Richard Kravitz is a psychiatrist at the VA Hospital in West Haven, Connecticut.
In the Spring 2022 issue of Intima, Woods Nash offers us an anti-eulogy. The true words he provides, “I’m not here to lie,” in “Lyric Appendage at the Dali Museum,” are not the loving description of the deceased. They are the forlorn, futile but precisely observed cries of the mourner. The narrator notices the little flying object in the Dali painting he’s looking at, “tiny wings and a dab of shadow,” that he associates to a gull he had noticed earlier, now gone, lost (might this be a reference to Auden’s great poem, “La Musée des Beaux Arts,” in which the everyman turns away from the drowned, fallen Icarus in a Brueghel painting?). Nash pays attention. He takes note. He will witness even without understanding. “How could casual and casualty have anything in common?” He considers the elongated piano in the painting, the “lyric appendage,” as a possible instrument of consoling song, but, like a door pictured in the distance, it is “tremendously closed.” Even the image of the gull, to which he returns, he rejects as vanishing under the weight of grief, of the desolate loss of direction he feels in the face of the senseless, unexpected death of his friend. It is eulogy as testimony (how can testimony and testimonial have anything in common?).
In my poem “With My 20-Year-Old Son” (Intima, Fall 2022), the narrator, too, starts from a condition of being lost, wandering in a wilderness, “without consolation.” But my poem can’t tolerate the desperation Nash expresses and represents. How does it find the narrator a way out of perdition? First, it offers a mythopoetic solution. The narrator will become a guardian angel to his afflicted child, to forever protect him. But that’s not a real path out of the wilderness. It’s the recognition that the son, whatever the threat of illness, of blindness, is not lost. That recognition and the accompanying feeling of gratitude provide the consolation the narrator so desperately needs.
One might say our two poems occupy a region adumbrated by the word “grace,” a region we often find ourselves in when faced with illness or death. In Nash’s poem, the narrator remains lost; in my poem, he is gratefully found.
Richard Kravitz is a psychiatrist at the VA Hospital in West Haven, Connecticut.