"when I came first to know that there were flowers also in hell"

Vahan Bego's [Saint] Sebastian:

Hoo boy. Shooting pains, followed by a little intimate throb::throb in the left shoulder. shivering from fever. is the night really over? I sent Fred off to worship with the militant existential feminist lesbians just a moment ago;  For the first time in years, we failed to wish each other a good morning -- we failed at every nicety of habit.

"See you," he said.
"Bye," said I.

He knows that I am teetering on the edge and he just doesn't need it right now -- no one does.

So, how sad is this? My insurance coverage does not kick in until (we think) 15 september... 24 days away. I have managed to stay out of the hospital since last October... which has been a real struggle plus a work of genius by my doctors -- true grit! -- only to fail at the attempt in the last few weeks before being covered again. No-o-o!

Just ignore me. [Have you ever gone to the top of a Blogger blog and clicked on Next Blog?  It takes me back to my days as a kid, traveling via National Geographic, a budding wheelchair anthropologist...]

I am emotionally needy when afraid, when I reach this point -- {what point?} -- When my attempt to control everything looks to be failing. I cannot even get my temp down to normal these days. Doc said to alternate ibuprofen with the acetaminophen in Percocet... I can get it down to about 100 but it just hovers there and i am worn thin (Oh, now, that would be nice; I had to raise the steroid doses and am hungry, always).

Okay, change the subject.  At least, for a few paragraphs.  There is a need -- not to be ignored -- to write about Hell, but it can be deferred a while.  Maybe I can even bury it in a big pile o' persnickety verbiage.

One of the ways I exercise and exorcise my various moral complacencies is by following the joys and resonant sadnesses inherent in the living work done at The Open Door. 

(Hmm.  At the words "living work," through the brain shot "Asphodel, that greeny flower"!  And so I went to renew that poetic friendship, one of my first.  Who does not grow up, at least in America, at the precise moment that red wheelbarrow depends?  As I reread most of Asphodel -- and is it any wonder that I don't get much done? -- I came to respect my memory, and the need to tell you about my Hell evaporated.  It's been done, as is said.  And so much better:

Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
like a buttercup
upon its branching stem-
save that it's green and wooden-
I come, my sweet,
to sing to you.
We lived long together
a life filled,
if you will,
with flowers. So that
I was cheered
when I came first to know
that there were flowers also
in hell.

I remember, once, an grad student in American Lit having a cocktail party moment, saying that WCW was so pedestrian. I wish! I wish!

So anyway, yes, I think of greens shooting in the spring from thin, bare branches when I think of The Open Door Community. Their needs are always, and never, met. Hey, I have an idea! If you have money to spare, send it to them:

Online donations can be made through Donate Now, a service of Network for Good.

They also need walking shoes, sizes 11-15, especially, and sandwiches, meat & cheese on whole wheat bread.  (I cannot remember if I have blogged on how beggers can be choosers?  It would have been a piece on Joe Coppage... and Ha! Ha!  I found it.  It's called:  beggars *can* be choosers!  I will repost it, as it is part and parcel of an offshoot to The Open Door.  Also?  Everyone knows a Joe, we just don't want to think about it.  That's why I am here, perhaps.  Sometimes?) 

I look forward to reading their monthly newspaper, Hospitality, as much to follow the health and well-being of founders Murphy Davis and Ed Loring as to keep an eye out for my own stuck-in-the-mud-ed-ness. Stucked-in-the-muddity? Fred and I are no longer part of the struggle, and yet are, of course. (We all are.)  It's just that we are out of practice, our hospitality is not crisp, is stale.  There are no homeless people in Tête de Hergé (très décédé, d'ailleurs).  Those who flirt with that sad state quickly find succor, usually with The Cistercians, sometimes here at The Manor, in Marlinspike Hall, where we can always use a hand -- but where we also can lend one, to the tired, to the sick, the worn out, to those teetering out-of-balance.  We aren't terribly different from The Cistercians, when push comes to shove.  They just operate with more of a theme.  Every room has a twin bed, a dresser, a bedside table -- all made of fiberboard -- with a Book of Psalms and a New Testament.  (The Old Testament causes the monks both dyspepsia and nightmares) In the Manor bedrooms, we have everything from rickety day beds to king-sized waterbeds, tables from consoles to converted one-of-a-kind medieval reliquaries, not to mention a mind-boggling assortment of religious reading material (often first editions, autographed) as well as every underground issue of Keep on Truckin'.

