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Stories of Lost Children
Excerpts from "Harpo Marx at Prayer"
by Saul Bennett, Author of soon to be released "Harpo Marx at Prayer", Woodstock, New York SHOPPING Around the third year following her death
in her twenties, you find your child has advanced from offspring to colleague,
and peer. As she has no longer a life, discussions center less on events personal,
more on those worldly. Imagine, as for example, strolling behind a cart you roll
together with her in a supermarket aisle, going on about your problems at work,
confiding your delinquency again on life insurance payments, questioning France's
motives in Iraq – will, that one's extreme. Oddly, then, a dead child drifts, over time, into
a spouse. Odder, you find yourself expressing her response to your view
on such topics to her mother, who stares.
MOVE Emptying at last her dresser drawer I fell
across a tidy swarm Of ticket stubs – Mets, Knicks, St. John's, Triple A
ball on vacations, Rock, the odd horse show. Late 80's, early 90's.
Adrift alone In that bog my eye hooked a '96, cheering me,
for, after all, dead, She had, aneurysms, brain, dropped at 24 in '94. Or, for
that eternity, Had she? Or thought had hooked. Swear.
Honestly.
BELOW I was struck today by the number of poems
inhabiting basements; shopping for our child's
coffin in the funeral parlor underground; retreating to our basement at home, alone, to scream,
evenings, once the drug of early mourning wore off;
ascending, at last, from beneath to the curb, carting for garbage our mourner's hard
box seats, treasured there a year and a month
past shiva; journeying down after delaying two years to exhume for Cerebral Palsy
her cartoned clothes. Maybe, I don't know,
below poems mean to stress to me I live today, as a practical matter, there.
FLIGHT NUMBER WHATEVER On the air a woman whose child went down
in an unsolved terrorist fashioned crash
was saying No! – she was not
a better person for her pain.
Worse! – angry, envious, small, ruined.
"Where," she ragged, "is justice?" Father of a child, 24, dead, suddenly,
naturally, I felt relieved,
as another, at least, whom I never
would catch and perhaps hope
to mutilate had not murdered mine.
HOWEVER
Usually the eyes fold first. No longer
water repellent they burn just a torch
before beginning to sear your insides
out. Composure is important. The wet
can be arrested if you will only stretch to their
limit your eyes, breathing deeply. However, lacerations pierce your throat,
a terrific stale burn renewed.
at the same time, a certain trailing
soreness sets inside your right eye (if you are
left handed, as am I; I can't speak
if the reverse is so). A vague press
upon your stomach could follow. However, your right remains your main
concern, though over time – half
a minute perhaps – that fire passes,
as do you, into what passes
for a present, after another
unscheduled visit to the bank
of memory of your dead child.
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