Poems of an Old PJ Fan
Medusafern
Posts: 7
New Orleans #1
She thought she knew Decatur Street
would be terrain retained for drunks or angels -
the place where migrants covet death -
but find that living, suddenly,
isn't so frightening.
And think they might go on.
She thought that she could surface here.
Steal the dreaming from her mind
and make a poem out of river rocks,
of too many days and nights spent wanting
oblivion or a love that could not stop -
and hoped that vampires loitered there -
and came to see that this was all
so dumb of her.
Was it only ever for her finding peace?
Some kind of impossible release
from a life turned strangely wrong -
and always the rumours that she had made it so.
Always the suckled one, her son,
the withered vine, the alcohol, the incubi,
all of which she swore to leave behind.
Or the constant terror of meaning
what to do or be.
But in the midst of all of this or after -
someone said, "New Orleans..."
And someone said, "Ghosts will breathe..."
in this last haven where guilt recedes,
and we are safe to be lost children
who walk a kind of wreckognition,
who bear a lasting need to live or die,
and most who still remember there is someone
they did not wish to leave behind.
And so it would become too real.
And soon she learned to swim upstream
through tides of bourboned bodies,
some of them half-innocents,
and some too ruined to be trusted.
And some with so much tenderness within
that she felt she might stop breathing.
And the night could never be so pretty -
and the cobblestones could never speak so clearly
and somewhere inside the rhythm of surrendering,
she came to know she was forgiven.
Hillary Hays
1997
Oliver's Miasm
I.
In the beginning
or end I did this
to you my child.
I delivered you
your life
a box of devils
tied to your toes
and wanted to know
are they all there?
Count them to ten
and again
before I go to sleep.
I did this.
Was it my sin
spasmed in
your brain-stem
my dis-ease
come wrapped
in teeth?
Belly-mouth
you entered through -
I numbered
what I saw of you
and then I
went to sleep.
II.
Enter I
your whirling dervish dream.
Shame of words
not coming out
just so
a carousel
you cannot slow
a sky is falling here.
These convulsions
ransom breath.
Muscles fall to gruel or mush,
your little deaths, now
scars the evidence.
What traipses off
on sticky cloven hooves
so that you feel it cling,
reside, persist.
Long-time leaving beast
cares nothing
that you tremor, weep.
III.
That when your bruises heal
and wounds are washed clean.
That when the moon remains
half-mast, so you can see,
and it is safe to look directly
at the sun.
That if my potions,
oils of root or fish or bane -
cannot untie the knots I made,
and you have taught me
all you know of love,
and we are closer
to an end -
I will say, your laughter
painted angels on each wall.
And that you often called me back from Hell
to hear the harps
plucked through the howl.
Hillary Hays
1994
Adultery
"Yet listen well. Not to my words -
but to the tumult which rises in your body
when you listen to yourself." - Anon.
Home of my eroded roads, I had chosen you -
was used to briar-scratch, and risk
of fallen trees, lives struck to their knees -
I knew not to disturb, defer, please step inside
but made my way beneath, and felt ashamed
beside the parched and gaping mouth of ditch -
emptied, starved with thirst, resembling me.
What I wanted was the love
within a grain of sand, the dying branch,
the hand of God emerging from withered leaves
or stones which creeks once cradled, soothed.
And now, you - music I hear through carcasses
of trees, the peck and howl, the voice
inside the grain, the only shoot of green
in beds of seared wheat -
you, sweet meal, asked for plucking,
as I knelt then, and would still kneel
to drink of you.
But God's hand is nowhere.
Only you, your palms, your fingers, clutching
at something you cannot name,
define, honor or cherish.
I am what you keep - a seedling,
or the last crust of bread coveted -
as if it could rise towards what might have been.
- Hillary Hays, 1994
Requiem for My Grandmother, Jean Ahlstrom
Nuit melancolique et lourde d'ete,
Pleine de silence et d'obscurite,
Berce sur l'azur qu'un vent doux effleure
L'arbre qui frissone et l'oiseau qui pleure.