Anyway, the last pages of Hospitality are for Grace and Peaces of Mail, wherein I sometimes see the names of old friends and death row inmates.

In the latest issue of Hospitality, my eyes bugged out to see a letter from Father Tom Francis of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit. I mean, it is not unusual to see Father Tom's words out in the world, as I think the brothers are all wonderfully worldly, in spite of, or because of, being cloistered.  It's what he wrote that took my breath away... simple, to the point, and right. He probably doesn't consider himself brave, but I do.

Dear Gospel-friends, Ed and Murphy,
Even though I winced at the article Dear Pope: Call Me in the May-June Hospitality, it is all so very true, completely accurate, and needs to be read by most Catholics, who tend to blindly side "with our Holy Father." The multiplicity of [sexual abuse] cases and the extent of the cover-up by the bishops are ghastly evidence that even church institutions "protect" their reputations and money bags, ignoring grievous injustice to children and parents and the betrayal of the trust given to clergypersons. I hope this rightful exposure will bring our Catholic Church to complete transparency on these matters, now and in the future.
Father Tom Francis
Monastery of the Holy Spirit

Cistercians, those wacky Trappists! They keep you guessing.  Fred theorized that were we to drop in unexpectedly, we might well find Father Tom scrubbing the flagstones with a toothbrush.

Ah, it's now late in the afternoon, and my Hell begins to descend again.  I will do all I can to fight it off, starting with poetry.  Funny, but I am unfamiliar with Kora in Hell, Improvisations.  Dare I say that those poems are too young to help me, written before hell was properly understood? 

Yes, I do dare.

All these images in my hot head: Father Tom scrubbing floors for denouncing the Holy Father;  Ed and Murphy blessing people with big pots of grits and available toilets;  Joe Coppage, still crazy and still dead; Bottles of bitter white tablets, methadone;  Flaming arrows thudding against my body, stuck deep inside my pus-filled joints, female counterpoint to Saint Sebastian.

Take a few moments and enjoy this excerpt from Asphodel -- so lovely, so basic to our poetics, a protection against chaos.

