Emily
helped heal me this morning. Emily
and two more hours of sleep. I'm not saying this as irony, although I
can see how it might seem so. But I'm remembering a Norman Mailer
assertion in perhaps Advertisements
for Myself that
some works of art can cure terminal cancer. As an example, he quotes
part of a scene in William Burroughs's Naked
Lunch
describing open heart surgery being done with a toilet plunger. A
theme in all of Mailer’s work I recall was his shock-and-awe attack
on the boundaries of propriety, I could see how a sophomoric plunger
scene in a work of “serious literature” would have aroused
his admiration, perhaps even provoking it
enough
to have assuaged a hangover if not obliterated something
catastrophic, as with Norman Cousins’s claimed laughing away a
crippling bout of ankylosing
spondylitis.
I’m
hoping my morning malaise was nothing more than a combination of
allergies, tail end of the flu, and a sudden claustrophobic
alienation from friends herding online
to hide their growing political anxiety.
Feeling the onset of a low-grade panic myself, with a dizziness I
sensed might floor me, I crashed for a
little more
sleep. Awoke feeling a little stronger, yet still torpid, weak,
dispirited…
...a
desperately friendly gathering
brought back
my
sense of balance.
This
from Emily,
setting the scene for a heart-bridging exchange between two women who
apparently have nothing in common.
A
less
robust
audacity than the
sort to roust a
Mailerian hangover
perhaps,
but
the more curative for its subtlety—an antidote for the toxic
social-media-required
swift, surface judgment. Yes, “desperately friendly” describes
many comment threads as they beg instant harmony,
and the
odd subterranean
note
can
intrude
like a deliberate belch in choir practice.
Emily’s
audacity (switching from title to voice
now) is that she reports her sightings with a poet’s sensibility,
not the bluster of a Mailer rebel. Two women with nothing in common
who accidentally
meet
on Facebook will soon become
invisible
to each other. In the flesh, at the desperately
friendly gathering,
Emily tries a little harder after the other woman looks at her with
starving
eyes.
Driven to
survive
this moment, Emily tells
her
she’d heard it
was she
who
brought the honey in front of them on the potluck table.
“Oh
yes,
the woman eagerly responds. Her eyes relax. It’s
rosemary honey. We also brought cheeses from upstate New York. Try
some. They go together well.”
It
is
a short, outwardly simple poem—as
are all
twenty-nine
in Emily—but
like a perfect note played by a master violinist
its overtones reach far beyond the
moment
and resonate long afterward in sublime memory. In an instant this
morning Rosemary
Honey
reached
all of the way inside me, touching and reassuring my starving heart.
I felt
something heal.
Ah
yes, Emily of Emily
is a child of Beate Sigriddaughter. No doubt of this. There’s her
dance with joy and innocence. Her dance with disillusionment,
disappointment, remembered horrors. Her hope for meaning, for the
whisper of Divine. Her gratitude.
She’s
a morning child, loving the excitements she knows await her for the
day, remembering her breathless
elfin adoration,
and feeling she was still
good enough for life.
Even
Sunday mornings at church with her indifferent husband and the
preacher insulting
women from the pulpit as is so often the case,
she enjoys the freedom to wear her hat and to bask in the choir’s
voices, her
time to sit and soar in private beauty.
She’s
ambivalent, a bit of a pushover, as a child giving up her allowance
to a fellow camper soliciting for a
worthy cause, but
disliking the girl from then on. As an adult, avoiding the sidewalk
in front of a church where a beggar hangs out, her soul
feels dusty and defensive.
Oh,
Emily has a sense of humor, she does. To celebrate this, I’ll give
you the entire poem, called 16th
Street Mall Shuttle:
On
the way home from riding the roller coaster
twice,
once in the front car, still fizzy with thrill,
Emily
sits down on the mall shuttle, then notices
a
small black man, even older than she is,
standing,
leaning on a cane. All other seats
are
taken. She jumps up and offers him her seat.
“No
thanks, he says with a wrinkled smile,
“but
you could give me a blow job.
Do
something that’s really useful.” She turns
her
head. Above them a sign reads
“Cancer
cures smoking.”
Give
Emily
a look. She’ll see you, hear you, feel you. Heal you.
Get your copy here: Emily
