Open Shutters Read Online Free

do us part.

Readings

PART TWO

Another Session
1.
    You opened with the rules. Outside this room
    nothing I said inside would be repeated
    unless in your best judgment I posed harm
    to myself or others. It was like being read
    my rights in some film noir—but I was glad
    already I’d at last turned myself in,
    guilty of anxiety and depression.
    And worse. Confess it: worse. Of narcissist
    indifference to how other people felt.
    Railing against myself, making a list
    of everything (I thought), I’d left a fault
    unturned: the one of needing to be praised
    for forcing these indictments from my throat.
    For saying them well. For speaking as I wrote.
2.
    Not that the goal was chalking up demerits.
    Indeed, I hoped you were basically on my side.
    That’s how I interpreted your nod,
    your pleasant face (at first, a little hard
    to judge behind that beard), your intelligent
    air of listening further than I meant.
    And never falsely, just to raise my spirits,
    but because you couldn’t not be interested.
    “You writers!” When the outburst came, I started
    out of my chair. (I’d had a habit then—
    feet on your coffee table. Never again.)
    “This is real life. You don’t live in a novel.
    People aren’t characters. They’re not a symbol.”
    We stared, stunned at the other, stony-hearted.
3.
    Once or twice a week, for a year. But ten
    years ago already, so that today
    those intimate, subtle, freeform sessions shrink
    to memorized refrains: “You seem to think
    people can read your mind. You have to
say
”—
    itself said kindly—or that time you accused me
    of picturing love too much like “Barbie and Ken.
    Why does it have to be all youth and beauty?”
    Therapists have themes, as writers do.
    (A few of mine, then: the repertoire includes
    clocks, hands, untimely death, snow-swollen clouds.)
    Like it or not, I picked up more from you:
    No showing off. In failure, no surprise.
    Gratitude. Trust. Forgiveness. Fantasies.
4.
    The last time I saw your face—how far back now?—
    was when I took my daughters (I still don’t
    know what possessed me) to a “family restaurant.”
    Dinosaur portions, butter enough to drown
    all sorrows in, cakes melded from candy bars …
    Having filed you away for years and years,
    suddenly I was nervous, my life on show.
    I’m still married, thanks. Husband’s out of town.
    But there was no talking to you across the aisle
    where, by some predestined trick of seating,
    your brood in its entirety was eating
    (their dinners, I suppose, were just as vile)
    with backs to me, remaining as they must
    faceless to patients even from the past.
5.
    Killed instantly
. That’s what a mutual friend
    told me when I asked how it had happened.
    Good,
I said,
I’m glad he didn’t suffer
—
    each of us reaching (not far) for a phrase
    from a lifetime stock of journalists’ clichés
    which, we had learned, provide a saving buffer
    within our bifurcated selves: the one
    that’s horrified; the one that must go on.
    Killed in a bicycle race. I’ve scrapped the Wheel
    of Fortune, the Road of Life. No, this is real,
    there’s no script to consult: you’ve lost your body.
    Still having one, I pace, I stretch, I cough,
    I wash my face. But then I’m never ready.
    This is the sonnet I’ve been putting off.
6.
    And also this one, in which your fancy bike
    hits a concrete barrier and you fly
    over it into fast
oncoming traffic
—
    the obituary’s formula for one man
    driving a truck, who didn’t even have
    time to believe the corner of his eye,
    until the thing was done, and he must live
    always as if this nightmare were the one
    deed he was born to do and to relive,
    precisely the sort of person you would trust
    in fifty-minute sessions to forgive
    himself, to give himself at least two years
    of post-traumatic whatsit to adjust
    to thoughts of all those people left in tears.
7.
    Only once did you confide a story
    from your own life. (And only to illustrate
    how long “people” take to overcome a