- Verlaine
I know you died trying to see beyond your pain.
There was a smile always out of reach.
There were memories with teeth, like sullen orphans
you could never seem to save,
or the war-time lover who never meant to stay -
you settled, acquiesced into your grave,
and found the hiding places for the keys
to cabinets where oblivion nightly waited
to whisper you to sleep.
I remember your scant and paling skin -
the way you scarcely glanced above the rims
of reading glasses or childish glee -
near the end.
And how I wanted you to watch me going for a swim
or after, when wringing out my suit,
I wished that you would feel a need
to brush the tangles from my hair.
I was too young to know exactly where
your grief began, or how the women on the street
refused to greet an unwed mother in 1946 -
and still you held my mother's tiny hand,
traversing every buckling in the tar
which seemed to like to catch your heels -
and steered through each reproachful eye
towards the only place the two of you could be -
an orphanage on a simple street,
so much in need of paint and trim,
where shutters fell like ghosts of children
at the slightest wind.
I don't know where you met him, Paul.
The salesman who never seemed to speak aloud -
not even to his sons,
and not about the former wife
who fell to hearing voices
and was done.
I don't know when he brought you out of Jamestown
farther north, to a lake with a native name,
to a house where pine trees kept good shade
so that your fair complexion
need not grow too red.
To the dock where your daughter almost drowned,
to the gift shoppe in the center of town,
where I would linger long and wait
for china cats and trellises
you'd place atop my birthday cakes.
But did you ever smile? I don't recall.
Your withering wanted all your will
and you complied.
I came to you once, to the hospital,
before you died. My mother wished I wouldn't see
how frail you'd got, how thin your gown,
the IV heavy on your arm -
as if it could keep you here.
Again the image of the keys
you weren't supposed to find -
but Paul had passed and mercy had a mind
to grant you sweet relief.
Or when, remembering you that way,
I should suddenly dream your soul at peace,
just past a sea of pastel-colored shanty tents,
where some sought shade from Heaven's sun -
and almost felt alive again -
then into the pines, not too far, a house
so like the one you knew -
and through the open door, I saw you, smiling,
and for a moment in your arms -
that you should say I'm beautiful,
and that I must not die the way you had,
and that you are no longer sad,
but that you miss your child.
Or when, in telling your daughter of this dream,
she should say, "Thank you
for letting me know my mother's okay."
You have not been forgotten, Jean.
God Bless and rest in loving peace.
Hillary Hays
1998
Melancholy, heavy, summer night,
Full of gloom and silence,
Lulls against the blue brushed by a soft breeze.
The tree that trembles and the bird that weeps.
- Verlaine
Date Rape, 1981
I.
For a long time I forgot my dream of wired-shut jaws.
A steely cock like scalpel, clipped the stitches,
Tong probing tissues. An asp between the scars.
My mouth would draw the poison.
Let the sore.
But not this night. Nor the nights just past.
It is half my life since the Russian blessed the match ~
Said, “Listen to the fire speak.
We do not have much time.”
So I made my mouth a pot for him.
A chalice lip seared back by kiln.
A flue in winter’s toss.
Shall I tell him the snow lost my secret ~
Mummed, clotted after,
I went under and within the freeze, and ground my teeth
For months beyond, forgot to eat ~
“Not meant to chew,” the Russian mused,
“Only to give pleasure.”
Shall I tell him, then, for years after
I dressed in man’s trousers, and even liked to strap one on.
How I often thought of him ~
Eyes reflecting balled-girl fists.
I made him limp. Flush. Excuse himself.
Forget to zip his pants.
Now it all comes crawling back.
Funny, but I think I see, very nearly
To the end of it.
II.
Peter, it’s been fifteen years of fences.
(You never broke her in.)
She’s wild, this one. Like you left her.
Bent on bucking. Spooks like rattlers under brush.
You’d be wise to bring your bit, your rein, your tether choke.
A sucker for the little boy who wants to mount.
An apple, when she’s tame enough to take it
Whole.
Best your man-hand grooms her rough.
