Illness and Fear

10 February Sunday 2013   
The Caboose on Catherine

Still feverish, hacking like a Welsh coal-miner, my canary sure doesn't sing these days... I'm missing church two weeks in a row, but at least I'm out of that dark night where watching the flames' shadows on the wall make faeries dance  was my only form of mad entertainment. It was all so George Mac Donald that first scary week of 102, 103 temperature and the hallucinations of my childhood with all the connotations of the step-father and the upraised fist and the holes in the cheap apartment walls in the parlor and the rising flesh, so now, so many years later, I need to be able to let it go, go far away from that place into my relatively comfortable now.

And why I would be flooded with these memories while in such a weakened psychic state, I don't know, except that I have also allowed myself back into the True Myth of Destry James and Alabama, and those days come fraught with memories that are so deeply embroidered, almost like cattle-branding, that those picture poems  beckon me.

The occupation of "Poet" is a lonely one and I think we prefer it that way, except for those after-a-public-reading when we gather in a cafe or a bar or some kind benefactor's living room and just talk our heads off all those ideas, dreams, plans and hopes we clutch to our hearts.

 Having recently survived cancer, a bronchial cold ought not frighten me so badly, but that's what has happened. I see the possibility of relapses everywhere. I'm not used to being so vulnerable. I rather like the reputation of tough girl-poet, even as I am now a poet in my fifties, a poet with great heart I have been called. If I don't look at the calender or in the mirror, my tongue can wrap itself around good poetry and snarl, "get out of my ways" as the street person I used to be. But my heart is no longer in it. I am kind to single mothers and small animals. The Good Book says to visit orphans and widows. I try never to go empty-handed.