Stroke by Matthew Dickman

This poem really struck me, because I have a close friend who’s just had a stroke, in his fifties. I believe Matthew Dickman was only in his early forties when this happened to him. I wanted to know what it felt like and Matthew is forensic about how his body and brain felt, so now I have a sense of what my friend is experiencing. This poem first appeared in Rattle.

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The hotel sign blinking in the brain of my body stops blinking but not the whole sign, you know, just a couple of the letters, the H and T. Then the E and L so all that is left when the whole left side of my body comes to an end is the O. I am sitting across from a beautiful woman, drinking coffee, and she is asking me what I did. What were you doing when you were in your twenties, she asks. And I am saying something like I was doing a lot of drugs but the words come out all slurred, they come out like pushing your tongue through a clay door, the word drug becoming droog. And then free-will floats up and out, really it flies, it leaps off the ledge of me, and I remember while falling from my chair to the ground, trying to apologize. The half of my brain that was still alive, as alive as a deer standing in a meadow in the morning licking dew off the blades of grass, telling what was left of me that I was just tired. You’re just tired the left side of my brain said, you’re just tired, this is normal. The normal not normal blood clot in the right side of my brain wiping everything away like a teacher wiping chalk away with an eraser, the blackboard full of signs and cosines and then just long strokes of white, a white field in winter, a white sky before rain. A white sheet of paper. Through the tunnel of my body I could hear someone ask me are you ok? My whole life someone asking me, and so often it was me, are you ok, are you feeling well? I’m just tired, I thought.And then this thought: I’m not. A hand on the hand I could still feel. They are coming, the voice said, it’s ok, you will be ok. The sound then of the ambulance from far off. The sirens getting closer, lights and sirens approaching my body from a street far off. That’s something I never thought of before. That sirens are always approaching a body, that’s the whole reason for them, to let everyone know there is a body. I thought of my son at home, seventeen months old, pointing to the window in the living room, saying siren, siren, siren,and up, up, up. I was lifted up onto the gurney, my shirt cut off in the ambulance, and arriving at the hospital, the triage nurse asking, are you Matthew Dickman. Yes. Up, up, up,I thought. Death is not a design, not an idea. Death is the body, I know this now, it’s your arms and legs, your whole cardio vascular system. It is the whole of us, only we walk around enough to think it isn’t. The blood clot is doing its job, it’s doing exactly what it was made to do and the only thing you need to do when you are dying is to die. Nothing else. You don’t need to fold the laundry or clean the kitchen floor, you don’t have to pick your children up from school. Unlike the rest of your life, there is only this one thing. You don’t even have to be good at it, you just have to do it. A list of chores with just one chore. In the operating room I’m awake,made to stay awake, while the surgeon threads a “line” through the artery in my groin and up through all the rooms, through the room of my legs, and the room of my chest, through the room of my neck and into the room of my brain. When I put my son to bed I give him a bottle of milk, and rock him and sing, it’s time to rest your body, it’s time to rest your mind,it’s time, oh it’s time to rest your brains. The surgeon is able to grab the clot and slip it through and out of all the rooms, into the one he’s working in. I can hear everyone in the operating room clapping because they are happy, because it took that one try to get it all, to remove the clot, and then the left side of me begins to move again, and there it is, I have to pee, my body is done with this death. And now there is nothing to do but wait for the next death. I have never been more inside than that moment. I have never wanted anything as much as I wanted to stand up in that room and walk out through the automatic doors to you, to walk right into your arms like walking into the sea. Matthew Dickman: ‘When I suffered a stroke in April 2018, I wasn’t sure that I would write poems again. Of course I could physically write a poem. I was lucky that I was in a public place when the stroke occurred and got help right away. It’s just that mentally I felt lost and alone and angry. But with any of the trauma I have experienced in my life it was always poetry that called me back to myself, back to the world—even if that world had changed dramatically. This poem was a calling back.’