Fisted yanks. Frequent spurs.
She’ll like it that she cannot throw you off.
Clumps of mane you’ll swear that she could do without.
Come. Finish what you meant to start.
Mouth for fruit. Not for biting down.
Hillary Hays
1996
Interknit
If I try very hard I can read your voice.
I can feel it lodged in the white,
leapt from the space where words are exempt.
It hovers, resonant,
draped beyond the rim of monitors
and my uncertain reach.
You are text to me.
Text and not text.
Breath in a vortex
of fibers and light.
And through hours after nights spent,
our lines, a tent drawn taut
against the split,
I know the sound of you.
II.
Now, I come to the room where you sleep,
and your father doesn’t see, doesn’t hear
the click of keys, the shift of feet,
the way we cover our mouths
to keep from letting on.
Or how we dare to speak past
the muteness of weathered houses
and walled-off lives.
III.
I think we have found the secret.
How to touch past skin.
How fishermen feel a rainbow swim
below, until a surfacing.
That hidden things aren’t hollow, after all.
Just here and there, a door, a ladder to,
a knotted sheet tossed from a tree.
We need no more than carving tools
to leave our names in Beech.
IV.
Our hieroglyphs on cavern walls,
once faint, the blood-paint flaking there ~
Come back to life to tell us this
is who we were before.
Hillary Hays
1996
She thought she knew Decatur Street
would be terrain retained for drunks or angels -
the place where migrants covet death -
but find that living, suddenly,
isn't so frightening.
And think they might go on.
She thought that she could surface here.
Steal the dreaming from her mind
and make a poem out of river rocks,
of too many days and nights spent wanting
oblivion or a love that could not stop -
and hoped that vampires loitered there -
and came to see that this was all
so dumb of her.
Was it only ever for her finding peace?
Some kind of impossible release
from a life turned strangely wrong -
and always the rumours that she had made it so.
Always the suckled one, her son,
the withered vine, the alcohol, the incubi,
all of which she swore to leave behind.
Or the constant terror of meaning
what to do or be.
But in the midst of all of this or after -
someone said, "New Orleans..."
And someone said, "Ghosts will breathe..."
in this last haven where guilt recedes,
and we are safe to be lost children
who walk a kind of wreckognition,
who bear a lasting need to live or die,
and most who still remember there is someone
they did not wish to leave behind.
And so it would become too real.
And soon she learned to swim upstream
through tides of bourboned bodies,
some of them half-innocents,
and some too ruined to be trusted.
And some with so much tenderness within
that she felt she might stop breathing.
And the night could never be so pretty -
and the cobblestones could never speak so clearly
and somewhere inside the rhythm of surrendering,
she came to know she was forgiven.
Hillary Hays
1997
Oliver's Miasm
I.
In the beginning
or end I did this
to you my child.
I delivered you
your life
a box of devils
tied to your toes
and wanted to know
are they all there?
Count them to ten
and again
before I go to sleep.
I did this.
Was it my sin
spasmed in
your brain-stem
my dis-ease
come wrapped
in teeth?
Belly-mouth
you entered through -
I numbered
what I saw of you
and then I
went to sleep.
II.
Enter I
your whirling dervish dream.
Shame of words
not coming out
just so
a carousel
you cannot slow
a sky is falling here.
These convulsions
ransom breath.
Muscles fall to gruel or mush,
your little deaths, now
scars the evidence.
What traipses off
on sticky cloven hooves
so that you feel it cling,
reside, persist.
Long-time leaving beast
cares nothing
that you tremor, weep.
III.
That when your bruises heal
and wounds are washed clean.
That when the moon remains
half-mast, so you can see,
and it is safe to look directly
at the sun.
That if my potions,
oils of root or fish or bane -
cannot untie the knots I made,
and you have taught me
all you know of love,
and we are closer
to an end -
I will say, your laughter
painted angels on each wall.
And that you often called me back from Hell
to hear the harps
plucked through the howl.
