Reflections at One Year

Take a look at this photo from my great-aunt's scrapbook. If you click on it, it will open larger in another window. The "Uncle George" of the caption is George McWilliams, freed from slavery at the age of 9, in 1863. Some members of his family are on the porch of the slave cabin where I suppose George lived most of his life. How often would this family have had such a portrait taken? Look closely. A young white male has one arm around a younger man, possibly George II, and with his other hand he has his fist full of George's coat. I suppose this little white boy, a rascal for sure, is my grandfather, Bob Lee (Robert Lee) McWilliams, who disappeared from my father's life -- and my life -- when my father was 8 years old. As we say Down South, Bob Lee 'turned up dead' in the late 1970s in Salt Lake City. Word was, he was an alcoholic, and an abusive husband, who brought a lot of pain and misery to a lot of people. The Hebrew Bible says that the sins of the ancestors are visited upon the descendants from generation to generation. I consider the stories, told and untold, in my family and I believe this is true. And, yet, the drunkard womanizer, King David is the ancestor of the Christian Messiah. Irony makes such good storytelling. This story is about so much more than race and slavery; it includes layers and nuances of human misery. At one year, I ask myself, "What's the point?"

Tonight, I had a conversation with reporter Brandon Perry of the Indianapolis Recorder, the weekly paper of the African American community of Indianapolis (and beyond). Mr. Perry's article will be the fourth publication*, within two months, of the story of the meeting between Imam Mikal Saahir and me, one year ago, March 8, 2009.

One year later, I still find myself shaking my head over the unlikelihood of that meeting a year ago. Mr. Perry asked me what I would like for people to take away from our story. After a lot of rambling on, with some of my academic thoughts and personal reflections, I settled on this thought:

So much has happened since 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in North Alabama and Southern Tennessee, when my great-great-grandfather, James LaFayette McWilliams freed from slavery the nine-year-old George McWilliams. Let me break that down, in case it isn't clear. In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation was enforced for Jim Fate McWilliams and other slave owners in the Tennessee Valley region. I do not for one moment think George McWilliams would have been freed from slavery any other way. There was no magnanimity in the action of Jim Fate McWilliams.

Now, on the one year mark, I have a lot more questions than I did on that day Mikal and I met for the first time. Firstly, why or how did his family come to know and hold and cherish this story of emancipation? I had no idea of this story, and could have lived out my remaining days without knowing it, had events not conspired (a G-d thing?) to bring us together in Indianapolis, IN, far away from Elkmont and Athens, in Limestone County, Alabama.

Secondly, what happened to little 9-year-old George on that day in 1863? He had a brother, bought by the McWilliams family at the same time, some time in their young childhoods. A third brother was bought by the Yarbrough family. What happened to him? Where did little George and his brother live? Who took care of these children? Were there other slaves in the McWilliams estate at the time? I know, from the photos gathered by MIkal's family, that George McWilliams continued to live on the McWilliams property, living in the cabin that was the slave quarters, at least according to tradition. Were there others? Did any adults, taking the McWilliams name, leave the estate and venture away from the others?

Finally, for today, how did Jim Fate McWilliams take the news of the enforcement of the E. P. back in 1863? He would have been a man in his 30s. What changed in his household, if anything did, because of the legal end to slavery?

I have none of these stories. The cloudy past of my father's "people," including the black McWilliamses, will most likely obscure this story for me for a long time. Now I have some questions for me.

What will I do with this information?
Why was my initial reaction to Mikal's introduction into my past a response from a place of guilt and shame? What is in this story that affects my ego to such an extent? Sure, it's all in the past and I can't influence it in any way. Seana said, on our vacation with friends in México last week, that I could work out my reparations with her. That was funny, a little twist on the question about, when will we ever be finished paying for the sins of the past? When will the learning be complete? Dear g-ds: if racism is over, then what kind of misery are we, in the majority, willing to continue to support in our cities? If racism is over, I need someone to explain to me what to do about this stain upon my name? If racism is over, what happened to the revolution? I missed it entirely.

What is the point of this story?

