Sister Wigberta

Dad hanging onto the pier

after his ship has sailed on

astounds his daughter--she is old, too--
Her father was a battleship.

How many times did she surrender
and see her little skiff dismembered!

Her sire was a man of war; she, a very quiet
pirate, has dressed in a black flag for years--

Now he's just a little buoy
floating on an unresponsive sea--

Aides prop him up; insignificance bobs.
Things won't be very different now

and quieter. Did she love him? She smiles--
The wreck of her life corresponds with a void.



This was first published in The Bryant Literary Review, Vol. 18, 2017

Before this poem was accepted by BLR, it was rejected by a magazine, the editor of which informed me that she had no desire to print a poem about sexual abuse. This interpretation was news to me, but I suppose it is possible. From my point of view, it's about a troubled father-daughter relationship, an abusive one, yes, but not necessarily a sexually abusive one. Sister Wigberta, by the way, was the name of a nun at the Thomas Morus Burse in Freiburg, Germany, where I lived 1965-1966. One of her main functions was to check our rooms periodically, in order to see to it that no student took down the obligatory cross from the wall. Sister Wigberta, where are you now?

For Trees on Tu B'Shevat

Your roots are literal and you

actually reach for the sky—

Each trunk is a capital “I”—

How peaceful it must be to be

first person singular figuratively!

Even one leaf banishes despair,

(metaphorically speaking, one strand

Of hair)--You never gray, you gold,

red, and brown; and, unlike ours,

season after season yours faithfully

comes back.  Fed by lifelines of

centuries-old, lithe and

organically willed-to-live veins,

leaves restore youth every spring.

Take a stand for challenged oaks

is not a command—Even when

gnawed during youth, yes, even if

crippled by long-since-dead deer,

oaks don’t need encouragement;

every one rises as high as it can.

Adult coiffures become canopies,

only 3% of sunlight reaches kids—

Yet saplings accept what they get,

and, most unlike us, never complain.

Tough love!  Yet If they received light

as they’d like, they’d grow too fast and

become deadly-thin.  I just read a book

(pages of tree flesh) that asserts roots

talk to each other via vast networks of

underground wires, fungi their go-betweens;

what do they say?  “Bagworms are

devouring us!  Constellate defenses,

neighbors!”  In one word: survive.

Choose life--Brothers, sisters, I am

a tree, you are a tree, long máy we

all flourish and seek sunlight yet!



This poem first appeared in The Deronda Review, Vol. 7, number 2

Lear as an Aging Musician

Your hyponthenar eminence is thin--
Your elbow hurts.  You've been
exercising without support. Sun's
not setting yet, my dear; it's ulnar.

I've been saying such for months.
Hand, wobbly as an unstable moon
less than a nano light-second away
from a saturnine planet, my face,

Age is like dark energy: gnarled digits
tremble, obeying an unseen force
no one really understands.  Old man,
(by the way, your handwriting sucks),

don't be afraid of that approaching star--
It's not a gas giant; nor is it God;
as Buddha taught, it's not like
anything else. Non-legato sounds--

You never trilled like that before. Life!
Did Lear expect a perpetuum mobile
composed by a bloodless neutrinio?
Play on, play one, while you can. Still,

still: sometimes I feel like an orphan
in a decomposing rocket
hurtling toward a quiet place--
Eternal spring? It's about to explode.:

Thomas Dorsett

Notes: this poem was recentlty published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, (JAMA, October 24/31, 2017, Vol. 318, Number 16).
The first stanza needs some explaining for a non-medical audience.  While I was playing the piano, I noticed a tremor in the third and fourth fingers of each hand.  I thought sure I had multiple sclerosis.  I went to the neurologist, who informed me that I had been doing too much weight lifting without protection.  The hypothenar eminence is the ridge along the palm beneath the fifth finger.  It carries the ulnar nerve which enervates the fourth and fight fingers.  Mine was a bit wasted due to too much exercise.  It was not multiple sclerosis; the tremor was due to chronic irritation of the ulnar nerve. (The ulnar nerve is most vulnerable at the so-called "funny bone," the inner area of the elbow.)
Question: in the last line, is it the rocket about to explode or spring?  Or both?  I leave the answer to that question to the reader.

