My younger daughter is a poet. She's six and said once of a rainy day "The sky is cut." Yesterday morning she was brewing a cold, though none of us knew. She said, "Mama, when I got up, I didn't feel right. Like I grew. Like I was too tall."
By 11 she was glass-eyed and feverish. Advil and rest and lying on the couch in that defiant "I'm not tired" position brought a swift improvement.
I kinda like being feverish. Shouldn't, but do. That blurred edge of perception, the little gifts of prodrome. Or the hours before a hemiplegic migraine takes over. No serious pain with these, but my body splits: one side, usually the left, is normal or feels thin and withered; the other side blorts out as unbordered goo, a BarbaPapa in transformation. Limbs tingle, sleep thins out. Then the storm in the head, which is the nuisance cost for those glittering moments of metamorphosis.
Not sure what I'm taking from them yet.
5 comments:
In my experience, the best poems are born of rainy days, fever and (too much) NyQuil.
Fever's a cool edge, no question. Frightening sometimes.
I don't believe for a moment that Colerdige was interrupted by a "visitor from Porlock" when he was working on "Kubla Khan" -- one my my favourite poems in the language. The poem's not about an opium dream, and it's not about some grand histrical figure demanding an epic: it's about an ecstatic artist or relating to his society. "Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Wave a circle round him thrice and close your eyes with holy dread, for he on honeydew hath fed and drunk the milk of Paradise." The poem is finished, done, right there. Shag Porlock. Poor old Coleridge was flat out addicted to laudanum, and it didn't "help" him write any more than booze helped that tottering wreck of himself, Hemingway. Or Fitzgerald. Some muted parody of their gifts cut through despite the owner's damp addictions.
It's maddening to watch a promising artist seek out the dangers of addiction as though it's a necessary passage. Like sensitive suffering geniuses (insert Hamlet drag here) don't have enough to manage without the slick burnstun of slavery to substance.
But I digress.
And I'm scared of the bottle. Can ya tell?
Ahem. "Weave a circle round him thrice." D'oh.
Oooh, I love a good Nyquil haze.
Note to self: Christmas gifts at the drug store for these two.
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