And I, sitting in my car in the parking lot,
wonder what went wrong.
The weight of years finally catching up?
Looking at the unoccupied blue Ford Escape next to me,
I imagine them sitting on a love seat in the counselor’s office,
a short length of opposition between them
and a continental span of awkward silence.
In here we use Vegas rules, the counselor explains,
and proceeds to ask the reason for their presence
in her practice of sixty minute benign wise regard.
Husband and wife fold and unfold their hands in their laps.
The husband declares he is happy enough,
things could be better but certainly worse.
Sure she refused to go with him to Furious 7.
Sure she scolds him for kissing their neighbor’s wife
as they go home after an evening of canasta and pizza.
Sure she orders Chinese take-out on too many nights.
Sure she slams the bedroom door to the mystery of sex
as if sex alone would repair the slow damage done.
The wife’s grievances are not so specific.
She speaks of lonely spaces never filled,
of a busy solitude with babies now grown,
of vacations when they plopped down
on adjacent smiley-face beach towels and
he sun-screened her back with absent hands.
She speaks of the dresses she never bought
because of the fact he never noticed.
He can live with his eyes pointed in other directions.
She has learned to survive by abandoning her ears.
She is a citizen of the republic of neglect,
he a citizen of the country of I-don’t-care.
Recognizing the somnambulant crisis
and insufficiency of words,
the counselor wishes she was a shaman
wearing a necklace of bear claws,
a headdress of bright feathers,
a vest made of antelope ribs,
a deer hide dress
stitched with the sinew of elk,
fox fur tied around her ankles,
and bells that sound with each step.
She wishes she could move them into dance,
blow holy smoke into their cold bones,
bless them with an ache for fusion,
so husband and wife became
primordial for a moment:
earth, wind, fire, water,
flesh.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
I was sitting in my car at an office building waiting for a friend to come out when a car pulled in beside me. An older couple got out and went in. I sat in my car wondering why. What business were they attending to? I did not know. But this poem arrived shortly thereafter and I quickly wrote it down in my notebook. After finishing the first scribbled draft I began thinking about what the poem could mean. First, I noticed that the husband complained about incidents, the wife complained about atmosphere. Second, I noticed she slammed the door not on sex but the “mystery of sex”. Perhaps both of them knew in the deep recesses of their unconscious minds that sex is not simply a physiological act but a psychological entrance into a sacred moment of shared pleasure, joy, and gratitude. The sexual expression of love, the greatest physical intimacy, is an opening to the deepest spiritual intimacy,
The main issue in their life would seem to be a lack of attention. He does not pay quality attention to her and she has developed the habit of ignoring him. Listening to their stories, the therapist begins to sense a deeper wound in the souls of this couple. Beneath the private and personal wounds of this husband and wife is a cultural pathology, a spiritual wound. They live in a civilization that promotes life alienated from the natural world, a life that things we are merely on the earth but not of the earth. They are shaped by a religious tradition that has privileged an invisible distant deity and dishonored the visible and present earth. So, unaware of their membership in the conscious human family on earth, they move through life like sleepwalkers. (somnambulant)They no longer feel the childlike astonished delight in the marvel of their own BEING,
So the counselor imagines herself to be a shaman of a people who know in their bones they are indigenous to the earth. She pictures herself wearing totems of her brother-sister animals, She realizes that this couple ultimately does not need a minor repair. The culture in which they are embedded, which is our culture, needs to recover its original relationship to earth and flesh. We need to rekindle our longing for primordial life and feel our humble (humble = humus – ground) place in the natural order of things.
What happened with the couple? We will never know.
What happened to humanity? We will know soon enough