DEE WILSON CONSULTING
Poetry Review:
Doctor-Poet attracts attention
Still (a poem)
Laura Kolbe
I rarely pay much attention to poetry in The New York Review of Books or The New Yorker. However, every once in awhile I quickly scan a few lines of a poem which captures my full attention. On p. 21 of The April 10 NYR, there is a poem, "Still," by Laura Kolbe who is a doctor and medical ethicist, as well as a poet. Perhaps the reason for giving this poem my full attention will be quickly apparent.
Still
Tell me about the final day my body—
full as it’ll go without yet changing
size or shape, denser than it ever packed
itself, the last day of Body-Before
—will still not show, when mirror still
won’t mark how underflesh
has no reserve, no extra give or compress
left, the airless torso sedimented on
a pelvic leaded glass, tell me which will be
the last time I look at me while
old body’s custardy silt still anchors
to the barque of how I am.
Say a month. Say tomorrow. Say not now.
Was it just now? Won’t I know it till it
happened and adrift? Won’t I look on
non-self me and algebraize its changes?
Is fear-of-future mash note to the past?
Oh, shameless how I loved Old Me,
prancing, boozing,
flinging my life into crosswalks like salt
into boiling water, latching to friends
like a pig-lead brooch. I was a mean sibyl
and a sleepy drunk, rocking on the sunup
subway while the girl beside me
on the bench curled her lashes
with a metal teaspoon,
honest to goodness, rinsed it with a little
spit, ate with it a carton of yogurt on
her way to whatever work requires
both those sacraments. I, covered
in eyes as hide can be when polished by
the mammoth chamois of light rain on
a Friday night. How I envy now those rinses
of the slipshod and august. O Old Me,
your morosity at noon, your blackened
silver, filthy toenails, doctrines, surmises,
hand between coat buttons like a general
astride a chain of sparkling islands!
Have I changed yet outwardly? And is
outward only dingy wrapper on the real?
Or does container flavor what it clasps,
alter it, the applesauce smell of wrist
under watchband? Like peregrine becoming
nearly pet inside its hood. Tell me it’s
the last day of Before and I’ll go a-mousing,
sink my beak beneath the fur of one
last clappered heart. How I feel even now
the meat swell under my skin,
warm the craw.
Say it’s good as here, this change in
body’s faithless shape. Say it’s good.
Say still. Say when.
-- Dee Wilson