The Secret Life of This Life Now #22
22nd in a series of 31 brief essays about the coming and going of a book.
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The previous edition of Secret Life seems to have sparked some joy for some readers, so I’m striking again in hopes that the iron is still hot. In know I am not going to unload the 90 or so copies that remain of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), my Lammy-finalist first book of poems. But I started Secret Life and I want to finish it, all 31 installments, one for every poem in this slim book or—to quote a well-known poet who wrote a review—“fat chapbook.”
You can get both This Life Now and my second book of poems, Drug and Disease Free, for the bargain-basement, fire-sale price of $10.00 total, including shipping within the US. Order yours now!
This is post #22 in this series. We go through the book poem by poem, reading a snippet and chatting a bit about the context and creation of the poem and the book.
We are at the start of the third and final section of the book, “This Life Now.” Each section starts with an epigraph—the first section with a quote from Emily Dickinson, the second with a quote from James Joyce, and this section with a quote from my mother.
I don’t want to sleep; I just want to be alive with you. — Lee Broder Methodist Hospital, Brooklyn. May 6, 2005
My mother, born Lena Brecher in New York on October 28, 1921, the daughter of Eastern European immigrant Jews, suffered a stroke in 2004, three days shy of her 83rd birthday. She was alone when it happened, in the studio apartment she lived in in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn—the apartment she helped me buy in 1989, which I had not lived in for years.
Amazingly, she managed to call 911, and she was taken by ambulance to Coney Island Hospital, where she made a remarkable recovery. In January, she transferred from the hospital to Sheepshead Bay Nursing Home to continue her physical therapy. At some point in early 2005, she was discharged home to the apartment in Brighton Beach. My husband and I visited her there, and she did not seem to be in her right mind. I did not think this was going to work out; but there was nothing I could do that day.
Within days, however, God seems to have made some decisions for us all. I received a call from a hospital emergency room in Brooklyn—I don’t remember where, maybe Maimonides, somewhere in that wide swath I refer to as Belt Parkway Brooklyn. My mother had again called 911, this time with unbearable abdominal pains. My husband and I went to the hospital. While we waited, my mom was diagnosed with a cancerous biliary tumor.
Much of that period is a blur. Whatever hospital she was in, it was awful, and we had her transferred to NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, in Park Slope, which was much better. I visited her more or less daily for some number of days or weeks at Methodist. Again, much of it is a blur. I remember stopping into Zuzu’s Petals, the florist and plant shop on 5th Avenue near the hospital, just to find a moment of peace and maybe a kind of hope. At some point, my mother had a heart attack that put her in the ICU, and in the wake of that, I remember an episode of something called ICU psychosis, after which my mother was never again fully lucid.
It was after the ICU psychosis that I sat beside her bed one day when food was brought in, and I asked, “Mom, do you want something to eat?” And she said no. And I asked, “Do you want to sleep?” And that’s when she said, “I don’t want to sleep; I just want to be alive with you.” I jotted that down in my notebook. I was, after all, a poet. I wanted to be alive with her, too.
After the heart attack, the oncology team said she was too frail to undergo radiation and chemotherapy. They had trouble spitting it out, but eventually, they told my brothers and me that hospice was the best option. My mother was going to die, sooner rather than later.
Within weeks, my mother died in hospice. June 23, 2005. Age 83.
The first poem in the last section of the book is called “Random.” It is, like “Secret” in the previous edition of Secret Life, both very short and very central to the major themes of the book, so now for the second time in Secret Life history, I share a poem from This Life Now in full.
Random
This fabric, once torn, cannot be mended.
You call it industrial chic; I call it
what I grew up with.Our love has no trajectory.
We are a fait accompli, pen to paper,
shattering of silence.
To this day, I still do not know precisely what that poem means, or what I mean by it. And yet I say it is very central to the major themes of the book! How can that be? How can it feel like one of the most important poems in the book, and I don’t really know what it is even about? Some kind of feeling; but what kind?
It appears to have been written in late January 2001. That was almost a year into my relationship with the man who would become my husband. I don’t think he ever said anything about industrial chic, but somebody akin to him is definitely the “You” to whom a speaker somewhat akin to me is addressing this little poem. I will let you figure out the rest—Whatever you think about this poem is doubtless no more or less valid than whatever I think about it. I only know that I love it. It is a darling I could never kill.
Okay, that’s if for now. We have nine more installments of Secret Life in which to dig into the psyche of this book. À la prochaine.
Get your copy of This Life Now, well...NOW! The bargain-basement fire-sale price of $10.00 includes my second book, Drug and Disease Free, and SHIPPING in the US.
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