Many in the park are reading the white butterfly.
I love that cabbage butterfly as if it were a fluttering corner of truth itself!
Tomas Tranströmer, "Streets in Shanghai"

Photograph from Wired New York

Many in the park are reading the white butterfly. Or worshipping the wrinkling God, exposing their winter-white limbs to the sun. Backs against thin towels, resting on hodgepodge quilts or supported by near-dead grass, they lie among the remains of dog shit and crushed beer cans. Four months of relative darkness, of travel wishes: the sea and sky clear, the beach unpeopled, a tropical drink supported by sand. Stuck in the city for the long haul, they celebrate the coming of spring.

They travel from studio apartments, from many-windowed penthouses, stream in from the train station, form in groups released from grubby cubicles. Maybe they are cutting school, calling in sick. It could be that they don’t have anywhere to be in the first place.

She props herself up on her elbows, surveys the landscape of bodies. Across a line felled by desire, a white butterfly floats, a promise fulfilled.

Tags: writing prompt, Tomas Transtromer, Streets in Shanghai, Poetry, sunbathing, Central Park

I wish I could explain the importance of the notebook. It’s one of those old black and white composition books, barely held together by 45-year old glue and stitching, the edges of the pages the color of dead oak leaves, cured by time. An artifact, a little piece of Kevin, half-filled with poems of late adolescence, poems that he probably wrote in his senior year of high school. They are short and generally angry, each one typewritten and stapled or taped to the front of a page.

If I could explain the importance of the notebook, maybe I could explain the importance of Kevin. How can someone who tried to destroy me, who battered my mother emotionally, be so key to who I am? Kevin was extraordinary. I’ve never met anyone like him, a man who pushed himself out of a childhood of emotional and physical abuse and formed a self out of will and ashes. He was a poet, a self-taught carpenter, a working class intellectual. In the midst of fatal illness, he completed his dissertation and received a PhD. He was also so wickedly funny that my mother and I still laugh when we remember his stories and jokes.

Kevin sometimes ripped us to shreds with that knife-like wit. He was an active participant in the neglect that led to my pregnancy at sixteen. Whenever he saw hypocrisy or hidden motive – which was often – he skewered the hypocrite, uncloaked the motive. His ability to see the darkness in himself and others never took into account the overwhelming goodness we each have, the lightness that makes up most of who we are.

I have a lot of empathy for him, whose cruelty and black math was caused by a childhood of pain and anger, but it probably helps that he is off stage now, six years dead. It was a long and painful exit. Kevin didn’t deserve to suffer, to be hospitalized for six months, to have his body whittled down to 80 skeletal pounds. He didn’t deserve to lose his ability to swallow and sometimes to breathe unassisted. No one deserves what happened to Kevin. But that time of suffering was also a time to make peace. I was at the hospital for hours almost every day, there for both him and my mother, keeping company, being a second set of eyes to make sure no mistakes were made. I was there for comfort.

It gave me a chance to prove my humanity, to show that we all have the ability to be good. Even him. Even me.

Sometimes I still believe it. But writing that paragraph about how I benefited from Kevin’s suffering leaves me with a dirty feeling, as though I relished the opportunity to be redeemed through his pain. It wasn’t like that. I was there because I wanted to be, couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.

Kevin’s final day stretched and stretched from early morning into late afternoon. A small group of family gathered in his hospice room and listened to him wind down, heard the silent spaces grow between each breath, watched his heart flutter out from under his ribcage. Outside, daffodils were pushing through once-frozen ground and the forsythia was in bloom. The world was coming to life again as we sat and waited for death.

It came with a dramatic final exhale followed by dead quiet. The dog broke the silence with a bark, my mother reached for me and Kevin’s son, held us and cried. Mom later said she felt Kevin’s energy leave his body, had an image of him walking along a river path against a cloudless sky, his old collie Augie by his side. When Kevin's brother thanked me for my presence, I said, "I'm so glad we had this time," and immediately regretted it. What was I saying? Those six months of dying were great? What a wonderful opportunity for me?

That night I woke up after midnight to the pressure of Kevin’s hand on mine, a grateful and loving presence. Don’t be hard on yourself. You were there for me. Thank you.

Then he was gone.

Two Ways of Looking at It
Kevin Sheehan (Knife Gift)

The magician, who is about to perform,
is wearing a suit which belongs to
his father. No one is supposed to know
that he is not his father. His first
trick, which involves some
simple sleight-of-hand, is well-received.
he bows, and the suit collapses.

And what if I would not grow up,
would not perform
the necessary murder. So what.
Was it any of your business?
I chose to be the child, hurt
and unhurting, but my body,
my beauty, betrayed me.

Tags: Kevin, Poetry, hospice, Death

no one read this blog. If I was still Anonmomous?

This has been a hard week of slog and attempts to think my way through a muddled, sad brain.

There could be at least one reason I am struggling -- the end of July marks an anniversary of sorts (some might call it an antiversary). This, coupled with an overnight work retreat for my husband next week, a true triggering event, is bringing me down. These dates will lose their meaning over time, but the first go-round stinks.

So. Maybe that's it.

(Ever since my mother sent me this quote from Seamus Heaney on the use of 'So.' as prelude, a call for attention, I've been using it as a sentence all on its own. The quote is below, Famous Seamus on translating Beowulf and using the term 'So.'

There you have it -- a little esoterica to balance out the angst, to confuse the crowd. Oh, for courage and greatness.)

"And when I came to ask myself how I wanted Beowulf to sound in my version, I realized I wanted it to be speakable by one of [my big-voiced Scullion] relatives, [who had a kind of Native American solemnity of utterance, as if they were announcing verdicts rather than making small talk. ] I therefore tried to frame the famous opening lines in cadences that would have suited their voices, but that still echoed with the sound and sense of the Anglo-Saxon:

Hwaet we Gar-Dena    in gear-dagum
peod-cyninga      prym gefrunon,

Conventional renderings of "hwaet," the first word of the poem, tend towards the archaic literary, with "lo" and "hark" and "behold" and "attend" and—more colloquially—"listen" being some of the solutions offered previously. But in Hiberno-English Scullionspeak, the particle "so" came naturally to the rescue because in that idiom "so" operates as an expression which obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention. So, "so" it was:

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness."

Tags: existential angst, forgiveness, Poetry, writing

He was my mother's boyfriend for almost two decades. Creative and manipulative, mercurial and whip-smart, brave to the end, Kevin was a complicated man who caused a lot of damage. He couldn't help it, with his own childhood of abuse and cruel words never far from the surface.

By the time he died, after eight years of illness, we had reached a peace. I loved him like a father.

Today would have been Kevin's 62nd birthday. (My mother just called to tell me she had a pain in the neck, just like she has every year on his birthday. Ah, the tension continues even after death . . .)

In honor of Kevin, I am posting one of his poems, "A Dream of the Snow." For many months after his death six years ago, my mother had this as her voice mail greeting. She got a lot of hang-ups.

A Dream of the Snow
From Knife Gift by Kevin Sheehan

For a long time I hid
while my body grew,
watched while it learned
a hard way to speak
till the clothes that it wore
no longer fit me
and I could not understand
a word of its speech.

For a long time I slept
while my body dreamed,
cried when it married, moved
away. Now I dream alone
in the room where we played.

Not of the fields, but the falling,
not of the cold, but the coming down,
my body is a dream of the snow.

Tags: Kevin, Poetry