Saturday Poetry: Leonia's Lament

an excerpt from The Cat Lover (Act II of Scenes From American Life), a collaboration with composer Roberto Pacé

(This act is set in the City.  The action takes place in bedrooms, a beauty parlor, doctors’ offices, and an analyst’s office.  There are several dyads [or chairs to represent the missing member of a dyad].  The pairs are:  doctor/patient, beautician/client, man/woman, husband/wife, woman/cat, analyst/analysand.)

(Solitary woman with cat begins singing to the audience.  Eventually she is joined by a person in a white coat, evidently a physician, and she tells the physician about a troubling ailment.)

Leonia:                   I have a feeling that something’s wrong

terribly wrong.

My Persian, Tutti

makes me red.

My body gets inflated

I start to cry

when I touch dear Tutti’s head.

I have a feeling that something’s wrong

terribly wrong.

I’m crying

for no reason at all

(for no reason at all).

I’m dying when sweet Tutti flicks me

with his tail.

My eyes are red.

My body gets inflated

whenever my Tutti licks me.

I start to cry.

I don’t know why.

I’m gonna die

whenever sweet Tutti flicks me

with his tail.

I’m crying…

I’m dying…

I think of marriage, I confess

when I fear I cannot keep my pet.

Am I allergic to the hair of

other mammals?

(Sometimes I can't stand my own.)

All the Single Ladies

Any long-married woman will tell you that husbands are made, not married.  So, Cuthbert, which is what I call mine when my gorge is rising, need only look out the back door and if I'm practicing semaphore signalling with the axe sitting 2 feet from this monitor he knows that it's a good time to get in his truck and go see a movie.  For you see, I don't believe in divorce.  I'm old-school in that way.  I believe in murder.
 
Psych.

We, the First Spouse and I are getting ready to become empty nesters. Fifteen and 1/2 years after our wedding day.  Thirteen years after Daughter No. 1 left for college.  And 5 years after Daughter No. 1 and boyfriend (now Husband of Daughter No. 1) moved out again after the requisite I-can't-afford-to-live-in-New-York-and-pay-rent sojourn.  (Don't laugh; with the way this economy's going, it can happen to you.)

We live in a very small house, by choice.  If you're not careful you can open the front door and knock yourself into the staircase.  When sober.  So, it takes practice and practice we've gotten along with my sister, and Beloved Niece No. 1.  We have been living together as a family full or part-time for 4 years.  A menagerie of 2 bulls, a ewe and a little lamb.  Hardly pastoral; rarely easy-going but often manageable.  (That previous sentence is classic NYTimes Grey Lady writing.  Deracinated of any drama.  Guess you'll just have to read my memoir, The Bachelor's Long-Suffering and Saintly Wife.)

Sister and Niece are moving soon to their own place and we will have a home to ourselves of our own.  Husband No. 1 and I are both looking forward to this new phase and while it won't be a miracle cure for all that ails our marriage we both know it's got to help.  A lot.

 

Saturday Poetry: Prospect Park III

 for Rachel Fruchter

Brooklyn is a small town

made up of villages.

Two such are at Clarkson and New York Ave.

Two hospitals:  One for the blessed, one for the rest.

Across the street from each other,

Downstate and Kings County,

first cousins, sharing blood and family,

yet, wary all the same.

Rachel lived in both.

Every Monday Rachel left Downstate,

her world of postdocs and clinical trials,

the world of NIH grants and abstracts

and jaywalked to Kings County

to be with her women.

Those women you see on the trains,

with 5:30 in the morning subway faces,

hands curled around hungry pocketbooks so dear,

Once a week Rachel offered them a Pap smear,

the first of their babymaking, closemouthed lives.

She collected, from these reticent ones,

their stories so that they might not have to die

of cancer undiscovered or AIDS denied.

At the end of the day, after tallying her results,

Rachel would argue for more money

for research and treatment.

But her committee was perplexed.

I can get another one to clean, they'd think

as she pleaded, if this one quits.

So, Friday, after another week of this

Rachel left to come home to me

and our standing date.

After 30 some years of marriage, 2 kids,

2 countries, and all the in-between

we saved Friday night for the movies,

for Saturday was for cleaning and shopping

and Sunday (in the way that people like us lived)

was for leisure.

