Station - a poem. Finally.

Station

I.
Pitted blue glass windows
line the church aisles.
Centered in each window
a square panel depicts
one Station of the Cross:
gilt figures on black slate.

Sundays after Mass, her
Grandmother walked through
the Stations, rosary
looped over her hands,
the skin silk-smooth, loose
on the bones. The kids
would all wait in the car,
impatient for the ritual’s end.

One station: Jesus carries His Cross.
Another, He falls the first time.
He meets His mother. A murmur
accompanied the beads’ clicking.

II.
On Fridays in Lent the upper
grades attended observance
of the Stations together.
The censer would swing gently
on its chain. Wisps of incense rose
with the priest’s thin voice:
eloi, eloi, lama sabachtani

Someone might faint
or pretend to in
the close hungry afternoon.

The priest and the altar boy attendants
moved on to the next one: Jesus dies.
He is laid in the tomb.

Between panels, the light streams in.

III.
She tries again to repent

wonders whether peace
would come if she made
confession, if she knelt down on
marble at the communion rail
or shed penitent’s tears.
She waits in the shadow of
the great crucifix above her.

She would pray: Jesus
how You suffered,
make me good.
With thorns or a whip
or with nails
make me forget
this longing.

Fail

Okay, so I realize it wasn't really a poem, "Super," which was my last post. It may be part of a poem, or just a crafted sentence to slip into a story some day. It was an awareness that had crept up on me and I had to write it down.

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. -Samuel McChord Crothers

I hope that's not all I was doing. I don't think so; poetry comes more naturally to me than most other writing. But I haven't written creatively in a while, no new poems or stories and it worries me. Granted, I have been in a sort of emotional cocoon. I am almost constantly in motion, from work to getting the kids to school, though I don't seem to accomplish much. The Christmas tree still needs to be undecorated, the ornaments put away for next year and the tree put out to recycling.

Honestly? I'm afraid to stop. For more than a year, I have been hard at work at changing the way I think (no victims live here anymore!), changing my relationships, changing my life. Having experienced at least periods of major depression for most of life, controlled now by meds, I have the fear that if I am still for too long, I won't even be able to get out of bed. There have been times when I was close, but never quite that bad. I can't have that, now, not with kids who depend on me.

I don't believe I'm close to that, not quite. Only, I'm so tired. All I really want is to regroup, but life keeps going, so I have to keep going, too. Maybe that's exactly what keeps the complete paralysis at bay.

...one got used to it - to being everlastingly tightened up to face things, you see.
- Harriet Vane Wimsey, in Busman's Honeymoon (Dorothy L. Sayers)

The point to everything has been to create a life to live, not merely to bear. I think I'm getting there. In the meantime, I realized I never post poems or stories, or fragments of them. It was time to make that change; better to post things that aren't so good and get better than to hold off and never get there.

Super

After the eleven or
twelve years together,
the end exposed a power
each had used
to hold on so long:
she to imagine
and he to pretend.

-draft-
the second shortest poem I've ever written,
work property of the author

Progression

One of the unpleasant things about today was just the sense of generalized internal pain - I said to someone that it was like having an emotional flu. Everything just hurt and it seems that anything one can do to dull it is unhealthy. I almost miss the days when I would come home and have a few glasses of wine, and block it all out. The point now seems to be that it's necessary, if I'm going to come through things the way I want to, to let things hurt until they get better. It sucks. Every trivial frustration is hard manage in that frame of mind.

Some of it goes back to pulling out the notebook (after too long a lapse, I admit) and getting to the real stuff, the stuff that hurts. I'm not looking forward to getting back into it, to shaping the experience into something with form and purpose. I can hardly bear to go through it - who could possibly want to read it? It's the real stuff, though, that makes a story, or a poem. And the stuff I hate to look at, is a lot like the stuff nobody wants to deal with themselves. It always a discovery and a comfort to find that we are all going through the same kinds of stuff. If we could remember that, I bet we'd spend a lot less time and energy trying to hide it.

Every true poem or painting, every measure of true music is paid for with life, with suffering and blood. -- Herman Hesse

With the writing, I've also noticed that I'm progressing from just hurting to feeling angry. It's not any more comfortable, but it does seem to be moving toward resolution.