In his essay “The Redress of Poetry,” Seamus Heaney wondered what good poetry is or does in the face of the pressure of an intractable reality. Heaney proposes that “if our given experience is a labyrinth, its impassability can still be countered by the poet's imagining some equivalent of the labyrinth and presenting himself and us with a vivid experience of it.” Heaney acknowledges these equivalent images do not in themselves change outcomes, but instead the image that represents the labyrinth allows “consciousness a chance to recognize its predicaments, foreknow its capacities, and rehearse its comebacks in all kinds of ways.” Heaney goes on to say that art places a counter-weight in the scales. On one side is what is real; on the other is what we imagine about that reality. What good is that counterweight? The imagined reality, argues Heaney, can offer a “glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances.”

In the past year two books reminded me with great force of Heaney's sense of the redress of poetry. The Mistress by Catherine Strisik, and Four Reincarnations by Max Ritvo present us with very different imaginative responses to mortal illness. Despite their differences in style from each other, and from Heaney too, both Strisik and Ritvo generated a poetry that served as a comeback and counterweight to the unacceptable realities they faced. They take us deep into the experience of implacably unfolding disease, and they offer us images that light up the paths one walks and the predicaments one faces when one enters the twilight world of grave illness.

* * *

In 1980, Larry Schreiber, a physician who would later become the husband of poet Cathy Strisik, was doing volunteer work for the Red Cross in rural Cambodia. There he was exposed to Paraquat, an insecticide that is now known to cause profound genetic damage to the brain, harming especially the cells that produce dopamine. Without adequate amounts of that neuro-transmitter, the brain and the whole body suffers. The death of cells that produce dopamine is more commonly known as Parkinson's Disease, a progressive, degenerative neurological disorder. It has no cure. Visible symptoms usually begin with various kinds of movement disorders such as extreme slowness and stiffness, and resulting difficulties with one's gait. Over time, the disease causes a series of cascading problems that include cognition and mood. In itself it is not fatal, but it complicates and exacerbates every illness a given patient faces. It also takes a long time for the disease to harm enough neurons for the first symptoms to appear, and thus it was not until August 2008 that Schreiber's first symptoms appeared.

Schreiber's poet-wife noticed them first. He was an active hiker, and Strisik observed that he was no longer swinging his right arm when he walked. She did not know it yet, but this was one of the classic symptoms of Parkinson's Disease. From the diagnosis onward, Strisik kept a journal on the progress of her husband's disease and her own responses to it. In 2016, Schreiber passed away in the aftermath of a massive stroke, and thus Parkinson's was not the direct cause of his death. Still, it is hard to imagine that Parkinson's Disease did not add to the stress in this man's life and on this marriage.

The Mistress is a collection of poems that emerged out of those eight years. The book is organized around a metaphor, namely, that Parkinson's Disease is a “mistress” who has entered their lives and marriage. At first glance the idea of an illness as a mistress is an odd, off-kilter trope. To be afflicted with an incurable illness is obviously no love-affair, and this mistress is no sweetheart. As Strisik presents her, this “mistress” is insidious, domineering, selfish, and harmful. In the first poem of the book, we learn of the moment Strisik first noticed something was wrong. That moment, however, is told in the voice of the disease itself, and from that point of view, it is as if a long-term secret affair has been discovered by a jealous wife. In this poem, set in August, 2008, the “mistress” speaks:

She has seen me.
I stop his arm from swinging
as he walks in summer
on Cape Ann.
I push his
hope of love-
making—
Oh, he feels good.
But she sees me stiffen
him and then
whatever saviors
she and he might have been
for each other, they are about to be
no longer.

“She” is the poet-wife. “Me” is the disease, and the speaker of this poem almost relishes the idea of harming both people. The poem ends on some chilling lines:

I am the best kept secret.
Until she sees me. No one
is crawling on their knees just yet.
It will be months before I bring them down.

This mistress feels more like a curse visited upon this couple. Something uninvited and unwelcome has moved into this marriage.

