Animatronic

Oh right, I have a blog, don't I?


It's been a long time since my last post, but never has the idea of HOSPICE been so real to me as the past few months. It's been a pretty tough time in my family -- it feels these days like everyone has cancer. We lost my grandfather this summer, which was tough enough, but then my very beloved aunt was diagnosed with a particularly nasty breed of cancer, and just a few weeks later, so was my very beloved mother. It feels pretty damned unfair, and my very irrational emotional response was anger.

You sort of want to write a pissed-off letter, or call 311 or something. Excuse me, sir, but my loved ones' bodies are defective. Yes, I've always taken excellent care of them, but I think there was an error in production. They seemed fine and then one day -- pffft.

Cancer! Your body makes it! What the hell, body! Very uncool!

Well the good news is, my mother and her sister (my two all-time favorite women on the planet, by the way) are recovering well. But it's both of their second bouts with cancer, and it all seems rather doomy right now.

If you've read my previous posts, you know about my body hangups. Bodies are weird, bodies are gross, bodies are amazing. Bodies have a mind of their own and will turn on you any second. There are things going on in your body every second of every day  that you will never know about. I just wish the thing would keep me posted, you know? "I've started forming a small structure in your GI tract. I'm trying to destroy it now, but I'm not doing a particularly good job, so you might want to have somebody cut you open and poke around in there a little." Just a newsletter or something.

Anyway, here's a poem. This one was in the 23rd issue of Mastodon Dentist, which is a very excellent poetry magazine, in my opinion. Guess what it's about. Go on, guess.

Animatronic

It was broken, so we buried it.
Buttons and levers buzzed and whirred, but
nothing happened.
It was broken, so we buried it.

It was rotting, so we buried it.
Stripped screws decomposed to red rust
under our fingers.
It was rotting, so we buried it.

It was ugly, so we buried it.
Rust stains peeled back, exposing
cracked tin.
It was ugly, so we buried it.

It was still breathing when we buried it;
white bulbs still lit when we hit the switch.
It coughed awake.
It was still breathing when we buried it.


-Tessa Crosby

I mentioned in an earlier post some nonsense about my concept of hospice, and the notion of the human body itself as a host. Sometimes I mean this literally -- all of the physical life that goes on inside us, completely independent of our consciousness.

But another angle that interests me is the concept of the human mind as a host. I have become fascinated with the idea of possession and exorcism. This is not to say that I actually believe in spiritual or demonic possession -- just that I find it to be an interesting reflection of psychological duality.

So I wrote a poem about it. Well, I wrote several poems about it. This one in particular is about a deceased family member surviving through his son, and the crisis of identity which follows. Or something like that.

Arithmetic

I.

this is what i know:

that one of us is gone.

he took his air so coolly

that we hardly felt the vacuum.

in his dusty parlor our misplaced faces

fade into felt hats;

fingerprints like saccharin melt

into limp lethargic coffee,

margarine on noon toast.

II.

in the same scene it was you

in my reflection, a ghost at my elbow

or i, a ghost at yours:

i, the eldest son or you,

the youngest daughter, in the doorway

in your father's hat and coat.

III.

one gone, i still saw three, or two

in one, or three in two. the felt-hatted man,

he comes and goes;

I never ask his name

for fear that he'll say mine.

-Tessa Crosby

What is it that they say about March? In like a lion, out like a lamb? This year, March in New York is more of a wolf in sheep's clothing: bright and cloudless, but harshly chilly. There are buds on the trees, though, and crocuses coming up in my backyard. Oh boy.

Whether it's a cliche or an archetype, springtime has quite a place in poetry. I have often wished it didn't. I love spring as much as the next guy (which is an awful lot), but I was sick to death of poems about it: change, growth, fertility, yadda yadda yadda. How overwrought. How exhausted. How... deliriously optimistic.

But it would, of course, be unfair of me to write off all springtime poetry. There is, after all, an awful lot of material to work with. A true wordsmith can braid in archetypes with new ideas, sidestep cliches, and harness our predisposed emotional relationship with season change.

I didn't write this one, sadly. Geoffrey Nutter did, and he did a dang good job of it. It's from his collection Christopher Sunset, published by Wave Books.

Electricity
by Geoffrey Nutter

Children picking through the rocks
beside the river on a spring day.
What are they looking for? Old green
net tangled on broken pilings; a couple
embracing on the tumbledown esplanade.
Some fishermen drinking beer from tall brown bottles.
Broken shells, tire treads, rusted aluminum pull-tabs—
downriver, near the sun, the great echoes
and the embers of the bridge; and upriver,
far away, the echoing spools and dynamos
of the dam, its forces crackling outward
like the giant snow crab's jointed legs,
like a web in sunlight, a net, a chorus
of embers, like a plan the river is planning,
abstract, afire and electric, glowing
in the levitating rubric, invisible,
visible to children, undiscovered:
Brace yourselves—electricity
is coming to us.


Why is this a good spring poem? First of all, it is grimy. Of course spring can be lovely, if you're in Ireland or Tuscany or something. But here in the South Bronx, all the melting snow reveals is the cigarette butts and leaf piles that have been stewing since November.  But it's still pretty, somehow. Because it's new. It's change. It's undiscovered, it's piles of potential. The kinetic energy in Nutter's poem is looming, but thrilling. Tense, coiled tight... almost.... like a spring....


Enough of that. On my part, I am much more hung up on stagnancy. Spring's evil twin. The thing about spring, see, is that it comes every year.

So here's one of my own poems, technically not about spring at all, but, I think, rather fitting:

Afternoon

Like your

curtains, the color of

tea, brittle

as a used dried teabag

in your

house all trim and

yellow and

low behind low

hedges and

you breathe out your

mouth, your

breath all thick and stale with

tannins, thick

like rancid honey and fills

your yellow

house like smoke, stains the air

sepia, a

picture upon which you have set your

tea, and

it has left a ring.

-Tessa Crosby

So this is the wonderful world of blogging about which I have heard so much. Be friendly to your new neighbor.

I started this blog because I have an awful lot to say and figured somewhere out there in the internet there's bound to be someone who will listen to me ramble about poetry. I'll also use it as a place to post my own work, and hopefully get a little feedback.

I named this blog after a series of poetry I've been working on, the Hospice Poems. The word  "hospice" has a lot of meanings: it was first used to describe a place of rest for religious pilgrims, and it comes from the Latin for "host." Now it's used to describe a home for the terminally ill: essentially, a comfortable place to die.

All of these meanings contribute to my value of the word. I figured I'd use this space to expand upon the concept, posting poems by me and other poets that contribute to this really awesomely broad idea.

I write a lot about the body, its perfection and its shortcomings. I like the idea of my body itself as the hospice, a "host" to all the things that live inside it, literally and figuratively. A host to disease, to pathogens, to parasites; but also to ideas and memories and all kinds of incredible and unlikely things. The body is amazing, the body is disgusting, and the body is what we're stuck in.

On that note, a poem:

The Illness

It crawled about inside me;

all drenched in fever-sweat I dreamt I was

an anthill

I awoke knowing that every opening was a flaw

and it was right to be

limbless

enclosed

clean

as an egg

-Tessa Crosby