I told Brandon Perry that this story brings my situation as a white Southerner -- who witnessed the dismantling of Jim Crow and the growth of Civil Rights and my experiences in consciousness-raising efforts -- out to a place of new scrutiny, to be sure. I have my response, and it is my response. I do not speak for anyone else as I live through this awakening.

One of the main points I take away from this encounter and its ongoing revelations is a repetition of something I learned from Maya Angelou, Oprah Winfrey, and Henry Louis Gates. Human beings are 99.99% exactly the same on the chromosomal/genetic level. Without the statistically insignificant differences contained in the 1/100th of one percent amount of difference that might emerge as skin color, hair, eyes, etc., we are all the same. What violence and evil we have made of that 1/100th.

Another point is the closeness we share, unknowingly, with others around us. How amazing: Mikal Saahir and I, two McWilliamses with roots from the same county, met on a Sunday in Indianapolis, IN. Indianapolis: his home town for life, my new home since three years ago.

I gave up a while ago my firm grip on the personal G-d. Too much bad stuff happened all in a row, and my faith was not much help. Still, I am drawn to community, to people who gather in G-d's name. I am so glad that there was a place that Sunday morning, where people gathered to reflect upon the Spiritual DNA of the children of Sarah and Abraham.

What to make, then, of the meeting, that it happened at all? What's the point? Where will this journey take us from here? It is a small world -- we are all interconnected -- what happens to one affects all -- a rising tide lifts all boats -- I am sorry -- I forgive you -- these phrases are so common because theses kinds of little miracles happen so often.

What now? I am left with a feeling of Mystery, with a capital M, trembling before a grace that is beyond me, that blesses me in a particular way that feels very personal. Shall I take the Mystery personally?

*other publications:
Indianapolis Star
My corrections to the Star article are below on February 20, 2010
Focolare's Living City Magazine
Muslim Journal (article not posted online/essentially the same as Focolare's version)

IndyStar Article: Bound by the Past

Image from Indianapolis Star article, credit goes to Stephen Beard and Robert King of the Star.

Thank you, Bobby King! You did a great job with a story of very tangled-up details. The front page of the Star! You forgot to mention that when we talked on Thursday, you sneaky reporter.

Below, I have posted the article that appeared in today's Indianapolis Star. There are some errors that I want to correct, but I don't want to go anywhere near the comments section of the newspaper because -- despite some nice comments -- it is such a cesspool of human ignorance and hatred. So there.

In fact, when I scanned the comments, I saw that a reader recommended Edward Ball's book, Slaves in the Family. My friend Laurel sent the book to me immediately when I shared this story with her back in March of 2009. I read the book in one sitting. Then, I sent the book to Mikal Saahir.

Here are some corrections marked like thas this and with more info in brackets like [this].

I want to say much, much more about this story, more than already, in an earlier post. I will do that soon.

TTFN

BOUND BY THE PAST

By Robert King on February 20, 2010

Meeting reveals shared ties to the culture of slavery

When Michael Saahir and Anne McWilliams crossed paths over coffee between Sunday services at her Northside church, they easily could have passed from each other's lives without another thought.

But Saahir noticed her nametag and made a comment that there were McWilliamses in his family.

The overture could seem odd, given that Saahir is black and McWilliams is white. And even stranger, Saahir is Muslim -- a kufi-wearing imam, in fact -- and at the time, McWilliams, was an administrator at a Christian seminary an educator by training, was preparing for a five-week stay in Guatemala to attend intensive Spanish language school. [actually, I was at CTS in 2007-8; in March 2009, I had just finished a unit of CPE at Methodist Hospital; I have been an adjunct at CTS off and on since I was Interim Associate Academic Dean at CTS].

Yet McWilliams couldn't help but come back to Saahir, who was the guest speaker at her First Congregational [United] Church of Christ, and pick up the thread connecting them. It didn't take long for them to realize they were connected by more than a thread.

Both had family in Alabama. From rural Limestone County, a place so small it's almost hard not to be related somehow. McWilliams had grown up there, she said. Saahir spent summers as a kid there and still has family there.

Then Saahir said his ancestors had been slaves, some of whom were owned by a man named James Lafayette McWilliams. She recognized the name.

It was her great-grandfather great-great-grandfather.