Who Was That Glum Passer-by?

A toddler with a gun--
The toddler is forty-seven
and weighs 200 pounds--
He's a software engineer,
he's unemployed,
he works at Walmart.

As you might have supposed,
he likes hamburgers, pizza, beer--
Surprise, the toddler also eats
broccoli, kumquats, quinoa
and kale; he listens to rap,

Andrea Bocelli, bluegrass, and Bach--
I remember how he used to scream
right in the middle of Woolworth's--
My doctor told me to ignore him--
I ignored him for twenty-six years.

You better not cut him off
on the highway;
you better not call him a cracker,
you better not call him a thug--
One of them hated my brother for a few seconds;
that was enough.

You're so unlike them,
you work hard and vote.
Your loves are freedom,
money, vermillion lips,
and, of course, guns.  You imagine
you're safe as the toddler
you were, and still are.



Thomas Dorsett
first published in
The Texas Review
Spring/Summer 2015

The Ginkgoes on Main Street

The revolution of trees
wasn't started by minds organizing
common things in God's obscure garage.

Chaos-fathered, here they are
on a strip of dirt in the center of town
without demands for a brook or a forest.

Drizzle from a mongrel's kidneys cannot keep them down;
they'll grow beside trash if they must;
I meet a gnarled survivor with canary hair.

It's only April so I guess she's dying
but she wasn't desperate--I leaned on her
and told her of troubles ginkgoes never have--

It's now two seconds before midnight
on a day that began with nuclear fusion
four and half billion years ago Thursday.

Her kinfolk have lived here for eons;
mine for two million tough years at best.
How long will it last?  Buddy,

my dog, sniffs a toy poodle walked
by a woman with lemony hair;
all it takes is one whiff and we're gone.


Thomas Dorsett

This poem first appeared in
The Texas Review
Spring/summer 2015

The Cosmic Heart

A pious colleague told me
some frumme Jews have holes
drilled in their coffins to
share their new houses

with worms.  Whatever's built
comes down--It is not
seemly for the believer
to imagine otherwise--

I think this while listening
to dreadful piped-in music
in a room of stacked vaults.
A newly chiseled date

on my friend's tomb--He would
have chosen a simple burial
in a box with holes--You gotta
get me outta here--Just kidding--

If life is good, death is
good as well; faith's better:
the cosmic heart still beats
untouched by putrefaction.


First published in
The New Laurel Review xxvi

In Memory of an Unknown Cousin

1.

They took you on a German day,
Europe still under its clouds.
You who were certainly my cousin
however man times removed,

were removed from passive neighbors,
still in unbombed houses, by night;
you were going to live and work and play
somewhere in Poland, they said.


2.

A scientist, a cook, a movie star,
a balding neurotic or my son's teacher
(he hates him)--fifty years later
up from a nightmare, I wonder,

smoke, what you would be?  Black
coffee.  Morning's ritual begins--Again
water comes out of my shower, not gas;
I have no right to write your eulogy.


First published in The Other Side, January-February 1994

Shortly after this poem appeared in print, I got a letter from the American poet, Samuel Menasche, whom my wife and I knew well when we lived in New York.  (We had moved to Baltimore in 1980.)  He informed me that he thought I did have the right to write my unknown cousin's eulogy and that he was pleased that I did.  I don't know what the difficulty was--I was busy with work and family, but not that busy.  I regret to say that I never wrote him back or visited him in his walkup on Varick Street, as I had done many times before.  (He wrote a poem about the bathtub in his kitchen; I lived in an apartment like that in Yorkville.) I always intended to contact him as the years passed; I never did.  Samuel died in 2011 at the age 84, a few years after receiving the first ever "Neglected Master's Award" from the Poetry Foundation.   Samuel, the inscriptions you wrote for us in your books have faded, but Nirmala and I are still very much here!  You are, too.