in pittsburgh, i could be someone else. i dyed my hair purple; i spit in the face of a maitre d’; i ingested something i really shouldn’t have; i took care of people who ingested things they really shouldn’t have; i wore a cat-in-the-hat hat and a plastic cow necklace almost exclusively; i forgot my vitamins and spent all my money; i kissed someone on the lift up the monongahela incline; i kissed a hidden statue of the virgin mary at duquesne university; i lied about being in pittsburgh when really i was in boston, hurting someone’s feelings beyond repair.
although i lived only 100 miles from it for years, pittsburgh has remained this weekendly surreal place to me. someone who knew me then still lives there, and he sent me this incredible poem this morning:
“Pittsburgh”
And my beautiful daughter
had her liver cut open in Pittsburgh
My God, my God! I rubbed
her back over the swollen and wounded
essentiality, I massaged
her legs, and we talked of death.
At the luckiest patients with liver cancer have
a 20% chance. We might have talked
of my death, not long to come. But no,
the falling into death of a beautiful
young woman so much more important.
A wonderful hospital. If I must die
away from my cat Smudge and my Vermont Castings stove
let it be at Allegheny General.
I read to her, a novella by Allan Gurganus,
a russian serious flimsiness by Voinovich,
and we talked. We laughed. We actually
laughed. I bought her a lipstick
which she wore though she disliked the color.
Helicopters tooks off and landed on the hospital pad,
bringing hearts and kidneys and maybe livers
from other places to be transplanted
into people in the shining household of technology
by shining technologists, wise and kindly.
The chances are so slight. Oh, my daughter,
my love for you has burgeoned —
an excess of singularity ever increasing —
you are my soul — for forty years. You
still beautiful and young. In my motel
I could not sleep. In my woods, on my
little farm, in the blizzard on the mountain,
I could not sleep either, but scribbled
fast verses, very fast and
wet with my heartsblood and brainjuice
all my life, as now
in Pittsburgh. I don’t know which of
us will live longer, it’s all a flick
of the wrist of the god mankind invented
and then had to deinvent, such a failure, like all
our failures, and the worst and best
is sentimentality after all. Let us go out together.
Here in brutal Pittsburgh. Let us
be together in the same room,
the old poet and the young painter,
Each time I travel through
the pass, a change occurs,
as the rain-fed,
rain-gorged,
lush green blossoming
of moss and mold gives way
to white slopes of snow.It is like the moment
after I say goodbye.
We become ourselves
for a slow moment
I want to lengthen
between us.