"I was just stunned," she said.

Making the connection

The McWilliams family -- its white and black iterations, its parts rooted in slavery and slave ownership -- had completed a long journey that Sunday almost one year ago. It was a trip that covered nearly 150 years, four to five generations and almost 400 miles.

Saahir and McWilliams have come to see it as a divine appointment.

McWilliams had just joined the church a few months earlier the previous month. Back late from vacation the night before, she considered sleeping in but went anyway.

Saahir was a visiting guest speaker. He had come to address the theme of the day: the "Spiritual DNA of Abraham" -- to speak about the common history of Muslims and Christians.

But he and McWilliams also wound up giving a brief lesson on racial history -- how a black man and a white woman in Indianapolis can learn about their shared ties to the slave culture.

"It was rather extraordinary," said the Rev. Richard Clough, pastor at First Congregational, who invited Saahir to speak. "I witnessed their conversation as it unfolded. It was really just an astounding thing."

The conversation continued after church.

Saahir realized that a black and white photo in his family history collection showed his once-enslaved ancestor, George McWilliams, circa 1928, holding a little white boy in his lap. That child, it turns out, was one of McWilliams' great-uncles father's first cousins, Thomas Martin Gilbert.

Talking further, Saahir, 53, and McWilliams, 52, realized that as kids they had walked some of the same streets. Saahir grew up in Indianapolis but spent his summers with family in Athens, Ala., where McWilliams grew up. Both went to the movies in a self-segregated [Ritz] theater -- she downstairs, he in the balcony.

And then there was Mary McWilliams Gilbert, a lively little old lady who, even late in life, lived in the "big house" on the McWilliams family's farm in Elkmont. [She was the mother of the little boy, Thomas Martin Gilbert, in the photo with George McWilliams.]

She was one of Anne McWilliams' great-aunts great aunt. But they had met briefly only once, after a family funeral after McWilliams' estranged grandfather's death in 1978 or 1979.

Saahir, though, had had an extensive conversation with Gilbert in the 1980s while on a fact-finding mission.

Gilbert told him that she had given his mother her name -- Gloria. It shows, he said, how the residue of the slave culture still held sway well into the 20th century.

It was so extensive that the last slave in the family, George McWilliams, freed as a boy [age 9] by the Emancipation Proclamation, in the 1930s still lived in the cabin behind the "big house" he had occupied as a slave.

That influence carried on, in fact, to Saahir. Much like Malcolm X or Muhammad Ali, Saahir took a new name after his conversion to Islam in 1980, dropping his Anglicized name for a new one. It was both a statement of faith and a rejection of the names his ancestors inherited from white slave owners.

Even so, when Saahir went to visit Gilbert in 1985, his Alabama relatives told him not to knock on the front door because, as a black man, he wouldn't be allowed in. Instead, they said, he should go to the back entrance, where slaves had once entered and black servants still used.

Saahir was too interested in hearing about the history to risk upsetting protocol. So he took the advice. "I had waited so long to get the interview I was afraid of being turned back," he said. "It was just the way it was."

Accepting the past

McWilliams' family research was more limited. She had once plugged "McWilliams" into a genealogy Web site and made contact with a Florida doctor judge [Alan Todd] who gave her some printouts. Mostly, though, McWilliams saw them just as names on paper.

Never did she conceive that her family had owned slaves.

Her dad, Robert Lee McWilliams, [Jr.] never talked about his side of the family. Her mother's side had been simple farmers, and she just assumed the same was true on the other side.

"It hit me with shock," she said. "And I just have to be honest with you that it hit me with shame."

Shame because McWilliams had always thought of her family as enlightened. As a child, she remembers asking her parents about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and hearing them speak favorably of it as a means to make all people equal, regardless of color. She had been taught never to look down on others.

As an adult, McWilliams chose the church where she and Saahir met in part because it was the kind of place that would be involved in interfaith work and would turn over the pulpit on the first Sunday of Lent to a Muslim imam.

Learning of the lost history forced her to re-examine much about her family's past. The fact she grew up in a house with a black maid who did all the cooking and cleaning and dirty work seemed different now. More unseemly than it had as a child.

