Preface - on the dangers in a poets mind

 “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders.” … “An old artist wrote to me of his wanderings by the quays” docks “ of New York, and how he found there a woman nursing a sick child, and drew her story from her. She spoke, too, of other children who had died: a long tragic story. “I wanted to paint her,” he wrote, “if I denied myself any of the pain I could not believe in my own ecstasy.” We must not make a false faith by hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and therefore it must be offered in sincerity. Neither must we create, by hiding ugliness, a false beauty as our offering to the world. He only can create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer.  p 30-33

Per Amica Silentia Lunae (By friendly Silence of the Moon ) ,
William Butler Yeats

One should be very careful when asking a poet for copies of his thoughts, for his thoughts may be non-conformal as most of my thoughts are non-conformal. 

My poetry was born, not of a desire to create, but a desire to thrust from myself the pain of my spouse’s eminent death. It was born in fear and pain and agony.  I found myself needing to rid myself of this guilt and shame as the body must rid itself of the remainder of an evening’s meal. As a celebrated optimist once said their must be a pony in this pile of shit somewhere.

So, if you must make the mistake of requesting some of my poetry know that I write in the third person singular, mostly because I am letting you into an argument, an argument, I have been having, with myself for some time.  

You will find in this volume, poems about making love to my wife the first time, and taking my father to get a circumcision when his greatest desire was to take the foreskin home and to make a leather wallet of the remains.

Know that if you continue to read this volume of non-conformity you chose to be offended in my non-conformity.  But if you continue to the end there is a world of beauty from within my head that I offer you today.  As this gift from my Eternal Mother has brought me much personal joy and satisfaction.

Also choosing to remain my friend, in my intimate circle, is to choose to be a subject of one of my poems, one day.

 

The circumcision

 SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2017

To the doctor, we go, today.

Today is the circumcision.
He is 73, and I am 51.

51 years ago he made, the choice...
... the same for me.

Now I make choices, for him ...
... for us?

In ancient Israel, it was the sign,
... of the covenant.

Now it is a sign, of ministrations,
... mine, for him.

Once he made the choices for me,
... now I make them for him.

We both did choose,
... of love, and care.

Then with choice,
... comes,
... redemption.

Of both, have come,
... sins.

Of ignorance,
... and choice.

With redemption, comes …
... forgiveness,
... learning,
... and joy.

He is helping me,
... to understand, his choices,
... and mine.

After my mother died, I became my father’s full-time caregiver.  He developed temporary dementia from a urinary tract infection.  As part of his treatment, I took him to a urologist to have a circumcision.  I was in the surgical suite at the urologist, on the day of the surgery.  He kept asking the nurse to save it for him so he could make a coin purse from the foreskin. At his previous pre-operation appointment, I saw the inside of his bladder from a very small camera.  Not many sons have seen the inside of their father’s bladder.