And I, sitting in my car in the parking lot,
wonder what went wrong.
The heavy history of their years finally catching up?
Looking at the unoccupied blue Ford Escape next to me,
I imagine them now on a love seat in a 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 intense 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 dress she never bought
because he would not notice.
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 wished she was a shaman
wearing a necklace of bear claws,
a headdress of bright feathers,
a vest made of antelope ribs,
a deer hide loincloth
stitched with the sinew of elk,
fox fur tied around ankles,
and bells that sound with each step.
She wishes she could move them into dance,
blow heat into their cold bones,
bless them with an ache for fusion,
becoming primordial for a moment:
earth, wind, water, fire, flesh.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
I was sitting in my car at an office building waiting for a friend when a car parked beside me. An old couple got out and went in. I sat in my car wondering why. This poem arrived in my imagination and I quickly wrote it down. 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 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 if ignoring him. But the counselor senses a deeper wound in the individuals who are this couple. Beneath the private and personal wounds of this husband and wife is a spiritual wound. They live in a culture that promotes life alienated from the natural world, a life that thinks we are merely on the earth, not of the earth. They are shaped by a religious tradition that has privileged an invisible and distant deity and dishonored the physicality of the earth. Unaware of their stake in the conscious human family, they move through life like sleepwalkers, barely astonished by the marvel of their very own BEING,
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 but the cultural in which they live needs a major overhaul. We need a more primordial life and dance with the natural rhythms of the earth.
What happened with the couple? We will never know.
What happened to humanity? We will know soon enough.