Imagining the illness as a mistress allows Strisik to voice her sense of loss and abandonment. It also enables Strisik to voice her sense of helplessness. When we say that a disease is cruel, this is what we are talking about. The actual disease is neither cruel nor gentle. It just is. But to personify it even slightly gives Strisik a way to speak of what is unbearable, especially since in point of fact there is little one can do to halt the “progress” of this disease. Moreover, the metaphor of the mistress also gives Strisik a way of expressing her distress as to what is happening to her marriage. She too is being harmed by this disease. Her grief, her denial, her anger, her disbelief, all these get woven into this metaphor.

This is the fabric of despair, but ironically the metaphor of the mistress gives Strisik a way of speaking about how one learns to accept the unacceptable. Resisting all the way, Strisik nonetheless makes room for this “mistress” in her life and marriage. One could say she has no choice, but in these poems, she chooses to grudgingly accept what has been forced upon her.

Toward the end of the book, Strisik tells her husband what that acceptance is like.

Tell me that you love
in the darkness
of our bed

that has become my lichen bed
where I lie with the too full moon
and a stranger. I tell you now

this is me
touching her.
These years of sharing you

with your Mistress,
her petty low-grade way of bodily encounters
with the two of us

the translucent lace curtains billowing
in and out because even in November
I sleep open, bound

you might say
with the Mistress I say
who is to blame for this night's audience.

And if I understand the concerto, this highest key
that aches, I might tell you
why this audience applauds.

“This is me / touching her” is bitter enough, but even more galling are the petty “bodily encounters” with the disease and the profound sense of being “bound” to the mistress, including sharing the marriage bed with her. This acceptance is notable for the almost complete absence of self-pity. The speaker of this poem is as tied to the mistress as her husband is, and that is probably the mistress-metaphor's most significant revelation: the disease truly belongs to both people. Parkinson's is an intimate, intrusive, and cruel presence in both lives.

* * *

In August 2016, at the age of twenty-five, the poet Max Ritvo passed away from a particularly virulent form of Ewing's sarcoma. As is typical with this rare form of bone cancer, the diagnosis came at age fifteen, and over the next decade Ritvo suffered through painful metastases and rounds of chemo and radiation. All the while he was coming of age as a poet. Throughout that decade Ritvo knew his chances at survival were slim. As these poems try to respond to the harsh conditions of his existence, there are a range of understandable emotions, but self-pity is not one of them. Nor is there is the lethargy that might come with knowing there is little or no hope. Instead these poems seem to emerge form a deep wellspring of imaginative activity. They bubble away with the energies of surrealism and dream. They are rife with the ironies inherent in a poet coming of age, discovering the shape of his art. Pathos might be the natural and grim landscape of mortality, but here in this book the landscape sparkles with empathic generosity and a sense of humor beyond either hope or despair.

For the generosity, one might look at “Black Bulls,” a poem early on in this book. Here Ritvo offers a portrait of his inner landscape, a burnt-out, Beckettian place.

My mind is
three black bulls on
three hills of sand, far apart.

My loved ones
sleep in clay hollows.

If I turn from you, you will go back
to your clay hollow.

The aqueducts of the city of my language
clot with lather.

The world is bad
and I am bad.

Why is the world “bad,” and the poet too? The idea is that the world and his body have to his mind started to rot. We can't be sure that is what he means here. Maybe those three bulls are icons of thick and sturdy bodily life, sentinels on guard for him. But they could just as easily be images of the tumors that will eventually gore him. The ending of the poem, however, puts all the ambiguous sand hills and bulls in perspective.

Three black bulls stomp the hills of sand
into blistered glass.

Their hooves swelter against these
wrong bells.

I am so sorry that you have come into this mind of mine.

This ending is empathic, generous, and almost humorous. It is the way a patient might joke with a nurse come into the room to take his temperature. He seems to want to apologize for what he makes us have to deal with.

Given Four Reincarnations as a title for this book, it is worth looking at the premise behind the last line of “Black Bulls.” The speaker assumes one can enter the mind of another, despite its frightening elements. There is a kind of faith hiding within that line, a faith that includes poetry as a doorway to that mind. It is fitting that this poem comes early in the book, for this collection as a whole the many ways in which we might enter into the mind of another. That is how we live on beyond death. That is Max Ritvo's idea of reincarnation.

