“The Other” by Diane Seuss
I’ve fought it so hard, this
responsiveness to the other,
though as a child it was my nature
to teeter
on the edge of deathbeds and read
storybooks to the ones lying there.
Children, I think, are without ulterior motives.
Those come later, in conjunction with desire.
Maturity taught me to fight it,
that at-oneness with the sufferer. I felt good
about snatching myself back.
I had a life to live, things to lose, like my so-called
virginity, though I’d already lost it
to myself. I helped
a family friend, Jan, by then bald-headed Jan,
onto the bedside commode, and wiped her,
and got her back in bed.
Then I stopped visiting.
Her house had always been a respite.
When she got sick it became the scene of the crime.
I can still smell the sweet rot of her pee.
Like Peter
Pan I was youth! I was joy! I still had
my milk teeth.
I thought poems required a degree
of heartlessness, a running
away into the pines, to the streambed.
From that point on I became squeamish.
I could no longer dig
the bullets out of animals and brown
their thighs in butter and eat them,
or soak morels in a sink full of hot saltwater
to kill the bugs hiding in their spongey hollows.
Once I declined a man’s fig,
having heard gossip of the dead wasp living
at its center. And I have the audacity, now,
to ask people who serve the suffering
to serve with joy. Joy. What a joyless word.
As if I served the drug addicts in my life with joy.
As if I kissed the slashed wrists. The bored doctors.
I’ve only kissed one medical doctor in my life
and it was because he was young and I wanted
to pretend I was young again and he wanted
a green card. Now, when I think of doctors, I say,
out loud, don’t touch me. I think of pap smears.
They want to know what’s inside me.
I once invented a dance, with a friend
who later died of AIDS in his early twenties.
The dance was called the Dance of the Bobby Pin,
and required the dancer to pass a bobby pin
from their lips into the lips of the other dancer
while mutually undulating like snakes.
No body parts touched. Not even the lips.
The bobby pin was the lone interface,
like the coupler linking two cars of a train.
It was fun. We got laughs from onlookers.
Once, he was drunk and stoned enough
to ask if he could feel my boobs.
He wasn’t attracted to women.
His interest was purely clinical. Sure, I said,
go ahead. Feel them.
He found it to be an interesting experiment
in discovering neutrality.
He went blind before he died,
and recited the Lord’s Prayer
in order to appease his mother.
At least I assume it was an appeasement.
Maybe deep, deep down beneath
the hipness and provocations he was a true believer.
When he died, we hadn’t talked in a while.
By then I’d married his arch-nemesis.
At the core of their hostilities was art.
Always art. The person I married was envious
of playfulness in art. Playfulness got all
of the attention, he claimed,
though he was the better draftsman.
He was likewise jealous of the Dance of the Bobby Pin.
It was all projection.
Especially the marriage and the divorce.
I cried in front of the judge,
but now I realize the tears were false,
like the tap water that poured
from the eyes of Tiny Tears, the weeping doll.
What I really wanted was to bury
a pickaxe in my husband’s forehead.
With joy! With joy! With a surplus of joy!
Whatever grace you stumble upon,
don’t sit on it like a smug hen on its eggs.
Whatever you think of yourself,
think otherwise, Diane.
Diane Seuss is the author of five books of poetry, including frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf Press, 2018), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry; Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press, 2015), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), recipient of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. She is on twitter at @dlseuss.