A Nearly Invisible Pin

You haven’t seen Blazing Saddles until you’ve seen it in the hospice where your mother is spending her last three weeks, and she keeps saying, wait, it gets funnier. 

Madeleine Kahn, Cleavon Little, morphine on demand. Give me Mel Brooks or give me death. Oh wait, we can have both.

August in Atlanta. My brother and I took turns sleeping on the fold-out chair beside our mother’s bed. Our father, who was 80 and still seeing patients (he was a psychiatrist), would get there late in the afternoon and take my brother’s dog for a walk. Or go stretch his legs. Or go get ice. He’s having a hard time, my mother said. He was. Sitting next to her, I wrote a poem called “Ice.” Read it to me, she said, and I did. 

After she died, fall came, and winter. I had days and grief. I had a job working for a jerk, I had my sweetheart trying to say the right things. I had swimming and poems and evenings with two fingers of bourbon and two dogs pulling me up the hills beyond our house.

And about eighteen months after my mom died, I was up at MacDowell and there was this:

The Committee Weighs In

I tell my mother
I’ve won the Nobel Prize.

Again? she says. Which
discipline this time?

It’s a little game
we play: I pretend

I’m somebody, she
pretends she isn’t dead.

I recited this new poem to a new friend at dinner, and he laughed, then grabbed his chest, as if I’d sucker punched him. As if? 

It’s a poem I keep thinking I’ve recited for my mom a hundred times. And in some universe, the one in which love or poetry can outmaneuver death—I have.

I went to graduate school right after college, and after that, I didn’t write poems for a couple of years. I was tired of the dissection. I waited tables at a sushi restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts and wrote long short stories. I thought you could do things in fiction that you couldn’t do in poetry: have people talk to each other, be funny. Of course, I was wrong.

“The Committee Weighs In” begins with a conversation I might well have had with my mother. As a kid, I’d jabber away, pretending I was reciting a speech by somebody famous, and my mom would play along—as she does in this poem, until we realize she is, alas, now a ghost.

What does humor do in poems? What it does in life—work in tandem with its twin, the decidedly unfunny. Together they’re like those tag team wrestlers I used to watch on a small black and white TV on Saturday nights: the bare- and barrel-chested twin brothers taking turns in the echoing ring, one seemingly exhausted brother tapping the other in, so that running, he could leap and body-slam an opponent, thumping down on his chest.

That was/is theater, of course, and humor can be that in poems, but it can also be quiet and wry and irreverent—the nearly invisible pin that pricks the pompous blowhard.

I gave a couple readings recently, and afterwards people came up and asked, Have you ever done stand-up? Did you ever want to? If my partner had been there, she’d have said, that’s all she does. 

And yet: I’ve been asked to consider humor in poetry and what have you gotten so far? Hospice, death, grief. And it occurs to me that when asked to deal with the dailiness of life, I respond with comedy. When tasked with considering the comic, all I can think of is pretty darn sad.

Maybe that’s just the rebellious 10-year-old in me. At the reading series I run in Cambridge, a poet announced the title of what she’d read next: “Love Poem with Sea View,” and before she’d begun reading, I’d scribbled the title for my next poem: “Love Poem with Trash Compactor,” a title that felt like the opposite of something poetic, one that a smart-aleck kid would write down when she should have been listening.

When I was actually 10, I went to the public school I could walk to from our house. I liked it there. But my mother said that if I went to this other school, I could drop out of ballet. Which seemed like a fair deal. And a small gift to humanity.

So I went to the interview for the Christian Preparatory School for Boys and Girls. I knew that’s what it was because that’s what it said on the stationary. In that interview, Mr. Thomas, the middle school principal, asked me the meaning of a word. It was a word I’d never heard before, so I told him I didn’t know. “Do you want a dictionary?” he asked. “Yes,” I said, and he handed it to me. I tried to find the word, which I thought began with a d, followed by a j, like Django Reinhardt, my father’s favorite guitarist. But I couldn’t find the word. “How do you spell it?” I asked. “J-e-w,” he said. “Oh, a Jew,” I said, “that’s what I am.”

Maybe that was part of how the Christian Preparatory School for Boys and Girls was getting me ready. I went out to the car where my mother was waiting and told her about the interview. If Mr. Thomas had wanted the definition of one angry Jew, that would have been my mother marching into his office, my beautiful, furious mother marching into a poem that I haven’t gotten quite right yet.