Brian’s Reflection: Thursday, May 24, 2007


Now I am forty.What should I say about my life? That it's long and abhors transparence.Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelet, though, makes me vomit.Yet until brown clay has been rammed down my larynx,only gratitude will be gushing from it.

- from “May 24, 1980”, by Joseph Brodsky, Russian poet,
Nobel Laureate (1987), born on this day, 1940

[ If you want to read the whole poem: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/may-24-1980/ ]


How could I resist! A man born May 24, who wrote a poem called that! I read a lot of Brodsky’s poems a few years ago. I “liked” them - primarily because I could understand them. I hate poems that are so weird that they are unintelligible, like many of the poems in the New York magazine used to be ………. they’ve gotten better, according to my no doubt low-life standards. Unintelligible poems are a contradiction in terms.

What should I say about my life? Brodsky was dead at 55; I’m still alive at 60 - after drop-foot (wore a brace for 6 months), amoebic dysentery (rectal bleeding and severe pain, ugh), malaria, 2 broken arms, a replaced aortic valve, a cardiologist who punctured my aorta (“If it had gone up, you’d have been dead in 10 seconds.”), sucked-out gall bladder, ruptured colon (diverticulitis - pay attention to gut pains!), septic e-coli bacterial infection, colostomy, reversal of said, abdominal abscess (open wound for 10 weeks), a hole in my heart (still have it) ….. I don’t hold a candle to some I guess, but!

Yet, until brown clay has been rammed down my throat, only gratitude will be gushing from it. That’s my intention anyway. I haven’t spent over 40 years of my life standing at altars offering Thanksgiving for Life and Salvation and Freedom and Creation and Love for nothing!

By the day I die, I hope that every other bitterness and anger and whine and self-pity and resentment and negativity will have fallen away. And only gratitude will be left ….. a soft smile beneath eyes shining with the transparence Brodsky said he abhorred.

Wish me luck. And thanks for all the help along the way.

Brian+