Gently Down the Dream

~for Robert H.

That morning I found myself

in my furniture’s way.

A fear of constellation

had gotten the better

of me, that and the call

from the social worker

telling me I’d better

come soon, so I set out

to make an otherwise

ordinary day 

my pilgrimage

to you.

That’s why I strapped 

an unfinished poem

to my chest

and headed north,

my heart veiled by

a preparatory web

of preyed upon words

no sheet of paper

was ready to hold.

Now that the hospice

allowed visitors 

I boarded the number 11

up to the rehab

only to find it

diminished in sheer style

by the abrupt magnificence

of a cathedral

ark-like

opposite it;

something breath-taking 

on an otherwise

humdrum avenue.

The hour threatened rain

and I felt content

to be umbrella-less.

I gladly welcomed

a torrent of tears

to sink into my 

weathered skin.

Inside the calm-colored walls

of Amsterdam House,

by the elevators

there was a picture

of a rowboat

abandoned on a shore,

it’s oars propped

sideways like

two flightless, if

beleaguered wings.

The doors slid 

unceremoniously open

and I entered

what felt like

a bright box

for arrousing

any and all visitor’s

trepidation. 

I pushed 7 

surprised to be

the sole occupant.

Symmetry shut

it’s doors

with an

indifferent sigh

causing my heart

to tremble 

inside my life vest.

I imagined myself

 already

on a ship

at the bottom

of the ocean

even while surfacing

to a faith-based promise 

of safety

in the sky.

Instead

the elevator opened

on the 7th floor

to a vacant,

rather pedestrian

hospital wing.

A delicate Asian woman 

was hovering 

over a pushcart stocked

with sterile items.

“Which way is room 112?”

I asked trying

to appear harmless

even as the poem 

ticked like a bomb

inside my chest.

She signaled me

to the last door

at the end of the hall

on the right

and I continued

forward as if

walking the plank

dreading

the inevitability

of my own splash.

Please know me

I thought to

myself

as I entered

the room

at the end

of another

man’s life.

You lay flat

but perpendicular

like a holy mural,

horizontal

and vertical

all at once.

Your body

a slip of a thing, 

the sole focus of

the vacant room,

composed as if

to prove 

every man

was destined

to die alone.

This tableau

is still

unforgettable

as it felt

infused with

the gentle peace

of dim light

intruding

from the window;

a Hopper

crossed with

a Magritte.

The room spoke

the language

of stillness,

 broken only by

the gentle 

determination

of your

tenacious

inner bellows,

as if life

were all

your body 

knew how

to do.

Your breathing

washing away 

it’s prints as

on a distant beach,

each exhalation

leaving no 

trace of

all your dreaming.

Standing at the foot

of your bed

I was awed

by the tenacity of

what appeared

a corpse

breathing

through

the shape of

a scream.

The white sheet

which hid your

wasted limbs

like birch branches

riddled with scars

for eyes.

You who had attended 

Yale Drama School.

You who had garnered raves

for your performances in The Times.

You who could be found

on a rowing machine

down at the Health Club

every morning at 9:00.

You who’s catheter put an end

to your swimming but

who’d show up

just to watch others 

enjoying the water.

You who had said

again and again

“I don’t belong in this world”.

You who spent entire days

alone in your well kemp studio,

who loved nothing more

than to be visited

by absolutely anyone.

You who leaned into a walker

like nobodies business.

What was this final stasis

meant to impart?

God, I thank you

for letting it be me

to sit at the foot

of your bed

even if

I drown in 

a sea of tears,

my body

an unlikely

but willing

 vessel

to hold

us both.

This is why 

I am here.

To assure you

your dream of life

was real

and to

insist that

the last words 

you hear

will be 

“I love you”.

Peter Valentyne

June 29th, 2020

Dispatches

from the Border

of Night and Day

This is where I always 

come to.

Just beyond the battle,

clutching my pillow

like an empty automatic

dissolving in my hands

as my drama

becomes

its gradual farce.

