Thursday, February 22, 2007
I asked for the poems & they never came
I talked with my brother Jim on Saturday night. He was in the hospital for tests, he's had heart trouble for some years. It had been a long time. Of his life & his family I know little in detail, although he's only 100 miles away. Most of his landmark events - changes of occupation, post-graduate degrees, not to mention the more mundane ones, passed by without my involvement & often without my even knowing about them. It was something about him, & my family generally, that was very difficult to become accustomed to after our dad died in 1983.
I'm not a cold-hearted, indifferent bastard, although it may seem so at times. The largest group of unpublished poems I have on a "theme" is about people in my family. One poem I did publish many years ago finally cracked through to my dad. I don't recall which one it was, I'd given him copies of a couple of the more respectable literary magazines I was in & he'd actually read the poems & understood I hadn't been ignoring everybody but rather observing them. I was a youngest sbling trying to make sense of personalities so maybe I could figure out their backstories. I know now that as a child I was dropped into the fourth act of a drama, & nobody evertried explaining what had happened during the first three acts. Except Jim. He was the only one who shed light on certain traumatic events - a serious accident - that occurred before I was born, involving all three of my siblings, my parents, my paternal grandmother, & god knows who else. It was Jim's sorting out of these events as a young adult that turned his life around & allowed him to become a person I never would have predicted. Yet, everything's he's accomplished makes complete sense to me in light of his intelligence, his stubborness following his own paths & interests, his perfect Sunday School attendance, his corny sense of humor, his harmless eccentricities, & the enjoyment he gets being in the spotlight. Jim had a tough childhood, & I wasn't even around, or wasn't old enough to be aware, when he went through the worst of it.
My siblings mostly considered me a nosy little brat, getting into their stuff, pulling rather mean-spirited practical jokes (some of which were devilishly creative or had a zenlike simplicity). Mainly I was motivated by curiousity. Any one of my three older siblings who bothered to look though my WFMU playlists would find embedded there their records. The very fact that I slipped right into the free form way of radio was made possible by the diversity of music they were trying to keep out of my grubby hands, & even by the tape recorder Jim was given as a graduation present but which I proceeded to use without his permission & slowly beat into a hunk of junk.
The 4 Rixon siblings were never to be an extended family. I can see now there was no hope of that ever happening. But I also know that I'm not alone in throwing it away. We discarded all of the relatives on both sides of the family, everyone in our generation & nearly everyone preceding it. The Amidons, the Rixon, the Bradys, they're all gone. I never replaced them with spouse's family & kids of my own. I dream about my godmother, the last connection to my grandmother Nana & to the people that came from Philadephia. Nana witnessed nearly everything, suspected what she didn't know, & had she lived I want to believe she would have told me everything. They're in my poems & stories mostly as mysteries & fictions. & my father, who I finally came to admire before he died & love after he was gone, strange process that my therapist thought one of the few sane adjustments I''d made in my life, but it was poet joel oppenheimer's wise gift to me in the years before dad died*. My talkative oldest brother, the one before Jim, withdrew into an emotional isolation that still baffles me & yet the indications were all there when he was 14 & retreating into an attic sanctuary plastered with funny "Keep Out" signs, the humor in them could not disguise the intent - he rarely stopped talking even as it became obvious one was interacting with an elaborate masquerade.
Lifelong alcoholism crushing the spirit of out of my once vibrantly social mom. At last in an angry, unguarded moment she answered a question I'd been asking all my life & I discovered her inconsolable sorrow & a secret that so shook me to my core that I wondered if I could ever understand what I really meant to her, & the sense of apartness I'd always felt from my siblings was not illusory at all but made implicit in my name. I came into being not as joke or happy accident but to heal some terrible wounds, it made me a fragile object, & learning it was so difficult for me to handle that I walked away & committed what I believe is my only really unforgivable sin: abandoning someone on their deathbed. I felt apart from my brothers & sister, but what made them pull apart from each other? How do I write about all this? To speak of these matters as fact & conjecture is to betray the silences I always hated. Do I owe anyone my silences now? When I thought not, I asked for more poems & they never came. I've been asking for one poem in particular for over a decade.
