Life, Lightened, and: The Analyst’s Severe Arthritis, and: The Pottery Jar

Life, Lightened

Like a runaway artist, you used to fleeyour patients’ modern anguish at home

to stroll along the ochre squares of Rome,to sketch a yellow leaf, a tawny hound,

to see unvarnished color with free eyesfar from our jaundiced complaints,

from having to be wise—as you’ve escapedfrom all of us now, your therapy room

now a studiolo, with a gallery of workyou’d never have hung before,

for fear of disturbing “our work.”And after your attendant

guides you up the elevator thatwe, your patients, rode (almost over-

weighting it with our emotionsso some days it barely chugged

to the tan walls of the 21st floor)you approach your door with

yellow mimosa that you’ll paint, afteryou unlock it, having learned

to use keys again, holdingboth hands to twist the cylinder.

When you lived as an artist on the lamfor that month each year, you used

the watercolor pencils in your handnot to note our dreams

(and now, who cares?)but to draw the jonquil things you saw,

and live the raw I am, as you do now,relearning how to show

the few of us who stay in touchhow to twist and relearn.

The Analyst’s Severe Arthritis

Even when you had all your facultiesthere were physical frailties.

Then you were harrowedyet capable of attention.

Once I attended to youas your eyes narrowed—

foreign, as if they’d lodgedin an animal’s skull

and not below your pert foreheadintelligently inclined.

“Are you in pain?”Your simple yes

displayed the degree.Then a question flowered

as if from a painting of a skull:“How did you know?”

“I saw it in your eyes.”How could you attend to me

while seized so?Yet you insisted on going on,

so I positioned my headand then my feet on your couch.

My resistance, your insistence,grew twin stems

toward the desert flowerwe painted together,

unable to leaveour harrowed hour.

The Pottery Jar

Thank you for asking me not to smoke,thank you for the extra ten minutes no charge.Thank you for knowing the smoke that seepedbeneath the heavy gray apartment doorwas war poison from afar.Thank you for your chic haircut—every therapist should have one.Thank you for not condescending tothat Navy man who had such badDepression-era karma he securedthe soles of his shoes with rubber bandsand the farm girl who leapt from reading booksbehind the barn into her Book of Life.Chapter Two: Post War,in which the wounded Navy boy threwhis farm girl down the cellar stairs.

Thank you for your posture, bolt upright,when I was so mad I declared I could breakthe antique pottery jar on your shelf.

Chapter One: War.It’s always backward in analysis, isn’t it?Thank you for reading my injured motherwho aided a game her child played—wherein the little girl walked with a cane, bandagedfrom head to toe in sheets torn up for kitchen rags.

Thank you for warning me on the phonethat now you’d be walking with a cane. Thank you for not believing me when I said I was suicidal(my Dad had died and evaporated into smoke—that rageful man, yes, slowly I admitted I hadhalf his genes—bomb-vaporous beneaththe heavy gray apartment door).

How could you take her seriously,a young woman living alone from paycheckto paycheck in a studio on the Upper East Siderehearsing Sylvia Plath:She opens the stove, crouches down on the floor,and stops before she rests her head on the oven doorto think How sticky this is!Thank you for waiting decades for her to acquirea sense of humor as well as better clothes.

After I declared I’d break the gray jarwith navy blue patterns, after your posture,bolt upright in your chair—you said, “You...