Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!
For this session we read a poem “Fourth Wall Arpeggio” by A. Van Jordan, posted below.
Our prompt was: โWrite about love’s austere and lonely offices.โ
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"Fourth Wall Arpeggio" by A. Van Jordan
Lately, my friends ask me, out of love,
have I written about my mother,
who suffers under the storm of Alzheimerโs disease,
and I tell them, โI donโt write about my family,
never directly, at least.โ To write this poem seems so
out of character for me, but itโs not about my mother,
as much as itโs about how, as a son, the disease
measures the changing rituals of family.
And 28 linesโall Iโve provided myselfโseems so
anemic. Now, I barely have 18 lines left for a love
I donโt have the vigor to describe. Reticence is a disease
Iโve suffered from throughout my life. Without family,
I donโt know what it means to live as myself, and, so,
I hide in the reflection of others, which, after all, others love:
people care more about themselves than a friendโs mother.
I mean, how does one explain to someone whoโs not family
how you now see the patterns into which a parent would sew
a quilt to lay over a child, the child neither hip to love
nor Haydenโs โaustere and lonely officesโ? My motherโs
silence seems like indifference except I know the disease,
which changes our relationship, the parent and child; I sow
healing from my memory of how she taught me to love,
not knowing her movement through a day as a mother,
as someone whose sole gig was to keep me alive, free of disease
and, whenever possible, embarrassment. But now, family
means playing the parent; Iโm still just a son, writing about love,
but, lowering my eyes from the trauma, I lift her body, her disease,
for a shower, straining under all the love she sowed.
Source: Poetry (November 2023)
Connections in Narrative Medicine 