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.
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
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