Hell Is Being without Space
Some mornings I wake up poor. The poverty of longing floods my consciousness with a hollow pain. The dust of regret is a bitter grit on my tongue and stings the corners of my eyes—even before I am out from under the covers. It is like waking from a dream of standing outside my own house, knocking and knocking, with no one answering.
Enough! Or Too Much
Endless witless poverty.
At four below
cold is the first affirmation.
Cleaning the kitchen floor
without whys or wherefores,
we trouble the councils of the wise.
What do we know
brother slut, sister hole?
Love overlooked, solitude, fear.
Low sun through the window.
Kneel on the warm tiles
until you remember
every flake of snow ever.
Lullaby of the Thimble —after Rilke
Close your eyes.
What is it?
What do you seek?
What have you lost?
Remember the girl
who lost her silver thimble?
“What are you looking for?”
an old man asked her.
She said, not far from tears,
“I am looking for God.”
Taking her hand, he said,
“Just look—
what a beautiful thimble I found today.”
There is a love that is the affinity of shared harmonies and there is love that is a self-sanctifying gesture, loving one’s own image of what another should be. When I am poor such thoughts just confuse me. I will lie there wondering what are the reasons I stay in my life? What are the layers of me that come from others, the oughts and shoulds, the visions of others I’ve accepted and learned to fill. There were times when I wanted someone who needed to be there, to sacrifice on my account as I would on hers, whose eyes with mine looked in the same direction. Even now that such an arrogant and adolescent dream has faded (and I would rather not want at all, or rather, if I must want, at least be with someone wholly in the world), I wake muddled, almost weeping.
My wife of many years lies next to me, rumpled in sleep. I can find myself angered by her vulnerability while longing for intimacy with her. Do I want, for example, sex? It was often deferred, especially in our troubled years just before and into my early recovery, for good and not so good reasons, which were nevertheless seen as normal—to keep peace, to force nothing, to maintain a semblance of harmony. Deferral in sex led to deferral in all important areas, so that I began to live vicariously. I settled into inertia and monotony in our relationship as a result of fear. A fear of facing what? That I saw the relationship only in terms of myself? Only partly. Guilt over the grief my drinking brought her and our children? Perhaps. Real intimacy? That meant taking the initiative to share in the evolution of the relationship, even when it did not match the dream I thought we created when we were courting. For many males sex is the only model for intimacy. When intimacy is needed and sex is not possible we turn the perceived failure back in on ourselves, turn it into anger.
It is said anger is self-loathing turned on others. I can believe it. Anger is a power trip, the last resort of the powerless and the assumed right of the powerful. Because it is destructive it seems strong and, so, desirable to the weak. Anger tries to control the present outside of the self. Anger not expressed becomes resentment. Resentment is a way we try to control time, to deny change or its possibility, to deny that the feelings of the past have no value in the present. When all wrongs of the past are washed clean, so are all rights! Anger is a cry for “me” to have power outside of the self, refusing to accept being as it is, to blame, to fear, to focus all away from the self. Anger destroys—destroys even its source. I used to think some anger was justified. I do not now. Suppose one lets go of power altogether?
But there have been mornings when I awake poor, longing for some physical expression of intimacy, of acceptance of my being in the world. Feeling alone, helpless, unable to express my longing—afraid it will sound like mere selfish desire instead of a need to share our sense of being, I become angry. The feeling comes. Its arrival is not anticipated or thought out or even desired. Long years of habit simply leave the door open for it to enter.
When it does enter I begin to create fictions of the wrongs done to me. I seek out, almost unconsciously, my wife’s weak spots when she wakes. I look for the buttons to push. It doesn’t take long for her irritated response to the tone of my voice to justify my anger, to define and affirm my loneliness, to push the resentments forward. Eden’s sin, to see oneself doing good, turns ugly as I try to see myself justified, right—hating myself for it, denying the hate, pushing on.
One such morning we bickered over the bedclothes. This was when the children were small and I was home during the day. Who was the most restless sleeper? Who mussed the bedding? Over breakfast, would we use the good silver or not for the guests next evening? Can’t you even say goodbye without that tone of voice? What tone? And so on. The variations on this theme are as numerous as all the known and unknown Dharma brothers and sisters ever. The cycle must be broken. Who will break it if you do not begin with yourself?
Hanging out laundry in bright, beautiful March winds, I muttered to myself, if only this, if only that. The four-letter words I learned from a Danish boatswain, for whom I worked as a deckhand, were getting good exercise. I jammed the clothespins on the line. My fingers were numb. The winds were bright and the temperature below freezing. The cold made me angrier. Early songbirds had returned, but their song was not sweet to me. To me they were squawking over nesting rights. The wind caught a frozen sheet and slapped it in my face. The tape in my head suddenly jammed. There was just the fluttering laundry and the chattering birds. In the empty silence of my brain another song began to emerge, a distant melody just beyond the edge of hearing, but not of awareness. What was it? Faint, faint. I reached out for it. It was the lullaby of death, cleansing the loathing, reminding me life is what we have to share.
The Most Sublime Act Is to Set Another Before You
It is a bitter thing, all morning they bickered—irritations by the bedclothes, fault over tomorrow’s spoons, raised voices at the back door, silence pegging the clothes on a frozen line.
Windy day.
Just this fluttering,
blameless
as the chattering birds.
Lullaby of Death
For though our life may be a thing to share, who is there in this world to share our death?
—Brodsky
It’s okay.
It’s nothing at all.
It does not count.
Nothing has happened.
Everything remains the same.
I am I. You are you
and the old life
is unchanged, untouched.
Whatever we were
we are still.
Call me by the old familiar names.
Speak to me in the easy way
you always used.
Habit of Being
I am hopelessly domestic. As much as I love to travel, I love being home more. We have a genius for comfortable clutter in our house and I revel in it. I would rather have company than go visit. There is little as satisfying as preparing a meal or sitting by the fire reading to the family, or simply watching the afternoon light