Hillary Hays
1994
Adultery
"Yet listen well. Not to my words -
but to the tumult which rises in your body
when you listen to yourself." - Anon.
Home of my eroded roads, I had chosen you -
was used to briar-scratch, and risk
of fallen trees, lives struck to their knees -
I knew not to disturb, defer, please step inside
but made my way beneath, and felt ashamed
beside the parched and gaping mouth of ditch -
emptied, starved with thirst, resembling me.
What I wanted was the love
within a grain of sand, the dying branch,
the hand of God emerging from withered leaves
or stones which creeks once cradled, soothed.
And now, you - music I hear through carcasses
of trees, the peck and howl, the voice
inside the grain, the only shoot of green
in beds of seared wheat -
you, sweet meal, asked for plucking,
as I knelt then, and would still kneel
to drink of you.
But God's hand is nowhere.
Only you, your palms, your fingers, clutching
at something you cannot name,
define, honor or cherish.
I am what you keep - a seedling,
or the last crust of bread coveted -
as if it could rise towards what might have been.
- Hillary Hays, 1994
Requiem for My Grandmother, Jean Ahlstrom
Nuit melancolique et lourde d'ete,
Pleine de silence et d'obscurite,
Berce sur l'azur qu'un vent doux effleure
L'arbre qui frissone et l'oiseau qui pleure.
- Verlaine
I know you died trying to see beyond your pain.
There was a smile always out of reach.
There were memories with teeth, like sullen orphans
you could never seem to save,
or the war-time lover who never meant to stay -
you settled, acquiesced into your grave,
and found the hiding places for the keys
to cabinets where oblivion nightly waited
to whisper you to sleep.
I remember your scant and paling skin -
the way you scarcely glanced above the rims
of reading glasses or childish glee -
near the end.
And how I wanted you to watch me going for a swim
or after, when wringing out my suit,
I wished that you would feel a need
to brush the tangles from my hair.
I was too young to know exactly where
your grief began, or how the women on the street
refused to greet an unwed mother in 1946 -
and still you held my mother's tiny hand,
traversing every buckling in the tar
which seemed to like to catch your heels -
and steered through each reproachful eye
towards the only place the two of you could be -
an orphanage on a simple street,
so much in need of paint and trim,
where shutters fell like ghosts of children
at the slightest wind.
I don't know where you met him, Paul.
The salesman who never seemed to speak aloud -
not even to his sons,
and not about the former wife
who fell to hearing voices
and was done.
I don't know when he brought you out of Jamestown
farther north, to a lake with a native name,
to a house where pine trees kept good shade
so that your fair complexion
need not grow too red.
To the dock where your daughter almost drowned,
to the gift shoppe in the center of town,
where I would linger long and wait
for china cats and trellises
you'd place atop my birthday cakes.
But did you ever smile? I don't recall.
Your withering wanted all your will
and you complied.
I came to you once, to the hospital,
before you died. My mother wished I wouldn't see
how frail you'd got, how thin your gown,
the IV heavy on your arm -
as if it could keep you here.
Again the image of the keys
you weren't supposed to find -
but Paul had passed and mercy had a mind
to grant you sweet relief.
Or when, remembering you that way,
I should suddenly dream your soul at peace,
just past a sea of pastel-colored shanty tents,
where some sought shade from Heaven's sun -
and almost felt alive again -
then into the pines, not too far, a house
so like the one you knew -
and through the open door, I saw you, smiling,
and for a moment in your arms -
that you should say I'm beautiful,
and that I must not die the way you had,
and that you are no longer sad,
but that you miss your child.
Or when, in telling your daughter of this dream,
she should say, "Thank you
for letting me know my mother's okay."
You have not been forgotten, Jean.
God Bless and rest in loving peace.
Hillary Hays
1998
Melancholy, heavy, summer night,
Full of gloom and silence,
Lulls against the blue brushed by a soft breeze.
The tree that trembles and the bird that weeps.
- Verlaine
Date Rape, 1981
I.
For a long time I forgot my dream of wired-shut jaws.