A scattering of stand-ins

make for the hills

as again I am

deserted and

left for dead.

Except I’m not dead

because I always

manage to crawl out,

if only

half alive.

So rather than be drafted

I learned to enlist.

Sometimes I fall in love

not knowing that at dawn

I will never see you again. 

Next life? But

a next life never comes.

Only the shadows

of those I thought 

were real.

What if we could live

without this rift

between us? 

Or at least I try

and imagine so.

Until none of it 

is or will ever

be true again.

I keep telling myself

the sun comes up

as the moon goes down.

But that isn’t right

because for a time

 both occupy

the same sky

like familiar strangers.

That makes more sense.

I need more light.

Again and again

I wake up

 dying

or am I

falling asleep

in order for 

another

to live?

Either way

we are twins

destined to

slowly forget

each other.

For instance, 

I forget I live

in a tower

and not the room

of a crying child.

Once I played

with soldiers

in a sandbox.

Now I’m digging

a trench on a beach

to bury his memory.

Its the only way

I know how to grow.

Even the stars 

pinprick my thin skin.

In the same way

mirrors never

make me feel

less alone.

Why don’t they?

But night has its uses

and so does sleep.

Every night I ask myself

who has passed down

this story of surrender?

And why is the protagonist

always killed off 

in mid-stream

like a thief

smuggling rations

to the front? 

Every night is a war

no one ever makes it out alive.

Or do they?

Now, here at the border

between night and day,

I am a twin separated

by the birth of

the other.

This poem,

my last letter

from the front.

Peter Valentyne

June 25th, 2020

The following piece is in response to having shared a poem I found relevant with a friend and being asked in a text “What do you get from this, Peter?”.

On Theodore Roethke’s “In a Dark Time”

In a Dark Time

BY THEODORE ROETHKE

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;   

I hear my echo in the echoing wood—

A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

I live between the heron and the wren,   

Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul

At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!   

I know the purity of pure despair,

My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.   

That place among the rocks—is it a cave,   

Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!

A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,   

And in broad day the midnight come again!   

A man goes far to find out what he is—

Death of the self in a long, tearless night,   

All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.   

My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,   

Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?

A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.   

The mind enters itself, and God the mind,   

And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

These are dark times. The news is filled with daily shootings and hateful speech.  I think of poetry as one of our surest consolations. It can't do much about the fear and violence running rampant in our world right now, but it testifies through taking responsibility, and speaking it’s truth out loud. Honesty may be poetry's best gift as  I feel poets have the one of the most potent chances to say what needs to be said about how we can think and feel more precisely and truthfully about one another. However, poets/poetry isn’t prone to play by the rules of society. Poetry is naturally subversive, even rebellious, and is quick to use our expectations against us. Every poem is a wake up call. As it’s been said, there’s more in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophies. I’ll say more on dreams after I attempt to briefly dissect (ugh!) Theodore Roethke’s poem “In a Dark Time”.

I see Roethke’s poem ”In a Dark Time" as a poem about understanding oneself. It begins: "In a dark time, the eye begins to see," setting the tone for images of paradox that reveal universal truths about self-knowledge and the reality of identity in the "I" we all seemingly must possess.This first line feels like the thesis statement of the poem: that in darkness one can see oneself more clearly, perhaps because there is nothing else to see; or, perhaps because it is a low point in one's life, when looking inward is necessary for growth. But this self-knowing can be perilous, as the "I" one sees when in one’s worst emotional state is not the true "I" that is one’s….for the lack of a better word: soul. 

Roethke goes on to write, 

"I meet my shadow in the deepening shade" 

and in the same verse ends with, 

"I live between / ... beasts of the hill and serpents of the den."

I feel he is describing his "I" or self, as well as his "eye" or vision of himself (in a play on words). He uses nature imagery throughout the poem, describing a winding path, a cave, the moon, a storm, a fly, and the wind to illustrate adverse, if vaguely sinister forces.