A ride, she told me, I'm going for my ride.

Rachel loved to bike in the Park.

My round-hipped, gray-haired

professor wife would take the curves

of the bikers' lane in jubilation from the week's battles.

It was her courage and stubbornness

that allowed her to survive

in the labyrinth of Downstate,

and cost her her life.

For Rachel, a woman of brains

a-plenty never rode with a helmet.

I don't need it, she told me,

it's safe in the Park.

I see Rachel on her Sunday ride,

I can see that final Sunday,

hair sailing as usual when

over the hill pounced the rusty van,

too fast for a Sunday, too fast

for the Park and the curves

and for Rachel

whose next sight was a strolling mother.

So, she swerved.

She steered towards her right instead

and whomped by a dollar van

(full of Haitians it turned out)

Rachel, my brave Rachel, was

thrown all over the street.

The EMT's knew where to take her.

The people's hospital, her other home,

where the emergency team

wrestled all day with Death, but lost.

Dear Rachel would have been pleased, anyway.

The care, the passion they lavished on

my beautiful wife -- insured and white --

was something that she fought for

every Monday, in the villages,

all her life.

It's Been Hot, N'est-ce pas?

I have to admit that life's been pretty good to/for me.  My major worries these days are stepping on one of those infernal slugs on the path between my back door and my office door; or Husband No. 1 becoming a full-blown Libertarian as he's always threatening to do.  The slugs I worry about constantly; my husband's political evolution?  Not so much.  He cannot stay sufficiently interested in it all to follow politics -- local or presidential -- otherwise he'd care enough to try to convince me to consider the likes of Ron Paul.  (And god knows Libertarians -- the committed and the fellow travelers both -- do like to argue.  I think it's a defining trait in them.  Perhaps it comes from working alone by themselves too often.  And still having doubts about being The Smartest Guy In the Room.  I really don't know; I just find them all a bit off-kilter.)

It's no secret that I have no truck for Paul (or for Paulistas, not to be confused with Paulists, another group of troublesome fanatics).  He's a cold fish of a certain sort.  By the way, is it just me or do you, too, find obstretician/gynecologists some of the grimmest physicians working?  I'd had my share of doctors and while I don't chose doctors because I need to love them, while conceding that at this age it's a good idea to stick with your internist because you'll be seeing a lot more of him or her as time goes by, it's been my totally unscientific theory that the specialty of delivering babies and looking at ladyparts with a flashlight seems to attract it's fair share of people with an empathy deficit.  Don't know what it is but the closest I came to brawling with a doctor was the ob/gyn who "delivered" me 31+ years ago.  Yeah yeah, I didn't come to see her until I was 7 months gone.  Yeah yeah, I was placenta previa by then, which if the delivery had gone badly would have meant a messy malpractice suit on behalf of my heir and survivors.  Yeah yeah I didn't think she walked on water.  She and I just did not like one another.  As far as I was concerned I needed a "mechanic" to get this baby out of me in a couple of month's time so I could get on with my business.  Needless to say she got her revenge:  showed up for about a minute in a 9 hour and oh so painful delivery.  (Were it not for the delivery nurses, it would have been worse.)  BabyMama Doctor left me totally unprepared for the ravages of childbirth and beyond -- the hemorrhoids, the psychotic breaks with reality due to exhaustion and all the usual greatest post-partum hits.  But, I digress.

It's politics I'm thinking of, or mischief, when I tell my libertarianistically inclined spouse to run for mayor.  He isn't the slightest bit interested in governing.  (He wasn't even living in this country when Reagan and his ilk invented the "gov'mint is the Enemy of the People" mantra, but it speaks to his contrarian soul.  Yes it does.)  And I am not in the slightest bit interested in him becoming mayor, although there's a part of me that would love to don a Chanel suit, a string of pearls and a wig of blonde hair with highlights (or some variation of the above) and campaign on his behalf.  But, a spell needs to be broken here in New Haven.  And perhaps a jester with nothing to lose can help do that.  (Jeffrey Kereke's was a serious and honorable campaign.  Far different than what I'm proposing.)