* joel, who was an influential, fatherly presence for me in the 70s, did this through a very gentle & uncomplicated process of inquiring about my father, & speaking well of him, although they never met & seemed as different as two men could be.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
I'm not a cold-hearted, indifferent bastard, although it may seem so at times. The largest group of unpublished poems I have on a "theme" is about people in my family. One poem I did publish many years ago finally cracked through to my dad. I don't recall which one it was, I'd given him copies of a couple of the more respectable literary magazines I was in & he'd actually read the poems & understood I hadn't been ignoring everybody but rather observing them. I was a youngest sbling trying to make sense of personalities so maybe I could figure out their backstories. I know now that as a child I was dropped into the fourth act of a drama, & nobody evertried explaining what had happened during the first three acts. Except Jim. He was the only one who shed light on certain traumatic events - a serious accident - that occurred before I was born, involving all three of my siblings, my parents, my paternal grandmother, & god knows who else. It was Jim's sorting out of these events as a young adult that turned his life around & allowed him to become a person I never would have predicted. Yet, everything's he's accomplished makes complete sense to me in light of his intelligence, his stubborness following his own paths & interests, his perfect Sunday School attendance, his corny sense of humor, his harmless eccentricities, & the enjoyment he gets being in the spotlight. Jim had a tough childhood, & I wasn't even around, or wasn't old enough to be aware, when he went through the worst of it.
My siblings mostly considered me a nosy little brat, getting into their stuff, pulling rather mean-spirited practical jokes (some of which were devilishly creative or had a zenlike simplicity). Mainly I was motivated by curiousity. Any one of my three older siblings who bothered to look though my WFMU playlists would find embedded there their records. The very fact that I slipped right into the free form way of radio was made possible by the diversity of music they were trying to keep out of my grubby hands, & even by the tape recorder Jim was given as a graduation present but which I proceeded to use without his permission & slowly beat into a hunk of junk.
The 4 Rixon siblings were never to be an extended family. I can see now there was no hope of that ever happening. But I also know that I'm not alone in throwing it away. We discarded all of the relatives on both sides of the family, everyone in our generation & nearly everyone preceding it. The Amidons, the Rixon, the Bradys, they're all gone. I never replaced them with spouse's family & kids of my own. I dream about my godmother, the last connection to my grandmother Nana & to the people that came from Philadephia. Nana witnessed nearly everything, suspected what she didn't know, & had she lived I want to believe she would have told me everything. They're in my poems & stories mostly as mysteries & fictions. & my father, who I finally came to admire before he died & love after he was gone, strange process that my therapist thought one of the few sane adjustments I''d made in my life, but it was poet joel oppenheimer's wise gift to me in the years before dad died*. My talkative oldest brother, the one before Jim, withdrew into an emotional isolation that still baffles me & yet the indications were all there when he was 14 & retreating into an attic sanctuary plastered with funny "Keep Out" signs, the humor in them could not disguise the intent - he rarely stopped talking even as it became obvious one was interacting with an elaborate masquerade.
Lifelong alcoholism crushing the spirit of out of my once vibrantly social mom. At last in an angry, unguarded moment she answered a question I'd been asking all my life & I discovered her inconsolable sorrow & a secret that so shook me to my core that I wondered if I could ever understand what I really meant to her, & the sense of apartness I'd always felt from my siblings was not illusory at all but made implicit in my name. I came into being not as joke or happy accident but to heal some terrible wounds, it made me a fragile object, & learning it was so difficult for me to handle that I walked away & committed what I believe is my only really unforgivable sin: abandoning someone on their deathbed. I felt apart from my brothers & sister, but what made them pull apart from each other? How do I write about all this? To speak of these matters as fact & conjecture is to betray the silences I always hated. Do I owe anyone my silences now? When I thought not, I asked for more poems & they never came. I've been asking for one poem in particular for over a decade.
* joel, who was an influential, fatherly presence for me in the 70s, did this through a very gentle & uncomplicated process of inquiring about my father, & speaking well of him, although they never met & seemed as different as two men could be.
Labels: about writing, growing up
