When The Geriatric Drunk Next Door
When the geriatric drunk next door who was
raising chihuahuas to make a living,
but couldn't part with one them when it came time to sell
came over one day in my childhood,
shaking like an aspen leaf in the fall,
going through withdrawal, to ask if he could borrow
a few bucks, I watched my mother give him five
of the last ten she had to raise four kids
for half of the rest of the month before
the next welfare check arrived, and say,
Here. Don't hurt yourself. Something to ease the pain.
Though she didn't drink and he'd been drinking too long
to turn the herd that had trampled him around.
She didn't judge. She didn't try to give advice.
She didn't belittle the man in the way she gave.
She didn't count how much the giving took off her plate.
She wasn't indulging her progressive, liberal, altruism.
She wasn't breaking loaves and fishes on a hillside
or trying to win a popular election.
She just gave like the sea, the earth, the sky,
like fire gives heat and light, all in one easy action
of a heart that has suffered enough on its own to know
we're all in the same lifeboat on the moon
white-water rafting through the rapids of a waterclock.
And that has been my religion ever since.
Though I've never said anything to her about it.
How much I loved her in that moment
of compassionate tenderness, how she pulled
one thread out of the straitjacket of despair in his eyes,
and rewove it not on a loom like the moon but a harp
into a flying carpet of joy so another human
in as much of a mess in her own way as he was
could gain some altitude for a little while above the misery,
and hang on to at least one single wavelength of threadbare radiance
that could still fall on the shit everybody was living in
and turn it into a flower. Indelible,
the understanding in their eyes when he
looked at her incredulously for a moment
and she knew exactly what he meant
as she laughed at herself with a soft, wry smile
as if she'd just seen the sacred fool behind her best sentiment.
That was the whole of enlightenment to me.
The beginning of a spontaneous discipline
and still is, though it's sometimes bitter to practise,
when your giving is mistaken for having been taken
and you lament how many people can't tell the difference
between a theft and a gift anymore. How they deprive themselves
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poem by Patrick White
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