In Which I Consider Depression and the Fall of Humanity in the Context
of My Dog’s Misbehavior
The chemical make-up of my brain is part lemon, part lost
child, part maple seed spinning to earth. Did hunter-gatherers
suffer depression? I read somewhere our Neanderthal genes
predispose us to it, but I also read trauma is handed down
like family china you never use but cannot bring yourself
to give away. Who doesn’t have trauma in their family tree?
Violence regular as seasons, hurt we learned early
never to talk about. I want to believe agriculture ruined
paradise—the labor that stooped our backs, the overseers
feeling power take root in their stomachs with its parasitic
poison, and money money money my god money—but maybe
we killed off the mammoths and giant sloths millennia earlier
like some toxic human spill. When I put down
the goodness in myself and can’t find it again,
I travel back through time
searching for the source of evil. What does it feel like
to know you deserve to be alive? Even when the slow boat
of my brain is making good headway, the spray cool
and sparkling, all I can do is fail
to think about it. And yet my love
flailing down the path as our dog dragged him
and his half-invented word that made me laugh
so hard I could not move my feet:
I almost went flugeling he said
and even remembering
my stomach contracts, my mouth
stretches in that weird miracle of biology and culture
that must prove some kind of divinity
still lives in us, no matter how far we keep falling.
Getting Older with Cruelty
Even in dreams I am lonely, given permission
for that word by the dead poet
I loved at nineteen and still do
though a friend told me something awful
he had supposedly done and it broke loose
a boulder that turned the river
to a trickle that sometimes goes almost dry.
Aging is not accrual but loss,
branches pulled off and the scars
healing more imperfectly every year
so it’s just a matter of time until the heartwood
rots. Meanwhile humans fail
to live up to the promise of their carbon,
little pieces of the universe come together
just so to make each of us.
So I woke to a world aflame, beaten, shot
and swept by disease. Should I take comfort
that the insects the poet loved
spin and sing and shine
still? Though they do not belong to us,
their lives are ours to take. I want to live
with those who cup such travelers
in their hands and carry them outside again—
a tenderness it is too easy
to forget to do. My father
forgot the anger he wielded during my childhood
like forgetting a bag by the side of the road.
He became the man whose eyes watered
in church, moved to memory by the hymns,
transported to the hills and clear streams
of a Pennsylvania probably gone now.
I’m not saying I forgave him
gained an expiration date. Like this world:
knowing it can’t last, we may still choose
to love it while we can.
Requirements
My dog is at the vet to be spayed.
A document entitled “symptoms” is open
on my screen, though it also lists
medications and side effects and possible
diagnoses. Two friends live with MS
and two with autoimmune diseases carrying
complicated names. My brother
must have his throat stretched from the inside
every year. All my siblings remember
ailments our parents and grandparents had
better than I do, though now
my sister with her family knowledge
is gone: cancer, echoing down the generations
from our grandmother to her daughter to hers,
all three women with the same first
names. How delicate these bodies are,
thrown this way and that with every tide.
Imperfection built in, so easy to harm,
like the poor dogwood sapling I planted
in too much sun, its leaves burned and curling
around the edges. I want to line up
my loved ones and touch each of them
with a wand: you will be well, and you,
and you, and you. An epidemic of wellness.
See? I would be a benevolent god. My love
would not require suffering. But didn’t I drop off
my sweet dog at the vet, knowing
what would happen to her there?
We’re All Standing in Line for That
Someone in Florida (always Florida) was caught selling
tickets to heaven for a hundred bucks. Drugs, Jesus,
outer space—the details don’t matter, only the certainty
that nearly anyone would pay a hundred dollars
to get to heaven, and the surest way to get there
is to be dead. People don’t like to talk about it,
but many of us think about being dead,
and how it just might be better than being alive.
In heaven surely the news doesn’t slash you
with the screams of children pulled from parents
seeking asylum in one of the richest countries
in the world. In heaven surely we’ve all found
our purpose, and yes maybe that purpose is to take
the very best drugs anyone has ever imagined
and sit around chatting with Jesus, who must be
one hell of a guy if he said even a little
of that stuff about loving your neighbor and helping
the poor and heaven being a rich-asshole-free place
because no kind of camel is getting through the eye
of any kind of needle. Of course what do I know
about being dead? On my resume under Experience
it’s all just living: watching my parents die
and my sister die and my brothers and me getting older
and none of us flying to outer space with the billionaires,
just trying to remember the old songs
so we have something to do while we’re waiting.
Katherine Riegel is the author of Love Songs from the End of the World, the chapbook Letters to Colin Firth, and two more books of poetry. Her work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Offing, Poets.org, and elsewhere. She is managing editor of Sweet Lit. Find her at katherineriegel.com.