The Cheated Daughter - sad poem

So here is a sad story, and a sad poem to go with it. The saddest poem I've written in my life, I think. And, for me, the saddest story.

The story is like this: a woman from Japan married a man from New Zealand, and they had a child, a daughter.

Then, when the daughter was very, very young, her father exited her life. She ended up living in Japan while her dad spent a year -- more than a year, actually -- in New Zealand.

Finally, she was told (and belived it to be true) that her father was coming home. Soon.

But it wasn't.

It was not true.

He, the father, he was still in New Zealand, and planning to stay there until further notice, eating cherries, drinking wine and pondering (the big question now in his immediate present) just what kind of iPod to buy.

That's the story, and here, now, is the poem about this situation. I am a man who is going to be living in New Zealand until further notice, and both the story are the poem are, to my sorrow, autobiographical.

THE CHEATED DAUGHTER

The cheated daughter
Who is not yet two years of age,
The cheated daughter,
She thinks her father,
Who is me,
Is coming home.
She has been told,
And seems, despite her youth,
To understand,
That my arrival will be very soon.
Will be, in fact, tomorrow.
But it's a lie.
Tonight I should be on the plane.
But am I?
No.
I'm taking drugs and drinking cups of wine,
With cherries red to finish off the meal,
Drinking red wine with a woman not my wife
And discussing not my daughter but the iPod
She recommends and I, persuaded,
Might soon buy.
My airline ticket I traded in for cash
So I could stay and gratify my urgencies,
Choosing to shun my home and wife and daughter
To enjoy the maximum from the women who are waiting.
My plan --
It's wrong, I feel, and yet my resolution --
Is once again to lock away my cash,
And, bare of funds, to go and take up residence
In the major house where many know me well,
The house with many rooms and many women.
My plan is books and chocolates, leisured days,
Meals brought bedside and, of course,
The women.
This house, a place not called the Rising Sun,
Stands high above the harbor on the hill.
The house has rooms and in the rooms are bells
To call the waiting women to your bed.
They come when beckoned and minister to your needs,
Smiling and gracious in the face of your demands,
Poised by experience, in attitude professional,
Unembarrassed by the necessities of your flesh.
They've seen it all and nothing can surprise them;
They've seen it all and nothing leaves them shocked.
They take a pride in serving as they do,
And, in token of that pride,
Are dressed in nurses' uniforms.
Dressed in such uniforms because
Nurses, by profession, is what they are,
Bringing me deeper needles and stronger drugs,
The poisons that I need to kill or cure.

Recidivism

One of my favorite paintings is by Salvador Dali and is called SOFT CONSTRUCTION IN BOILED BEANS: PREMONITION OF CIVIL WAR.


This painting shows a tormented human figure which is in the process of tearing itself apart. The figure is gigantic, and is inspected by a neatly dressed observer, who is diminutive in comparison with the painting. This onlooker is uninvolved in the drama. Can't be a CIA analyst, because the CIA had not been invented back then. But that kind of person. The kind of person who takes a purely technical interest in how long the scorpion venom will take to work.

The painting dates, I believe, from before the advent of the Spanish civil war, which Salvador Dali evidently saw coming.

Parenthetically, my maternal grandmother was involved in the Spanish civil war, if only as an observer. Her husband was the skipper of a tramp ship which was running guns into Spain. Don't ask me for which side, because I don't know.

According to a family tradition, which I believed firmly when I was younger, but which I am less certain of now, at a certain time my grandmother was ashore in a Spanish seaport which fighting broke out.

And, if the story can be believed, when my grandmother headed back down the street, bound for the port area and her husband's ship, the two warring sides held their fire to let her pass.

If she didn't get back to the ship in time, she was in trouble. On one occasion, she got back late, and found her husband had sailed without her. Some days later, when they met up in another port, possibly Gibraltar, my grandmother chided her husband for his unchivalrous attitude, but he had been unrepentant. She has been late so he had sailed, "And, besides, I knew you'd be all right".

My grandmother had quite an interesting life, and went with the ship to, amongst other places, China and Japan.

Late in my grandmother's life, my mother asked her where she would like to go for a holiday together. Anywhere was okay. My mother was really expecting the answer to be in the form of a request for a trip somewhere in the British isles, which was where my grandmother lived. But, no, my grandmother wanted to go to Tunisia. Tunisia? Well, she'd been everywhere else. So they went.

My grandmother exits today's account at this point. So what is the account about? Well, it's about what I found in my notebooks.

Recently, I started looking through the notebooks I worked on during the months of last year, 2005, when I was receiving chemotherapy and radiation therapy. I figure it's time to sort through the notebooks and throw out any stuff which isn't useful.

Opening one notebook, I was surprised to find, written down on the flyleaf, a list of poems which I had absolutely no recollection of having written. One of the titles was SOFT CONSTRUCTION IN BOILED BEANS: PREMONITION OF RADIOTHERAPY.

The title looked very promising, so I turned to the poem, and was disappointed to find that only one line of it existed, "The color red is on vacation". Where that was supposed to go I had no idea.

Another poem I found was BUNKER BUSTERS, which is about a guy called George W., who, having warmed up by nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is itching to get going again and nuke more. But this poem was unfinished and I found I didn't have the impetus to get it done. Whoever George W. nukes next, it's unlikely to be me, and, selfish as it may seem, my own personal concerns, right at the moment, outweigh my concerns for planet Earth.

However, in the debris of the "under construction" site which was BUNKER BUSTERS, I found a line which looked promising. Well, not a line, exactly. Just two words: "headless giraffes". And this provided me with the inspiration I needed to write a more personal poem, RECIDIVISM, the text of which I give here.

RECIDIVISM

It seems I don't learn.
All these months,
I've learnt nothing.
The nation state
Incarcerated me,
Poured out its wealth
On tubes, poisons, monitors,
Round-the-clock vigilance
And hard radiation.
But I learnt nothing.
Did not,
In the final analysis,
Reform.
And so I'm going back
Where I've already been for far too long.
I have been too long
In the country of the headless giraffes.
There have been far
Far too many needles.
Being an apocalypse
Is not a smart career move.
Banks won't take it as collateral
And it's no good on your resume at all.
But here I am,
A recidivist,
Heading back to the cancer ward
Again.
Undeterred, it seems,
By the penalties:
Nurse Mutant raucous in the corridors at 2 a.m.,
And the unspeakable
Hospital food.
And capital punishment,
Too.
Might scare you
But it's nowhere near enough
To frighten off the likes of me.

Dying We Can Do Tomorrow

Dying We Can Do Tomorrow

Dying we can do tomorrow.
Today there are the demands of
Chocolate,
Icecream,
Coffee
And my daughter's arms
Outflung in an amazed "All mine!":
Splendid with possession,
Rejoicing
In the spectacle of presents
At her second-ever Christmas.