Do you been or did you never? Ha!
Speakless, can you flex your omohyoid
and whinny ninety-nine? Quick now,
can you recall your grandmother's maiden name
six times rapidly? Have you a phobia of spiders?
Only fairly large and brown ones
dropping from the ceiling?
Does this happen often, would you say?
(Nurse, clamp the necrometer when I say when.
If he passes out, tickle his nowe with a burning feather
and tweak his ears counterclockwise.)
An tularemia? No recent intercourse
with a rabbit?
(Lash him firmly to the stretcher
and store him in the ghast house for the night.)
Ramon Guthrie (1896-1973), from Maximum Security Ward and other poems, (Persea Books, 1984)
The dramatic situation of Maximum Security Ward is an old and physically
helpless patient in an intensive care unit. In his last years Guthrie suffered
from bladder cancer and the complications of its treatment.
The Invention of Nostalgia
Lawrence Raab
------------------------
Before 1688 nostalgia didn't exist
People felt sad and thought about home,
but in 1688 Johannes Hofer, a Swiss doctor,
made up the word. It wasn't what he himself
was feeling, but a malady he'd observed
in soldiers posted far from home.
Leeches and opium were the cure,
and if those failed, a return to the Alps.
Therefore: homesickness, nostalgia's symptom,
the way your stomach felt that first nitht
at summer camp, though if you cried
so ard you had to leave, later
you probably found yourself thinking,
They'd be swimming now, they'd be having lunch.
And you felt sad in a different way.
Imagine how many places you can't
go back to, how much it hurts
to want what's lost--all those days,
the ones that have left
their cloudy picture in your mind.
and the smell of certain rooms, the light
through trees at a certain hour, a time
before the first time you felt it,
like all the years before 1688
when no one had the right word to turn to.
Lawrence Raab is author, mostly recently of "Visible Signs: New and
Selected Poems"