I suspect when he says he "lives between" it is because he is experiencing a lack of unity, seeing himself and wondering which "I" is the real one—the watcher or the watched?

The last verse echoes the first:

"Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire,"

which again contradicts—is he light or dark, and is the darkness full of evil thoughts that alienate him from himself?

He repeats events that make no sense in the middle of the poem:, 

"And in broad day the midnight come again!" 

The last two lines of this poem are:

"The mind enters itself, and God the mind

And one is One, free in the tearing wind."

The split, first between "I" and "eye," continues as Roethke presents disjointed images from the natural world ("a night flowing with birds, a ragged moon"). His inability to find wholeness in himself grows until God enters the picture. Yet I think the last two lines resolve all his issues. In God, his sense of being split into two—the watcher and the watched—is finished. He is free, although nature ("the tearing wind") is still present—but now outside of him.

Roethke states that "death of the self" is what he seeks, but it's impossible for him to know his true self when he identifies with his despair. Through God, he sees the "I" clearly, and claims a unity of self.

Roethke as a poet seems to be insisting that a plunge to the bottom of the abyss of psychological disorientation and dislocation of identity is necessary to achieve clarity. There must be painful struggle, though, before this end is reached. 

I learned to write my own poetry from my dreams, as every night I am mocked by shadow experiences that follow no rules of conduct and manage to subversively excite and depress me from within. Being that half my life is lived in this way, days devoted to the literal, nights negating it, a continuous dance between expansion and contraction…I realized that I could reveal as much to myself by paying attention to my interior voices as I might learn from a friend, enemy, or person bent on impressing upon me their own agenda. Since all of life’s greatest motivators are made of an un-manipulatable grace….happiness, love, sadness, anger….these things all arrive like guests (invited or uninvited) to which we can choose to host or cast out. As an experienced host in my own home (and my community) I always set out to be welcoming in attitude no matter who arrives, providing fresh linens so to speak, good food, respectfulness, appreciation, attention, acknowledgment, etc. These guests come to show me themselves in two distinct ways. The face they want me to see and the one they may very well conceal. That’s what a poem is for;  a sacred space for the marriage and reconciliation of both realities in service of the light.

Peter Valentyne

June 22, 2020

The Year of Living Defenselessly

Mornings begin with an untraceable bruise,

a sudden gray cloud in an otherwise blue sky.

Is this how my body resolves its emotions?

One wound at a time.

Maybe I’m wrestling angels unaware.

Buddhist monks are known

to clock you with a stick

to get your attention.

Have I really joined that club?

I live a re-purposed life

since my romance lost face.

My passion now lives in my hands.

What that simply means is

I can no longer be taken at face value.

There is no such thing as strength.

To be alive is to opt for vulnerability.

There is no such thing as a superman.

Wisdom merely leads to more bewilderment.

Did you think it would make you safe?

Hardly. Everything will still hurt.

From now on I am keeping a low profile.

I’m content to be more than I seem.

Try imagining outgrowing your history

and you will begin to understand me.

Most faces take too much precedence.

Like a sucker on a flavorless stick.

If only we could choose our flavor.

Or maybe we can.

What does your life taste like?

Mine tastes the color blue.

Momentarily.

I’d like to officially disown the word dream.

Like the word God

it has no business being a noun.

Better to rise to action as a verb.

Better to be Godly than a God.

Otherwise, how else to get involved?

I’d like to bring Godly down to earth.

God can only be heard vacuuming

like Monroe upstairs when you 

really came to meet Miller.

A total distraction!

I’m afraid of zombies 

and zombie words.

No, I suspect them.

It’s the difference between

being jaded and being detached.

One responds to the moment

while the other is barely present.

Imagine what it would mean

to make everything from scratch.

Not to worry. 

What’s needed is not material.

Nor is it immaterial.

For example:

I’m making this day

this very moment.

Now you try.

Peter Valentyne

June 9th, 2020