In “Poem to My Litter,” for instance, the litter consists of mice that medical researchers have implanted some of Ritvo's cancer cells. In effect they have given those mice his genes, this litter his progeny.

I want my mice to be just like me. I don't have any children.
I named them all Max. First they were Max 1, Max 2,

but now they're all just Max. No playing favorites.
They don't know they are named, of course.

They're like children you've traumatized
and tortured so they won't let you visit.

I hope, Maxes, some good in you is of me.
Even my suffering is good, in part. . .

Or take Ritvo's elegy to his dog: “Poem to My Dog, Monday, On Night I Accidentally Ate Meat”:

Monday, with your millions of soft horns
I will slip behind your poodle eyes,
loading myself like a cartridge of light

I will live in your ecstatic brain
and take your life,

and you can take mine,
and we won't give our lives to cancer,
but to each other.

The wish for an afterlife in the mind of another is most explicit in “Heaven Is Being a Flower Together,” a poem in which Ritvo addresses his wife, Victoria.

I have written this poem inside of you.
I am clutched in with your mother blood,
feeling your bends in the dark,
becoming a soft bend in your body.

We are becoming a bulb
in the ground of the living
in the winter of being alive.

From poem to poem throughout Four Reincarnations, Ritvo offers us his wishes, his best guess, his fondest hope, and maybe sometimes his deepest belief about how a life isn't over just because it has come to the biological end. There are both visible and invisible legacies, reincarnations if you will.

Ritvo's poetry is energized everywhere by his humor. There is some gallows humor along with considerable verbal wit, and one could think of both as a psychological defense mechanism, but Ritvo's humor is more than that kind of deflection. The first line in this book is: “The bed is on fire, and are you laughing?” This question sums up the predicament the speaker faces, and Four Reincarnations answers in the affirmative. Yes, he is, you are, we are indeed laughing even as the bed is on fire. Later in the book we meet a “Poem In Which My Shrink Is a Little Boy.” The setting of the poem is an imagined afterlife wherein the poet and his psychoanalyst, now reincarnated as a child, engage in a long colloquy about how their souls have been “twinned” for eternity, “through countless bodies.” The former analyst now needs some adult advice, and Ritvo counsels the child about troubles at school.

The boys at school teased you about your Velcro shoes?
I'm sorry, but you'll never outgrow them.

Last life, you were at the zoo, and a monkey
tied your laces together.

This may be a playful imagining of adult and child role reversal in the afterlife, but like the last line of “Black Bulls” it is premised on the idea that we do create legacies that live on in the minds of our significant others. It also plays with the idea that in our closest relationships, the roles we have in our lives are in fact interchangeable. In “Universe Where We Weren't Artists,” the last poem in the book, Ritvo suggests that humor may be all we have, in Heaney's terms, to make a comeback to the mortal facts of existence. Here Ritvo and his loved ones are looking for a gravesite for him, and as he ponders the “hilarious moon” above and the moonlit mud of the earth he is going to, Ritvo makes a final request.

When the breath starts to be ragged,
tickle me, my deepest beloveds—
so that the raggedness become confused.

* * *

The Mistress and Four Reincarnations are books of poetry about ostensibly hopeless situations, but the poems and the poets are not hopeless. Strisik's trope of the mistress puts that Parkinson Disease in its place and helps her endure what she must. Ritvo's empathy and laughter can live on in the mind of another. Neither change the course of the illnesses confronted. We can hear in the back of our minds Auden's dictum that poetry makes nothing happen. But these books of poetry remind us even more of the rest of what Auden said in his elegy for Yeats. Poetry, he wrote, survives “in the valley of its making,” and as it flows forth from our isolation and griefs, it continues to survive as a “way of happening, a mouth.” Words at some points may in fact be all we have, but what these poets teach us is that at such moments they matter more than ever.

Works Referenced

• Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.
• Max Ritvo, Four Reincarnations. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2016.
• Catherine Strisik, The Mistress. Denver: Three: A Taos Press, 2016.