So did the memory of being told as a child that all the [other] McWilliamses in the Limestone County phonebook were black, and of no relation. She came to feel cheated out of an important part of her past.

"I've never had an encounter so clearly, face to face, with my history as a Southerner, a white Southerner," she said.

And McWilliams began to feel some guilt.

"There's an assumption in a lot of circles that if you are white in America that you are racist because of the way racism is so systematized in this country. I sort of believe that," she said. said, "I have to take the longest step forward to bridge that gap."

To that end, McWilliams has asked Saahir and his wife if she can accompany them to his family reunion in Alabama this summer. She wants to meet the ["other"] McWilliamses of Limestone County and learn from them.

For Saahir, the lessons of this new family connection aren't about inducing guilt. He's told McWilliams she bears no burden from the distant past. But he is hopeful that their story can help heal some of the racial problems in America by encouraging people to understand their history.

"There is a lot of untold stories that we are ashamed of," he said.

Like many Southerners, Saahir's family migrated north from Alabama looking for work and a better life. McWilliams bounced around the country in pursuit of her education, and for her work in academia.

Their own lives -- the segregated movie theaters as kids, the need as adults to still respect the code of the big house back entrance -- evidence vestiges of a past not so far behind us.

But both say their willingness to put themselves in an interracial setting where they could meet is a hopeful sign, a measure of progress.

Yet they won't chalk up their meeting to simple coincidence.

"It just seems like a conspiracy of factors, spiritual and cultural, that brought us together," McWilliams said. "I'm sure you can explain it away in many different ways, but it was so efficient, so instant."

"It is the plan of God," said Saahir, the imam. "And I don't fully understand it yet."

[Neither do I, Mikal, -- neither do I!]

Prose Poem: Unruly Tenants

   A group of unruly people followed me home from band rehearsal last night, and crawled into my dreams.

   These people rented spaces in a massive old house.

   The landlady was cranky. She called a meeting of all the tenants.

   Was I an observer or one of the tenants? The dream world is not always specific about this assignment.

   The landlady revealed the tennis scoreboard she had set up in the lobby. Each tenant's name appeared in the vertical column to the left, and out to the right of the names, horizontally, were the numbers of the rented spaces and the contracts they made to renovate the space. So far, nobody was winning.

   The landlady was furious with everyone. No one was keeping to the terms of the contracts.

   The renters were:

• a dancer
• a philosopher
• a chef
• a writer
• a healer
• a teacher

   Some had spouses; some had children; not all with spouses had children; not all with children had spouses.

   Each renter had excuses:

• too busy
• other priorities took over
• the work was too expensive
• or too hard
• or needed more skill

   The landlady was cracking down: Get it done or get out.

   Caught in the landlady's headlights, each renter was wide-eyed with terror. There was no place else to go. There was nothing else to be done. Time's up -- get the work done, or you are out of here.

   Later, I went to a party at the dancer's house. He showed me how to get to the Caribbean ocean through a tube. We swam there, or the current took us there. We landed on a beach.

   An Afro-Caribbean man on the beach opened a large scallop shell and showed me how to feed abundantly on the fruits of the sea there on the beach. He also told me that if I came across a grouper as long as his arm, he would pay me $100 for it. {Yeah, I know -- sometimes seafood is just ... seafood.}

   According to the dancer, whenever the going got too stressful in the house, we were free to take the plunge and find the ocean and the beach. The tube is always open, and you can breathe underwater. Go there any time.

