The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review by Danielle Ofri

Author:Danielle Ofri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Psychotherapist at the Landfill

Lou Lipsitz

—for Bob Phillips

1—

On an early morning in my seventy-first year

it is a mixed thing

to come to the county landfill

and in the piercing yellow light inter

these scribbled notes of bewilderment,

attentiveness and odd, interminable hope.

To bury them among garbage heaps

and old appliances: one hundred twenty-two

boxes of records, manila folders

filled with my writing—

forty years of dreams taken down

forty years of dilemmas,

visitations from the archetypal powers,

forty years of human beings

talking out loud to themselves and to me,

pages, an unbelievable accumulation now;

evidence of how we humans struggle and ruminate,

trying against so much training,

so much fear, to dig

through the long, heavy dark and raise the dead—

accomplish the slow, uncertain resurrection

of becoming ourselves.

Because I could not bear to have them shredded

I now carry the boxes out

amidst the debris and dust of the landfill

and lay them here thinking somehow

they will be left alone to decay and vanish

in their own time, decompose under the stars.

Only I am wrong.

The bulldozer appears so quickly;

snorting and shoving things aside

burying the pile in efficient sweeps of its yellow plow.

Then they’re gone, pushed under—

the fine attunements, the record of all

I was able to make sense from—

gone into the garbage

—forty years worth in forty seconds.

Instant burial!

2—

And then for a week

I can’t sleep in peace.

I wake every morning

and know something is wrong, unfinished.

And finally, I grasp it and go back.

I have the smudge stick with me this time

and the sage and fragrant cedar.

This time, I go up to the bulldozer,

silent, unattended now, and mark it

with my stick.

This time, I create the fire

and speak my makeshift

native american/modern man

prayer:

Commit these writings, these

scribblings half understood, memories

of spirit struggles, to the Great Mystery.

May they find their place,

a breath of our strange journey,

often obscure to us, that nonetheless,

we yearn to know.

The smoke rises and I think of the road

I have taken myself: seventy now,

retired detective of dreams.

A mixed thing to be here with prayers and endings.

My soul feels its damp exhausted

exhilaration—

letting go of all that was healed

and not healed—

my long initiation through the comradely, lonely,

stinging sweat lodge of the years.

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