A steely cock like scalpel, clipped the stitches,
Tong probing tissues. An asp between the scars.
My mouth would draw the poison.
Let the sore.
But not this night. Nor the nights just past.
It is half my life since the Russian blessed the match ~
Said, “Listen to the fire speak.
We do not have much time.”
So I made my mouth a pot for him.
A chalice lip seared back by kiln.
A flue in winter’s toss.
Shall I tell him the snow lost my secret ~
Mummed, clotted after,
I went under and within the freeze, and ground my teeth
For months beyond, forgot to eat ~
“Not meant to chew,” the Russian mused,
“Only to give pleasure.”
Shall I tell him, then, for years after
I dressed in man’s trousers, and even liked to strap one on.
How I often thought of him ~
Eyes reflecting balled-girl fists.
I made him limp. Flush. Excuse himself.
Forget to zip his pants.
Now it all comes crawling back.
Funny, but I think I see, very nearly
To the end of it.
II.
Peter, it’s been fifteen years of fences.
(You never broke her in.)
She’s wild, this one. Like you left her.
Bent on bucking. Spooks like rattlers under brush.
You’d be wise to bring your bit, your rein, your tether choke.
A sucker for the little boy who wants to mount.
An apple, when she’s tame enough to take it
Whole.
Best your man-hand grooms her rough.
Fisted yanks. Frequent spurs.
She’ll like it that she cannot throw you off.
Clumps of mane you’ll swear that she could do without.
Come. Finish what you meant to start.
Mouth for fruit. Not for biting down.
Hillary Hays
1996
Interknit
If I try very hard I can read your voice.
I can feel it lodged in the white,
leapt from the space where words are exempt.
It hovers, resonant,
draped beyond the rim of monitors
and my uncertain reach.
You are text to me.
Text and not text.
Breath in a vortex
of fibers and light.
And through hours after nights spent,
our lines, a tent drawn taut
against the split,
I know the sound of you.
II.
Now, I come to the room where you sleep,
and your father doesn’t see, doesn’t hear
the click of keys, the shift of feet,
the way we cover our mouths
to keep from letting on.
Or how we dare to speak past
the muteness of weathered houses
and walled-off lives.
III.
I think we have found the secret.
How to touch past skin.
How fishermen feel a rainbow swim
below, until a surfacing.
That hidden things aren’t hollow, after all.
Just here and there, a door, a ladder to,
a knotted sheet tossed from a tree.
We need no more than carving tools
to leave our names in Beech.
IV.
Our hieroglyphs on cavern walls,
once faint, the blood-paint flaking there ~
Come back to life to tell us this
is who we were before.
Hillary Hays
1996
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Comments
In reading your profile I also noticed that you have a son with autism. Its a subject that has been very interesting to me. Send me a message some time
I write down good reasons to freeze to death in my spiral ring notebook. But in the long tresses of your hair--I am a babbling brook.
And I didn't even read the rest of them.
Thanks for taking the time to read me
I have yet to write an introductory post to the Pit; I need to do that. In short, I've seen PJ in concert only twice in my life, but that has been for lack of money, not desire. And for lack of ability to travel freely, given the intense needs of my autistic child. Yet for all my love of words, I've always found it difficult to describe what it is that PJ's music does to me. Like my throbbing heart is held outside my body by unseen hands. Like everything I am is bleeding through the floor. Like the grief I believed would kill me suddenly raises me up to the sky...
I remember a dream I had about Eddie Vedder 13 years ago or so, how at the end of it he was standing beside an orange Camaro and I was telling him not to destroy himself with alcohol. Then when the song "Wishlist" came out and it contained mention of the 'full moon shining off a Camaro's hood' and I got all wide-eyed, noting the Camaro synchronicity...
In any case, it is good to finally be here. Thanks again for your welcome
Hillary
Thank you too for your kind words and welcome. As for autism, I'm fairly steeped in it. I myself had a long interest in autism prior to the birth of my son Oliver. Then my second son Ronan arrived, and he was diagnosed with a mild degree of autism, but fortunately 2 1/2 years of teaching therapy healed the more troublesome aspects of his syndrome and left him gifted and wise and spirit-filled. What a journey it's all been.
