New,
autobiographical poem about my first serious relationship, looking back
more than 50 years and described aptly by an early reader as about
"love, loss, regret, and learning". There's a fair amount of EFT content
also, making it one of a series of EFT poems I've been percolating.
1 Unfinished Business Marker
Jet-lagged
from Greece,
I wake in
the middle of the night
Haunted by
the feeling of something unfinished
Between
us.
After so
much time,
You’ve
appeared to me in a dream.
But all I can
do is foolishly
To try to
impress you
And your
friends
In a
callow, callous way.
Something is
wrong
In the
great web
In which
my little life lives.
I lay
awake for hours.
On our
morning walk,
I tell
some of this to my 51-year life partner,
With
half-century of experience
Of people
being confused
That I had
married her and not you.
“Do you
regret not marrying her?”, she says,
(A fair
question, I think.)
“No”, I say,
“But it does feel like
There is something
Unfinished
with her.”
And just
like that, I’ve suddenly crossed
My
professional life
as
therapist, trainer etc.
With my
personal life
As an
aging 74-year-old nonbinary person
Dealing
with a lifetime of uncertainty and shame
About my
gender.
In my
supervision session later
I talk to
Gordon about the dream
And the
unfinished business marker,
Unable to
say what felt unfinished,
Beyond the
sense
That we
had injured each other.
When I cautiously
say,
“I think I
may need to put her in the empty chair…”
He asks,
“Is this
something you feel you can do on your own?”
(Another
fair question)
I say: “I’m
not sure.”
After a
small pause, he says,
“I could
do that with you, if you want…
I’d be
happy to do that.”
“Thank you”,
I say.
“Let me think
about it.”
But what
comes instead
Is this
poem,
Postscript
to an earlier, painful, piece.
2 Apologia Pro Vita Mea
Last year
I plowed through all my files
Of the
letters I’d saved
From the
important people
In my
life.
When I got
to yours
I read again
your journey
Through the
time
Our lives
overlapped.
And I saw
how you lived the life
You needed
to live,
And
chronicled it for me.
You
offered me that window,
And I
understood your trajectory,
The
parallels and divergences
From my
journey.
You told
me your dreams,
Even when
they led you away from me.
But I also
saw
My own meanness
of spirit,
The things
I said out of spite,
And even
the small but pointed missile
Of a poem
about Pompei,
Its title
a play on your name.
By
Abderrahman Ait Ali from Stockholm - IMG_20190316_160912, CC BY-SA 2.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79059068
And even
now
I feel
ashamed of my smallness:
That I was
unwilling to resist
The
pain-driven, reflexive hitting out,
And the
cleverness of the metaphor,
At your
expense.
I have
spent much of my career as a therapist
Understanding
the struggles of women
In a patriarchal,
sexist world,
Supporting
them as they seek
To take
their power.
And as I
have done this,
I have
become ever more alienated
From my masculinity,
Seeking my
own psychological androgyny,
Now,
finally, renouncing “he/him/his”
And coming
home to “they/them/theirs”.
I think
these are some of the things
I’d like
you to know now.
So even
though our lives have since followed
Plutonian
orbits of distance,
I send out
this small Voyager of a poem,
Not
knowing
Whether if
it will find you,
But
wanting to share my sorrow
For any
hurt
That I may
have caused.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
3 Purple
String Thing
Another
night of jet lag:
You are
still on my mind.
I awake
very early
Wondering
how to proceed,
And what
my motives are.
Guilt? Reconnection?
It just
feels like piece of my life
That I
need to put right.
From my
bed, in the dark,
I can just
barely make out
The Purple
String Thing:
The construction
of felt,
Multi-colored
strings, and nails,
You made
for me so many years ago,
Proud of
yourself for having done something
So out of
character and artistic as this.
Regarded
ambivalently if at all
By my
family,
The Purple
String Thing
Has hung
for decades in my study,
First in
Toledo, then again here in Pleasanton.
This
metaphor of frayed interconnection
Is now
somewhat worse for the wear,
A bit moth-eaten
and slightly mildewed from
Its
intermittent storage in damp basements.
Its state
led m partner to wonder,
Several
times over the intervening years,
Why didn’t
I just throw it away,
This
reminder of a previous life?
And every
time, I thought about it,
And found
I couldn’t.
So when I
moved it
To our
hallway a year ago,
I
re-secured some of the little nails
And
re-attached a few of the strings
That had
come loose.
And there
it sits today,
A reminder
of you that I stubbornly
Refuse to
let go of.
So now in
the early predawn,
As I look
at its shape in the hall,
Dark
against dark,
The Purple
String Thing
Begins to
yield it meaning to me,
And I feel
a wave of gratitude,
For what
you gave me:
When we
met
I was a deeply
self-ashamed,
Unknowingly
queer person,
Unable to
embrace
The
culture and norms of masculinity,
Yet deeply
drawn to the feminine in others
And
myself.
Before
you, I had had a series
Of
one-sided crushes
On young
women around me;
It felt
there was no place for me,
That no
one wanted me.
Then in late
1969,
Behind
Crown College
At UC
Santa Cruz,
At a
Sunday evening folk mass,
Between “I
will raise you up”
And “The
Lord of the Dance,”
I read the
two little prayer poems
I’d
written for the service.
And at the
Passing of the Peace,
You kissed
me on the mouth.
And no one
had ever before shown me
That they
were attracted to me,
That I
might in some way be desirable,
And
therefore that I did not
Have to
live my life alone.
A small
thing, perhaps,
But this
changed my life,
And for
that I am even now
Filled
with gratitude that you saw me
And wanted
me in that moment.
There were
other gifts you gave me
Before
things between us got
Complicated
and came undone:
Julian
Bream and concerts in San Francisco;
The pride
of being your boyfriend
(My
friends were jealous);
Your
connections to my elders
(My
grandmother and Ted Sarbin).
But also a
view into your inner life
and the
company of your female friends,
As women
navigating
A time of rapid
change in relationships.
And
perhaps most importantly of all:
A sense of
how hard
Relationships
can be,
How they
sometimes fall apart,
And how
painful and terrifying that can be.
This might
sound like common sense
(Something
I’ve been told I lack)
But for
one thing:
When, ten
years later,
My main
relationship began to fail,
I invested
everything I could,
And discovered
what you and I
Were not
ready to know before:
That
sometimes relationships,
Like
Purple String Things,
Battered
though they be,
Can be repaired.
And so at
last I know,
With
gratitude,
Why I’ve
kept the Purple String Thing,
That you made
for me,
For all
these years:
It is the
door of connection
Linking me
to you,
And you to
me;
And not
just us,
But all of
us,
Linking
each to all,
And all to
each.
More real
than the illusion
Of all our
sad separateness.
-September/October
2024; Pleasanton, California
