BY JAN HAAG
PERSONA
1983?
HISTORY
I knew a man
who had a mother
who had a father
who came
home one day
without a leg
to his young wife
who then
bore
daughters
I don't know how many
by the time the
man's mother
was eighty-eight
she had three children
and
eight grandchildren
of whom three were dead
more or less
one committed suicide
at twenty three
one was killed
before
highschool graduation
on a motorcycle
one was born
brain damaged --
because his mother
when pregnant
her
mother said
sat hunched sewing --
he lived in a home for
forty years
never said a word
she
the man's
mother
vigorous for her eighties
said little about it
except to note
she had three dead grandsons and
kept their
pictures
above her desk which
she didn't use
her
husband
at ninety
drove a car
bawled at his wife
messed his pants
and had both legs
the man
father
of the son who hanged himself
born the year his mother's mother
died
drank
his sister
mother of the silent boy
and one other
was angry
and celibate
he said
his daughter was gay
and had incestuous thoughts
he said
his ex-wife
had had an affair with his best friend
her
brother-in-law
others
her mother, father
and retarded
brother
were dead
her sister had committed suicide
she was
psychopathic
he said
he had wanted to abort their third
child
his second son who
at seventeen he treated
witht the
timid tenderness of a lover
while saying she, his ex-wife, treated
him
the boy, seductively
had invited him into her bed at
eleven
he said she had said
"I'm going to destroy you
and everything you have
(are?)."
which
holding white wine
in his mouth
he liked to dwell on
still
years after she had
divorced him
this man I knew
was strong at fifty-two
well formed
but one leg was slightly smaller than the other
from an accident
(he had spent one of his childhood
years in a cast)
#69
12-01/02-02
ALDONA
Aldona brings me narcissus, Paper Whites,
sharp-smelling, upright and angular -- as she
is -- sweet, witty, with her white-teeth
flashing. Too early for spring, even
before winter, the hubristic narcissus thrust
high in their white-papered pot. Later,
we walk the fog, in four
p.m. darkness drifting among trees,
across Red Square's luminosity speaking of
Russia, under the cherry trees' black
umbrellas and into the night. Pensive
Aldona brightens my life like haloed
light in the mist. The 21st
Century is a dark affair. If
I had Bertolucci's options, I'd put
Aldona -- intriguing, chiaruscuro, intense, shy -- in
a Bertolucci movie. Distinctive, complex, at
cross-purposes in the day by day
world where quotidian concerns dominate, intrude
against her goddess-evoking presence. Mysteriously controlled,
graced and nuanced, in the hands
of the master puppeteer. Hesitant, dainty,
sparkling with laughter's filigreed pleasure -- smell
the narcotic pungency of the Paper-White's
scent as they accelerate into bloom
in the fog-shrouded, high, white room.
Tall, feathering, they whisper Aldona's paleness,
vulnerability, sorrow. The leaves, like green
sentinels, guard her, stay her from
returning to Poland -- or Lithuanian, where,
she assures me, her animal-like ancestors,
unsophisticated, dwelt wild in the woods
howling. She says with sly, smiling
insinuation, she traces "Aldona" to them.
#114
07-22-03
CZAR
Surrounded by wild white hair
as crazy as a Russian Czar's,
a face
stares back at me
from the mirror of time.
Where does this image
of madness
and czarness come from?
The movies of course.
One must
never forget
that only half of one's memory
is one's own. Early
invaded
by images, the brain's stew
gets blended over
time.
Which bit belongs to which
source? How much is
projected
through the cat's enormous
blue eyes. Where has
he
been before joining me?
Why does he stare at me so?
-- as
if he saw other creatures
within my czarinian wrinkles,
as if
he knew I was only half
there anymore, disappeared
as I am,
strolling about in
the winter palace of my mind.
#115
07-23-03
FREEDOM FIGHTER
As if he were an Iraqi,
I'm training him for freedom.
In
return, he brings me
gifts in the night.
Two ruby-red
shards of glass,
formerly, I would guess,
sunglasses or wine.
His cork,
gifted from James' wine,
and his piebald fur
play ball.
I find these at the edge of my bed,
delivered in
the night without
my knowledge. Apparently
my reward for
trusting him,
in the hall and the five-story
stairwell, in
access and egress
through Uncle Roger's propped-
open
door. Yesterday day I
made plans with Mark to
open the
outside world to
his jungle ways:
a propped-open window
four and a half flights down,
branches and freedom
beyond
in the gardenŐs jungle.
He will adjust easily
enough,
but the question is: Will I?
