MYSTICAL REHAB and Other Occasions

I was flying back triumphant from Las Vegas where my screen play had won at an important film festival when two days later, I discovered I couldn't walk. Thinking I had broken my hip, I asked my noble roommate, Mike to get me to the hospital. Turns out I had forgotten about the rule against stopping blood thinners when making a long flight, and my legs had filled up with clots top to bottom. Both of them.

Eight hours later, four surgeons apparently saved my legs and my life, though 'reconciliation was their long difficult work," as William Meredith says of his and his sister's acceptance of their parents' foibles, and I ponder where the road takes me now. I'm not sure what the future will bring, but I'm glad to be limping around, insomniac yet again, wondering if I should put all these occasional poems to bed. "Here lies one whose name was writ in water," a

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line John Keats apparently drafted for his tombstone. Sure, I am no John Keats nor was meant to be. I'm already three times as old as he was at death, and am hardly a third ofCollier's injunction makes sense to me at this point in my life. Too many sleepless nights, too many metaphors and heart breaks and longings might be recorded if only to "remind me of the man I am," as dear Stanley says in his poem, "Touch Me." And in another, "I am not done with my changes." He also says in an interview with Charlie Rose how difficult it is to write poems as you get older. The great risk is simply in repeating oneself.

In other collections, I have grouped poems into themes as was the editor's preference: love, work, play; edge of consciousness, border of memory, and so on. But those categories seem a bit contrived now. I've organized the poems in a limited way, but my goal here is a simple chronology of the poems as they came to me, a to z, starting with a number from the month-long recuperation at Mystic Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center. I hope they will be something like a stream of consciousness you can dip into possibly to find a lucky stone, or something worth keeping.

I'm fortunate to have a little press where I can air out my closet. Most writers have to curtsey and solicit the good graces of this publisher or that. But there is no shame in self publication. Who cares? "I just keep writin em," as Gracie Twenty years of unpublished poems, beginning with a recent series from a summer in rehabilitation after surgery.