Hillary
have you ever tried AIT (Auditory Integration Training)> I know my mom does a lot of that and she really swears by it
I write down good reasons to freeze to death in my spiral ring notebook. But in the long tresses of your hair--I am a babbling brook.
Yes we tried Auditory Integration Therapy beginning when Oliver was about 3 years old and perhaps twice after that. He didn't have a measurable response to the actual therapy but he enjoys listening to the AIT CD's on headphones now and then. Also tried: vitamin, acidophilus & enzyme supplements, herbs, acupuncture, homeopathy, ketogenic diet for epilepsy, gluten and casein-free diet, Irlen lenses, Craniosacral therapy, Chiropractic and Kinesiology, massage, yoga, music therapy and perhaps some others I'm forgetting
More recently, we finally tried medications, but none of them have helped and most have made him worse, ie; more anxious, more obsessive-compulsive, more inconsolable, more destructive of property, more frequent headaches and more dangerously aggressive towards others. Fortunately he's about to enter a 28-day treatment program wherein a whole team of professionals will try to figure out how to make him more comfortable in his own skin. It's agonizing to be with him, he lives in a fight-or-flight mentality almost all of the time, he can't be left alone, he obsesses about minivans and school buses and is always desperate to find the "perfect one" on the Internet, and he scratches and bites and breaks things and cries when the object of his fixation cannot be found.
Some people believe we choose our lives in order to learn a particular lesson. I cannot imagine being so brave a soul as to choose the seeming hell in which Oliver lives. It's excruciating to witness, but it must be moreso to experience. And that I brought this life into the world is even harder to stomach. Still, I have to believe it was all meant to be. As a teen, I volunteered at a school for autistic children. As an adult, and while pregnant with Oliver, I worked with autistic adults in a sheltered workshop setting. What else could I have expected but that Oliver be exactly as he is. Still, I hope there is something out there which can soothe him. My heart breaks for his suffering.
Thanks again for your warmth and your interest in autism, and for your mother's valiant work.
Sincerely,
Hillary
have you ever read the novel "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon? Its pretty interesting. Its written by a young special ed teacher and it is about the experiences of an autistic boy and it is told through the eyes of the autistic boy. Its a really beautiful peace of literature and really quite cleverly written. good luck to you
I write down good reasons to freeze to death in my spiral ring notebook. But in the long tresses of your hair--I am a babbling brook.
I'll look up that book, I haven't heard of it before.Thank you much for the recommendation of your mother. She sounds like a tremendous person. Hopefully this 28 day treatment program will help Oliver. My one regret is that Lovaas/Applied Behavioral Analysis therapy wasn't available in this area for Oliver when he was young. My son Ronan started out with a mild autism dx and after 2.5 years of this one-on-one teaching therapy, he graduated from the program as perhaps the most amazing example of a "recovered" child ever before seen. He literally has no trace attributes of autism remaining.
Of course Ronan never had seizures or relentless ear infections or leaky gut syndrome or allergies or any of the other associated conditions which Oliver has suffered from. But I have to say that where a milder case of autism is concerned, such as Ronan's, Lovaas therapy really is stellar in terms of bringing the child forth to his/her full potential. Now I have a 5 year-old who reads at a third grade level, who has many diverse interests, a brilliant mind and a beautiful heart. He is very social, talkative and affectionate as well. I've been so fortunate that Ronan had Lovaas therapy available to him from the age of two. It might have helped Oliver had it also been available to him.
Thanks again for your replies.
Sincerely,
Hillary
on another note.....I just wanted to say that I really appreciate your poetry.....your poems are amazing (the kind of stuff I wish I'd written myself).....they show a lot of insight, and are probably some of the best poems I've read on here......I'm blown away......
Catherine
In any case, maybe I'll just post this Letter here, risking any ridicule that may arise. Thank you again for your warmth and kindness.
Sincerely,
Hillary Hays