and hooted wet with fog and chop-surge-crash waves bigger than a man, danced and drank the complete sea, gods — preferred words to water-speak, whiskey to land that’s sand, dirt and dumb air beautiful against their fire — now ashes, hard poets and mechanics and bricklayers packed up, home with life, leaving slight and then no footprints for followers who hold tickets for the show and wait for something to happen.
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“Had she ever tried to convert any one herself?
Did she not wish everybody merely to be themselves?”
— Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
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They no longer colonize with ships. No armies arrive on my shore, war-boots in sea-water until they sink into wet sand and subdue. Too costly. And then you have to leave a force to force compliance... It’s ugly. Instead, they whisper, those enlightened who yet carry the burden of rectitude. A word, a phrase spoken through the air, taken in — and I’m lost. They no longer act; they just wait until I bow my head beat my breast seek forgiveness from gods curiously unprepared to absolve.
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G Beckman 