Asphodel, That Greeny Flower
by William Carlos Williams


Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
like a buttercup
upon its branching stem-
save that it's green and wooden-
I come, my sweet,
to sing to you.
We lived long together
a life filled,
if you will,
with flowers. So that
I was cheered
when I came first to know
that there were flowers also
in hell.
Today
I'm filled with the fading memory of those flowers
that we both loved,
even to this poor
colorless thing-
I saw it
when I was a child-
little prized among the living
but the dead see,
asking among themselves:
What do I remember
that was shaped
as this thing is shaped?
while our eyes fill
with tears.
Of love, abiding love
it will be telling
though too weak a wash of crimson
colors it
to make it wholly credible.
There is something
something urgent
I have to say to you
and you alone
but it must wait
while I drink in
the joy of your approach,
perhaps for the last time.
And so
with fear in my heart
I drag it out
and keep on talking
for I dare not stop.
Listen while I talk on
against time.
It will not be
for long.
I have forgot
and yet I see clearly enough
something
central to the sky
which ranges round it.
An odor
springs from it!
A sweetest odor!
Honeysuckle! And now
there comes the buzzing of a bee!
and a whole flood
of sister memories!
Only give me time,
time to recall them
before I shall speak out.
Give me time,
time.
When I was a boy
I kept a book
to which, from time
to time,
I added pressed flowers
until, after a time,
I had a good collection.
The asphodel,
forebodingly,
among them.
I bring you,
reawakened,
a memory of those flowers.
They were sweet
when I pressed them
and retained
something of their sweetness
a long time.
It is a curious odor,
a moral odor,
that brings me
near to you.
The color
was the first to go.
There had come to me
a challenge,
your dear self,
mortal as I was,
the lily's throat
to the hummingbird!
Endless wealth,
I thought,
held out its arms to me.
A thousand tropics
in an apple blossom.
The generous earth itself
gave us lief.
The whole world
became my garden!
But the sea
which no one tends
is also a garden
when the sun strikes it
and the waves
are wakened.
I have seen it
and so have you
when it puts all flowers
to shame.
Too, there are the starfish
stiffened by the sun
and other sea wrack
and weeds. We knew that
along with the rest of it
for we were born by the sea,
knew its rose hedges
to the very water's brink.
There the pink mallow grows
and in their season
strawberries
and there, later,
we went to gather
the wild plum.
I cannot say
that I have gone to hell
for your love
but often
found myself there
in your pursuit.
I do not like it
and wanted to be
in heaven. Hear me out.
Do not turn away.
I have learned much in my life
from books
and out of them
about love.
Death
is not the end of it.
There is a hierarchy
which can be attained,
I think,
in its service.
Its guerdon
is a fairy flower;
a cat of twenty lives.
If no one came to try it
the world
would be the loser.
It has been
for you and me
as one who watches a storm
come in over the water.
We have stood
from year to year
before the spectacle of our lives
with joined hands.
The storm unfolds.
Lightning
plays about the edges of the clouds.
The sky to the north
is placid,
blue in the afterglow
as the storm piles up.
It is a flower
that will soon reach
the apex of its bloom.
We danced,
in our minds,
and read a book together.
You remember?
It was a serious book.
And so books
entered our lives.
The sea! The sea!
Always
when I think of the sea
there comes to mind
the Iliad
and Helen's public fault
that bred it.
Were it not for that
there would have been
no poem but the world
if we had remembered,
those crimson petals
spilled among the stones,
would have called it simply
murder.
The sexual orchid that bloomed then
sending so many
disinterested
men to their graves
has left its memory
to a race of fools
or heroes
if silence is a virtue.
The sea alone
with its multiplicity
holds any hope.
The storm
has proven abortive
but we remain
after the thoughts it roused
to
re-cement our lives.
It is the mind
the mind
that must be cured
short of death's
intervention,
and the will becomes again
a garden. The poem
is complex and the place made
in our lives
for the poem.
Silence can be complex too,
but you do not get far
with silence.
Begin again.
It is like Homer's
catalogue of ships:
it fills up the time.
I speak in figures,
well enough, the dresses
you wear are figures also,
we could not meet
otherwise. When I speak
of flowers
it is to recall
that at one time
we were young.
All women are not Helen,
I know that,
but have Helen in their hearts.
My sweet,
you have it also, therefore
I love you
and could not love you otherwise.
Imagine you saw
a field made up of women
all silver-white.
What should you do
but love them?
The storm bursts
or fades! it is not
the end of the world.
Love is something else,
or so I thought it,
a garden which expands,
though I knew you as a woman
and never thought otherwise,
until the whole sea
has been taken up
and all its gardens.
It was the love of love,
the love that swallows up all else,
a grateful love,
a love of nature, of people,
of animals,
a love engendering
gentleness and goodness
that moved me
and that I saw in you.
I should have known,
though I did not,
that the lily-of-the-valley
is a flower makes many ill
who whiff it.
We had our children,
rivals in the general onslaught.
I put them aside
though I cared for them.
as well as any man
could care for his children
according to my lights.
You understand
I had to meet you
after the event
and have still to meet you.
Love
to which you too shall bow
along with me-
a flower
a weakest flower
shall be our trust
and not because
we are too feeble
to do otherwise
but because
at the height of my power
I risked what I had to do,
therefore to prove
that we love each other
while my very bones sweated
that I could not cry to you
in the act.
Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
I come, my sweet,
to sing to you!
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Hear me out
for I too am concerned
and every man
who wants to die at peace in his bed
besides.


[excerpt from Poets.org -- I apologize for not reproducing the versification accurately.]