   I could tell: the landlady really wanted everyone to get the jobs done. She knew: if each tenant fulfilled her/his contract, the massive house would be fabulous. She wanted everyone to stay and to complete the work.

~~~***~~~

   Of course, this is all a metaphor of the Self, and each character, location, and talent is some aspect of mySelf.

The unconscious brings such gifts!

I have this Thirst for Poems

I have this thirst for poems. Mary Oliver. Robert Frost. Anyone, really, who has just the right blend of the concrete embodied reality of the little horse standing by the snowy wood, or the soft animal body of the goose flying overhead, and the mystical tending toward the universal desires.

Attending to this thirst, I remembered that a book by Donald Hall, Life Work, was on my shelf. And, seeking more about form, an unopened Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook, on poetry's forms, a text for one who aspires to write poems -- like me. Earlier in the month, I read another wonderful text about writing, Reading like a Writer, by Francine Prose.

I watched a DVD movie, or should I say film, Local Color, a story of a young artist who wanted to learn from an old master. This film brought images and thirst together.

Rachel brought home a volume of poems assembled by Garrison Kiellor, Good Poems for Hard Times. In that volume, I found a form that I could imitate, to tell the story of getting fired. I still don’t know what I am going to do. But, I sat down and wrote the poem, because I knew that I would rather write than die. Getting fired made me feel a way of death, not of suicide, but some soul-killing thing that wanted to eat away at my heart. Writing the poem gave life to me and defended my soul from death.

Hall’s Life Work came into my hands as a bequest, a gift to my late partner, Nancy, in 1993, from our friend Jane, who loved books and poetry. Jane introduced us to Laurie R. King, still my idea of the best of the kind of fiction I want with me on a desert island.

Life Work I picked up some time after Nancy’s death, when I was wondering what would come next, as I wrote in a journal and talked into a micro-cassette recorder, talking to Nancy and missing her. I made some notes in the margins in that earlier reading. But I did not finish. I could tell that things were not going to go well for Donald, and I just could not deal with that at that time in my life.

As he recollected his grandfather's farming life, and his cancer appeared, I could not continue to travel with Donald. Nancy’s cancer was too close yet. So, I put the book on my shelf, with other poetry.

I read thirstily through the Keillor volume, but like a kingfisher watching for the shine of one fish at a time, finding the poets I knew well first. I put the volume down and picked Life Work up again.

I had to press through Life Work. It is a lovely little book, but it is not light reading. (My ordination mentor reminds me that I am very intense, so perhaps anything would be heavy reading for me.) I soldiered on to the end, as Donald began his chemotherapy, as he and Jane Kenyon held each other and wept in their anticipation of his dying.

When I finished Life Work, I picked up the Kiellor volume again and kingfished for Donald’s poems. I found Donald’s poem about Jane Kenyon’s death. What a sad irony and symmetry, that she died before he could die. She left him. His poems about her death, the theme of his book Without, express his “deep grief and fury” or so said one biographer.

I know that grief and that fury.

The partner of a colleague took her life last week. I wrote a poem to try to defend my senses against, again, death. How wonderful, how helpful to me, that I can turn to Donald Hall in his loss of Jane Kenyon, and to Mary Oliver in her loss of Molly Malone Cook (Thirst; Our World). Others have sought through poems to defend against death, to rage on Heaven and drag the clanging metal cups of their earth-prison cell against the bars and make themselves heard, to get. it. out. C. S. Lewis used his craft. Hemingway used his.

How many times in my own experience have I found myself overswept by a memory of a specific grief, and have been told to “let it go”? These phrases are so common because death is. Eventually, for some people, these phrases go on to become helpful; that’s why the very people who could not hear them when they were tossed out in the height of grief go on to say them to the other sufferers in the height of their grief. These phrases sell a lot of shiny and frilly commercial greeting cards. But, please, there must be a time for silence. Can a card contain silence in a kind of large blank space, with something at the very bottom, or centered in the middle, like "I am so sorry" or "I miss her, too." or "I do not want you to be alone. Come."

Who gets to decide when you let go? What is the deadline after which your grief becomes a pathology? I'll tell you one: some arrogant bastard in an office with framed diplomas on the wall. When you've exhausted your curses, against the insensitive types, and the Pollyannas and the Nietzsches (what does not kill you makes your stronger), then, I say, grab your own pen and paper and write it all down. Let it flow.