The Age of DeStefano has lasted too long.  Both operational efficiency and dysfunction have consumed innovation and vision.  How many people who work for the city work for the city, as opposed to work to keep themselves clothed and fed and eligible for a pension?  What mechanisms exist to honestly and critically evaluate its major initiatives in health, in economic development, in school reform, in housing or crime prevention with enough accountability that if there is not reasonable progress heads roll?

I'm not unmindful of the city's challenges, and how some of them are due to factors beyond one municipality's control.  Nor am I unsympathetic to those who are responsible for day-to-day governance.  It isn't easy, and it's all too thankless.  Nevertheless, I've had the uneasy feeling for a while now that this is a feudal city with more supplicants than citizens.   The sooner that ends the better we will all be.
 

Saturday Poetry: There Are Men Dancing On My Afghan and I Need Them to Stop

Three bottles times 31 days times 4 months

Times 5 diapers times 31 days times 4 months

Times 2 visits to the gynecologist times

1 hour of unassailed sleep per night times 31 days times 4 months

Times I can’t keep track of it all but I talked to the doctor

And I told her

I told her this that there were men dancing on my afghan

And they are sometimes leprechauns and sometimes not

But they sing to me and won’t shut up.

I don’t know how they got in here, I am not afraid of them

They don’t seem to mean harm to me or the baby

They are not large either, tiny really but they keep dancing

dancing on my bed and almost more than I need sleep

I need them to stop.

New Haven's Brookside: Been There, Seen That

I was the designated babysitter yesterday.  I had 2 kids and a truck.  So, we went to Edgewood Park where they climbed trees and delighted an audience of developmentally disabled adults out on an excursion.  From my I'm-not-moving vantage point (as in if you climb that tree, you better figure out a way to get down without breaking your neck because I'm not rescuing you, Little Kittens) I watched the black boys and men play basketball.  As Niece No. 1 so perceptively observed, there were 2 games going on -- the teenagers and the adults.  It broke my heart:  It was mid-day on a Friday.  Why weren't they at school or work?  (I, we, know why.)

A city park on a weekday is populated by the disabled  -- by the economy, by culture, by either physical or emotional disability, by illness, or illegal status, or the imperative of caring for very young children sans institutional childcare.  As it is in Edgewood, it is in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, except that in Brooklyn the comet's tail of bikers and joggers rushing past obscures that fact.

New Haven, Elm City, is a beautiful city, especially in the spring, and we left one park in search of another.  But, I wanted to see the newly redeveloped Brookside so I decided to detour before we got to the next set of swings.  Back in 2009 when I was a public health study surveyor my partner and I drove out to the city's west side to interview residents of public housing.  I was stunned.  I knew New Haven wasn't all Whitney Avenue or Morris Cove; it wasn't even just my modest neighborhood.  But the west side of town, where these projects were located took my breath away, and I wasn't kidding when I came back barking that they were Bantustans, and although I was under no illusions that New Haven was le plus ultra in progressive urban planning, locating housing so far away from any and every kind of commercial center and supplying the entire area of mono-income families with one school, well if that wasn't worse than red-lining, show me the hell what is.

Later I was told that those projects were to be demolished, and I was actually shown plans for the new development.  Pretty houses, I thought, wouldn't mind one of those myself.  But, I asked, where's the bus stop?  Where's the grocery?  Surely the developers and designers already know that pretty townhouses do not a community make?  I don't want to get all New Urbanism-y here, but for god's sake I spent 1 1/2 years in Columbia, MD, and during the years I lived there I learned all I need know about Good-looking Dead Space.  (I concede that it may be a better place to live now.)  And that experiment is over 30 years old; not at all hard to research what it has become.

The kids and I drove through the development -- the windy streets, the newly-planted trees, the beautifully rendered, differentiated homes.  As the Irish say:  very nice, very luvly.  And yet, once it's populated, what will the people living here do?  If you don't have a car, if you're not the driver, where can you go, what can you do?  All I could think of was bored 13 and 14 year olds with too much time on their hands.  Too much early sex.  Too much food consumed to assuage loneliness and boredom.  Too much trouble to make because you feel trapped.

What will destroy Brookside cannot be prevented by fresh paint and square corners.  As if yet another ersatz stage set of the American Dream truly addresses the socio-economic and racial divide we all pretend isn't as pernicious as it is.  Be ashamed New Haven, be very ashamed.