Easter by Roisín Kelly

As it’s Easter, and Roisín is one of Cork’s own (well, we claim her!) here’s her lovely poem, which first appeared in The Guardian. Just had to share it on my blog:

You walk by holding a bunch of flowers
never knowing that you’ve just performed a miracle.
Are those flowers for your girl?
I imagine her dressed up like an Easter egg
in yellow and pink. I’d tap at you like an egg,
cracking your thin chocolate shell.
If I were made of chocolate too, I’d break
off parts of myself to give to you and your girl.
Once, I gave my words for garden
and water and moonlit and love
to a man who kissed me. After he rolled
a stone over my heart and shut me off
from the world, I had no words left
to describe the dark dream that followed.
Now you’ve walked by, godlike in jeans
and an old t-shirt, the sun glinting on one
silver earring. Now a rose is once again
not only rose but also soft and red
and thorn and bee and honey.
Now a bird is singing song and tree
and nest in a high place and blue speckled egg.
You yourself are glowing with words, they move
up and down you as if they’re alive.
The words bring themselves to me
and tell my tongue sweetness over and over.
The words are everything. With them,
I’ll turn water to wine at your wedding.

And here’s Carol Rumens’ analysis of the poem. Hope she doesn’t mind me sharing it:

From Mercy, the first full-length collection by the young Belfast-born poet, Róisín Kelly, Easter seems to have a special glow to it. And no, the glow isn’t only that of romantic love. The latter is a strong contributory factor, of course: its pains are rekindled for the speaker when her ex-boyfriend walks by “holding a bunch of flowers”. The question “Are those flowers for your girl?” contextualises it a little, while retaining the tonal mystery. Is the voice angry, sarcastic, sorrowful? We might guess it’s all three.

I like the mixed emotions playing throughout the earlier passages of the poem, and how they are finally resolved. Easter eggs initially supply the poetic calories. All three players in the love triangle are turned into chocolate, the man’s current girlfriend being a particularly sickly and triumphant example “dressed up … / in yellow and pink”. The man is seen as the more vulnerable.

Writing a kind of verse letter to the man in question, the speaker imagines tapping him and “cracking your thin chocolate shell”. Birth may be suggested, but death occurs first. She imagines her own comic-extreme self-sacrifice, breaking off parts of her chocolate self to give the man and his girl.

Later on, imagery from the Passion of Christ recalls the numbness and sense of being buried alive “after he rolled / a stone over my heart / and shut me off from the world”. Probably the same boyfriend was the culprit, though not necessarily. Kelly’s change of pronoun leaves it ambiguous. The “sepulchre” analogy is pitched high, yet it’s also faithful to the experience of severe depression, a suffocating stone that’s all too real.

Now the speaker returns the ex-lover to mortal form, a little self-mockingly at first – “godlike in jeans / and an old t-shirt, the sun glinting on one / silver earring”. The mood has changed, perhaps with the recovery of simultaneously erotic and sublimated feelings.

Words withheld and words given become the dominant theme. In line nine, the first of the special, italicised words and phrases, garden, helps the transition to biblical analogy. There is an implied betrayal. But the words are magically potent. They ignite the rose, although they include thorn. They produce birds who lay “blue speckled egg(s)” in nests high in trees. Kelly’s italics slow the reader, so we savour these archetypal symbols, these ordinary happy words, and, importantly, imagine them as the especially meaningful gifts originally offered in the poet’s native Irish language.

Six lines from the end, the poet turns on her full power with that marvellous image of the man clothed in, covered in, words that “move / up and down you, as if they’re alive”. Most significantly, “the words bring themselves to me / and tell my tongue sweetness over and over”. They enable the speaker to find her own words and “The words are everything…” Once more, I was reminded of a passage from the New Testament: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. And the word was God.”

Out of the rediscovery of inspiration and language comes the generosity of forgiveness – and, of course, the miracle. A miracle was first attributed to the man in the poem’s second line: now, an old-new miracle is performed by the speaker. What could be more generous than turning water to wine at a rival’s wedding feast? And of course the wine is also the poet’s gift-to-self – part of her own word feast, now freely flowing.

Easter appears in the forthcoming collection, Mercy, to be published by Bloodaxe Books in 2020.