How frightening it is to
gift
Shiva with his ancient heritage.
#116
07-23/28-03
ABBESS
Walking through the vast garden,
keys clinking against my chest,
the
sunshine unbearably bright,
the raspberries almost gone,
I pick
the elaborate, sticky, Japanese
version, more elaborate than
our
own. I water Aldona's plant
She didn't know the name of the
little
tree, nor do I. In the hot and airless
night, I think of
the nights she will
spend in New York where the air
in July can be
like sheet metal,
unbearable, thick, suicidally heavy.
The cat
rubs his silk coat against my
legs. The city shines and
shines,
twinklingly, like a billion stars
beneath my window, and
I wonder:
Why? Even as I begin my last
rounds, the cool air drifts
against my naked shoulders
as if it held an answer, as
if
its gentle touch could lift the despair
in this world where
change
and change again is the pain
and the reward. Time
passes,
the little tree will grow. Already
it sends forth new
shoots that curl,
like Aldona's sweet laughter,
her beautiful
teeth, her awkward
shoulders. I wish I had asked for
one of her
thread hung glass squares
to hang on my wall, the utter
simplicity of being -- nothing more
than it is. No more than
the obscured
stars in the sky, no more than the heat
and the cold,
and gentleness setting
out for its destiny, sadly, alone.
Fred
has disappeared into time
somewhere in the world, for some
reason --
unknown. The sun will
shine tomorrow -- again.
#117
08-03-03
ALDONA/ABBESS
I have two images in
my mind this morning:
the fragile
Aldona
graciously making nice
with her family's friends
in the
inhuman heat
of a New York summer
and me and my mind
in a
phantom body
walking the deserts of
Asia, desiccated,
beyond
sweat, in the joy of
privation and thirst.
Why did so
many
saints and sadhus
flourish in the desert
-- do they
still? --
the heat, no doubt,
is good for illusion and
illumination, little food
is needed, the heat
takes care of
sanitation
and disease. Few come
to disturb the wandering
saint,
the sitting sadhu.
Through the wavering heat
one has the illusion
one can
walk forever. No thought
is needed, no destination.
One foot before the other.
If the oasis is not there,
one can
dry right out
to the bone, turn white
with salt, weep
tearless
tears in an agony of thirst.
Perhaps that's why
the
saint and the sadhu
are also found in
the mountains, where
one
can lie down gently
in the snow and sleep
forever. But
Aldona
and the Abbess live in
cities, immolated in
hydrocarbons, cacophony,
bewilderment, sadness
unable to see to the
distant
mountains, unable to see
the bones and marrow
of the
land, unable to
choose between heat
and death, unable to
toss
their consciousness
into the sky. I have never
spent enough
time
in the desert.
What would be enough?
death in the desert?
What is enough in
the
city? Alienation even
from blue sky,
nonexistence of
silence,
the unbeatheable air.
Aldona is kindness itself,
I am despair. I get what I
want, she is
still wandering.
learning daily, incrementally,
to want what one
gets.
I wear the thinnest soles.
Through my sandals I feel
the heat, the sand does
not keep me from despair.
Study
will not shroud
Aldona's mind, nor
honesty keep her
from
anguish, baseless change
of mood more unstable
than the
seasons. When
the leaves turn red
Aldona smiles, when
the
leaves turn blue
Aldona smiles, when
the bare twigs flourish
she
picks bits for art,
wires bits of glass for
the wall, parts
with them.
They decorate my heart
beneath the purple
scarf. I
stuff my mouth
with paper towels --
not to cry and try
to
live always in the sun
walking the dusty path
straight to
a distant hill,
which I shall climb,
shade my eyes, and look
to
the east. Will she
be looking to the west?
#118
08-03-03 (check)
MISSIONARY PRIEST
Am I a Missionary Priest
in the land of economic
barbarism? -- where
they
study lead-poisoned children
rather than canceling the
study
and, with the money, saving the children.
Odd, isn't it,
since there is no doubt in their
-- or anyone's -- mind that
lead-poisoning leads
to irreversible brain, motor, metabolic injury.
Will
the time ever come when, scientifically, it will be more
worthwhile to save the children, then to pay the salaries,
maintain the economic lives, fast forward the careers
of the
scientific studiers?
Why would they listen to me in the land of
the golden heifer?
Compassion is a dying religion, children are an
abundant commodity.
I practice my own religion alone in a garret high
above the necessity to do
because it is too complicated to demand eating the calf instead of
incanting.
Copyright © 2003 through 2015 Jan Haag
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Jan Haag may be reached via e-mail: jjhaag@gmail.com
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