Switch

Switch

Some old friends seem to think it's like hitting a switch,
and you reset to what you were before. Reset, reboot.
As though one treatment was enough to cure the plague.
As though none of what has gone before had gone before.
As though you could throw the switch and be what you had been,
before everything. Before everything happened. A simple switch.
But in the mirror you look older, older than you really are, lined down,
face aged, stiff, careworn, beard and hair whiter than yesterday,
than in quick memory. You never get out unscathed.
In the meantime, having circled so close to that black hole drain,
close enough to see through the grate to nothing dark inside,
when you return to old venues full of old friends and old dramas,
nothing clicks, nothing connects, nothing seems to matter.
Nothing matters more than something. It's hard
to care about paying bills, buying groceries, weeding the garden.
You know you need to, but you just can't find room to give.
It's one thing to throw yourself into the details of life as a form of
meditation, knowing that slicing a lemon is enlightenment, just so.
it's another thing to feel this withdrawal from every day, as a monk
in one's own home, forced to be this way by the slow drip of bloody
circumstance, by the constipated pressure of survival. Ill for long enough
to have lost track of what some friends say really matters. Time away
from the usual flurries of the usual personal dramas of other lives
makes them seem small, irrelevant. I suppose I ought to call some
friends who called a week or so back to ask how I was. It's just too hard,
though, to keep telling the same story. And friends who think the switch
has been thrown, one treatment and you're all well again, are too tiring,
overwhelming, exhausting to seek out. Needy people are needy enough
to drain what's left right down that black drain, sucking dry the juices
of attention. Especially when by contrast you can spend an hour by a river,
in sun, by trees, listening silent to birds and brooks, getting recharged.
When human time just drains. I try to write a poem, and the pen gets stopped
by interruptions, now that I'm supposed to be all better. Now that
I'm all better I'm available to be sucked dry again. I try to go out and
the phone rings, keeping me in. I try to go shopping for those uninteresting
needs that keep the flesh alive, and run out of steam halfway to the checkout.
Fresh meat never looked so good. Throw the sugar bowl over your left shoulder
and make room for chocolate. But getting impatient with impatience
is bad form, you offend the needy by refusing to meet their needs.
It's all about them, after all. Now, again, now, again. What's a poem worth
compared to your latest romantic fiasco? Of course it doesn't matter.
Still, when I go out to the garage and look at the pegboard filled with tools
some drained despair chokes me, waters my eyes, and it's not the cayenne
kept on the shelf to pour over the flower beds after rain to keep deer
from eating my roses again. What's a child of the heart to the wake of narcissus?
I'll tell everyone my narcissus have already finished for the season, bulbs dormant
under mulch till next spring when they'll be the second line up and blooming.
Nothing to do but wait through winter. Sorry, door's closed till then.
No office hours. And if I'm impatient with the unsympathetic, if I'm rude
to the rudely insecure, if I'm silent in the face of redundant neurotic unbalanced
nightmare gall, then at least I still have the excuse for now of saying
I've been sick. I'll act pathetic, to be left alone. I'll pretend it's not a waste of time.
I'll act as if the divine remains in the small things, the lemon sliced,
the row hoed, the quiet stack of freshly washed stone teacups, the endless
repetition of laundry and gas fire. I'll put on Mozart's Requiem and pretend
it's about survival. I'll harvest bell peppers growing on the porch,
ninety days of watering and turning to face the sunlight later. i'll pretend that
it's okay now, that the switch got thrown, that there's no time
like the present, that recovery isn't still in doubt, that in no uncertain terms
shall there be uncertainty. Just because you circled that drain a few times,
edged a little too close to that precipice, doesn't mean your life has changed,
that you want to live, now, again. Nor does it mean that hovering near
that threshold gave awareness of the numinous glint of time's long fading,
nor did it make you impatient with those who refuse to perceive.
Sweet strong peppers hang from their thin green stalks, a metaphor
for recovery, perhaps.