Where are the listeners to the stories of those who grieve? The listeners. Ones who listen. Listen. Here is a holy act, an act of the apostles of love, the ones who sit with and hear. That's how it is, reading Oliver's Thirst. Here are poems that give a glimpse of what it was like for her to lose her. And, maybe that helps, somehow, hearing how another tells it, this experience of losing and grieving.

As I read through the poem, Last Days, (Hall) I felt again that desolation of loss. And now, I await the sound of the garage door opening and the door swinging in, and the chatter of the new family, the one I love and her little shadow, the child, whom I also love, but so differently. I love this little one like a custodian of a work of fragile art, belonging not to me, but to others for whom she is a priceless treasure, moving through this world here on a very bumpy path. This woman I love and her child are out playing basketball, boisterous and oblivious to the passage of each present moment and their proximity to mortality. And that is just how it should be. We know better than to stare into the sun. Besides, who would want to? We prefer to stare at what the sun makes possible: life. Our life together, here.

What more universal theme than death could there possibly be for poetry? How does anyone survive without it? Prose is just too facile, too prone to preaching. (Like now.) A poem can contain it all, from sorrow to fury. Just writing about it now feels shallow, like trying to find the perfect prize for my beloved in WalMart. As if some plastic imitation will do.

This reflection ends in listening. And, maybe a small pretty glass of something amber-colored, a fine Central American rum.

Donald Hall, the Poet, and his Book, Life Work

Other People and the Noise

How do you write poems in a house with other people, especially a child, and dogs that need to be fed, and a cat whose box needs to be cleaned out, who sits outside the upstairs bedroom and howls at you?

Donald Hall said that Gertrude Stein wrote in her Ford, parked at a busy Paris street corner. By law, drivers had to sound their horns when approaching an intersection. So, imagine the cacophony of that scene. She said the noise took the top of her mind off so she could pay attention at the right level. The next time I feel the top of my head coming off, I will look for my notebook and pen.

I can do it if I close the door, I can tune it all out, and I can write. If there is not music with good flatpicking guitar, because that makes me want to pick up my own guitar; or music with lyrics that compete with my attention and my present level of emotion, because that makes me want to make rhyming tunes; without these kinds of distractions, I am fine. If no one calls my name or asks anything of me, I can deal with it and let the noise go on behind the closed door.

I can’t really say that the background noise is helpful. I prefer silence, and a view out a window into trees, like now, in approaching winter, with empty limbs, and in the spring and summer, with leaves, with birds and squirrels, and grass and flowers. Just not people. Not words. Not music. Only quiet and the natural world. Kind of like AlderMarsh on Whidbey Island, WA, or a campsite at Brown County State Park.

Donald Hall said that he and Jane Kenyon worked in the same house at the same time, each having a study in opposite sides of the house, and for the entire morning, worked without disturbing each other. Then, they made lunch, and after lunch a short nap and sex, or was it sex and then a nap? Then errands. Then supper, followed by a ballgame and dictating letters. Sounds so nice.

I can work out of the playfulness of right-brain mind here in this back room overlooking the back yard, with the door closed. The puppies will want to come in and sleep in the seat of the recliner while I work. I sit on my big blue exercise ball.

I don’t need a typist for proofs. I compose while sitting at my desk on my big blue exercise ball, words moving across the screen of my MacBook. I edit and read out loud – another reason to crave solitude, no one listening to my phrases and sometimes curses.

Thank you, Donald Hall, for your book, Life Work.

String Theory: Or, How you have forever changed our holidays

reflecting upon the suicide of the partner of my colleague

Help me weave a web of care

back onto this weaving

this safe soft landing

some will want to fall, or lean for a moment, or rest some time

the one in the book of life said

love the one whole soul you have been given

the only one you will ever have

the only one whose skin in this present

time enfolding your only you in full

now

the one that leads you through the universe

cosmic imagining becoming something other

in your dreams

this pin-point of light a galaxy

within a galaxy

contains all the light of you

so you do this thing

release your light now or

later

it flows on in matter and energy

some know

more than they will say

what they know

they cannot bear

they cut their strands

binding them to time

to you they say

strings are there

linking time to time

forget syn-chron-ic

time

is because all

happens not at once

you are timeless and I am bound to now

always and only now

yet

you bound your strand to some fixed point

you could not bear the manner

of tendential time

and its gravity

pulling inward all your light

becoming a mountain

the size of a pin-point containing

now and future and what went before

flowing into the same space

falling and sliding and sweeping you in

until

you were only able to climb

the stairs and fall

into the constraint of one visible strand

the one that began at the bitter end

and led our gaze

into the up or the beyond

the space without time we cannot see

and on the other end

there is no end

on this visible end

you left something

sweetness of a kiss

love imperfect and sincere

and all this uncertainty

your little ghosty-faced dog

you have gone under the flow of time

our tears our seine for our memories of you

into the oceanic depth and expanse

or the nothing of everything at once

meanwhile

I -- caught in time --

tap myself at the temple

and grasp at my heart

bend over at the middle of my grief

my knees finding hard cold stone

say, oh, why can’t I remember

must I be reminded like this:

capture this moment and it dies

in your hand.

Help me weave a web of care

back onto this weaving

this safe soft landing

some will want to fall, or lean for a moment, or rest some time.

The man who looked like Gandhi in his mIddle years: Homeless, dying a slow septic neurological death

My brother, Pat. (born November 4, 1963)

A sweet man with a monkey on his back. I wrote this poem about him and his recent hospitalization.

The Man With the Dark Sad Eyes

Homeless, Dying a Slow Neurological Death

Anne G. McWilliams

Good Samaritan delivery

to the emergency department

found down in an alley

behind a bar

downtown.

The young blonde nurse

called the chaplain to come

to the neurological

intensive care unit

to please continue the quest

to identify the silent small dark man.

Trim of beard and spare of body

he lay in white sheets

dark sad eyes stared ahead

as if thinking deep thoughts

brow furrowing

in pain?

solution of lactated Ringers dripping into a vein

closed soft lips absolutely silent.

now and then startling his head up from the pillow

pointing the oxygen saturation probe

taped to his forefinger like the extra-terrestrial

phone home?

slowly soundlessly

you might say

deliberately

but probably not.

Compact and brown

like Gandhi in his middle years

hair black sprinkled with silver

peaceful and present like a saint

a peasant

a king

an imam

a holy man

a professor.

Dark sad eyes beneath

wire framed glasses

free of scratches

clothing neat

soiled with human waste

collegiate

blue chinos

rugby shirt

Rockport shoes

no socks.

Bag of belongings

signs of ER detective work:

his clothing and

Googled pages

images of India

Pakistan

Middle East

Africa

Elephants

Camels

Taj Mahal

Jameh Masjid

Pyramids of Giza

Arabic script

God is Great

Allahu akbar!

Word spread to speakers of languages

the United Nations

of a hospital’s underclass

housekeeping

sanitation

cooks

the dark-skinned people from the basement trades

came up the service elevators to the fourth floor

in the middle of the night

to speak phrases

Urdu

Farsi

Hindi

Arabic

Swahili

Tamil

tribes of

Kenya

Ethiopia

Madagascar

Liberia

no answer

no evidence of comprehending

dark sad eyes looking

wise

lost

dying.

Signs of Islam

cut of hair and

facial hair

female staff please

do not touch

or pray

falsely

avoid offense

to person

place,

and faith.

All of our projections

could not find him

create him

identify him.

Infection crept through

every cell

sinus abscess

sick brain

sepsis

seizure

and, without a word or sound

after a long time

death.

In death, illusions fell away

like leaves of paper shredded

in the nursing station

in morning shift change

as with the battle-hardened on the front lines

the tongues did wag and strip away

what dignity created in mystery

we remember -- disgusting --

he stank of urine and feces

and decomposition

and gangrene of the sinuses.

My brother is often homeless

alcohol dependent

drug-addled

twice head-injured

left for dead

he looks like a world traveler by foot

dark skin, black hair sprinkled with silver

a beard not so neatly trimmed

and dark sad eyes.

You might place him

without ID

in Italy

Brazil

Nicaragua

He could be Roma

Latino

Uzbekian

I don't know

Call the UN.

Will a young blonde nurse

in the neurological

intensive care unit

page a patient service assistant

to give him a bath

with the green soap

call a patient old chaplain

to hold his hand

to speak softly to him

fetch an extra blanket

a drip of water

with some sugar in it?

Will he

reek with lingering stench

finally naked

beneath clean white sheets

brunt of chatter

at change of shift

man of mystery.

And after

a long time

laid to rest

without benefit of clergy

the coroner's burden.