H
e a r t S o n s & H e a r t D a u g h t e r s of A l l e n G i n s
b e r g
N
a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 4 : A r c h i
v e s E d i t i o n
PETER MARTI
Samsaric
Plans
(Mom’s Voice All Night in My Dreams)
Every morning I try to prostrate, touching
forehead,
elbows, knees, and
belly in front of my shrine which has on it sacred
Buddhist Text preliminary practice called
Ngondro.
I move slowly, seeing my mother: Ratty
white terry cloth robe, kerchief hid
hair like a cancer victim, glasses pushed
down her nose so she could see
through the proper
lens at what she was looking at. I picture her bowing
down on my left, Dad, dead too, bows on the
right - both prostrating with me
symbolically in front of
visualized empty crystal Guru Rinpoche, he of the
infinite compassion,
enough for my family even. And so I stretch out, if time
and my own body's ill permit, so that we are
bowing together: Parents, son
my living siblings my dear dead cat all
beings we've killed this life or any, all
food animals we've consumed, all insects
squashed by mistake on purpose, all
friends who've
betrayed, all jerks on the freeway, in supermarket lines, the
rude waiters, the sarcastic students, the
lovers who left us the ones we left,
the hard and difficult ones in our lives we
cant escape and so vow to learn
from - all tourists of cyclic existence - yes
all of those join my robed gone
mommy, bowing to the
Buddha of my mind.
stripped by death bare her wig hair
forever
gone, mother, strapped to the million dollar machines
with
liquid crystal displays, kept breathing eight breaths per minute, a
perfect
eerie # since there was just enough pause in between to cause
me
to look up at the TV screen in fear of her giving out.
Said
2 sandalwood mala bead cycles of mantras-visualized the gentle
white
light consciousness emanation of Guru Rinpoche over
mother's
thin
haired pate.
Not even a glimpse for her of thangka depictions of deity Vajrakilaya,
like
Dad, whom I instructed not to worry and who at
least had dhutsi*
and my
sober efforts to
calm his confused mind after the final plug pulled on dialysis.
No, Mother got nothing but the best that
science had to offer. Healed
up, after admittance for alcoholic
hemorrhaging in esophagus, her lungs nearly
gave out in emphysemic
reaction to not smoking for the first time in 50 years.
But that was on the mend too when the big Stroke
hit and her brain fried like
some power cord left in the rain or.
No, the stroke took her down past words,
past memory past grief over
Dad gone her sister Dorothy gone and the Kids
and Grand kids not enough,
travel not enough,
booze alone 4 a.m. with bitter resentment pouring the glass
full, raging against Death while saluting the
Bastard, bitter about her life of
sacrifice - all of it
finally enough as her synapses snapped and the second
stroke 12 hours later
slapped her down into final coma spin and the gradual
body dance of Less began and she lost This
Body and drifted toward another
- while I mumbled
prayers and shivered in the air conditioned horror chamber
of the Intensive
Care Unit Bardo.
Already
gone an hour, skin cool & moist to touch her shallow chest
rises
& falls, eight times a minute
the
doctor arrives and pronounce Mother Dead
just
as her brother shows. Bursting into tears
(his other sister dead six months now) we hold
each
other struck dumb by sudden horror.
Mother
lies still
wire
and tube strung
a
dim red light
points
from one finger
Deciding against the autopsy they said was
standard procedure - more
machinery, the corpse to
be disturbed - after all, she did die in the hospital,
all of Science arrayed like jewels, useless
and to be left behind, the four sons,
her brother, now sitting in cafeteria with the hundredth cup of coffee we
had
there over the years
with Dad's many stays.
Calls to friends from her address book. Call to
her dentist canceling last
appointment, to the
pharmacy who'd left message about prescription and to
the mortuary where we'd taken Dad for his
final viewing just eleven months
prior. the cemetery, the gravestone, the flowers.
We'd be dividing up the household, arguing over
knickknacks and furniture,
but tonight was the first night of Mother
dead and I was to sleep in their bed.
First the ordering of take-out food, the
liquor store where I stopped to
buy girlie mag to
look at to distract me if the rented video couldn't - not tho
to
buy Drink, for that was Her Muse of Death
but mine no more. Besides, the
house was fulla the stuff, bourbon mostly I reckoned, but it didn't
matter
tonight. Tonight I
would gorge on bbq meat and pussy shots of young
women
I could posses for a few minutes without
questions - ah, the chubby mess I'd
become.
Did she look down on my throbbing orgasm
with sad longing? Did she
fly from her castle in the Modesto night
after watching me sob my post-futile
climax blue tears?
Was she happy to be dead at last, never admitting it alive
but for dark hints those final months that “there
wasn't much to live for”
post Dad, post Sister Dorothy, post health
and empty bed?
And their bed welcomed me like a cloud of
opium.
I could've easily pulled out the guest bed/couch
and found the sheets and
blankets to make me
comfortable, but Dad had died in the guest room, in a
rented hospital bed,
so death was everywhere, what matter where this living
orphan lay?
I sleep with the lights on, Mom's voice
all night in my dreams.
Wake, half expecting her cloud of cigarette smoke from the kitchen to great me.
Bloody fucking cold Modesto - the city
that reminded my parents of
San Jose in the sixties, the city of cemeteries,
of dialysis center, of the hospital
were Dad nearly died three times but
recovered only to die at home and
where Mother
entered, was nearly healed, then died anyway.
Yes, Modesto where, ironically, my
Father's 95 year old Mother lay,
sill alive in her dementia nursing home bed.
The animate mind that moves from the
sleep of dream to the dream of
wakening to the quick
sleep of death to the memory to the present view:
Even this black and white polka-dot
bolster pillow I lean my head on
comes from their
house, the House of the Sixties
Danish Modern tables &
chairs, the antique
gilt frame mirrors, the end tables, sewing machine of woe,
the kitchen of aluminum pots and the goofy
time save meals of old age, of
potholders and bourbon
glasses cloudy from years of dishwasher, the garage
full of stuff for Christmas...
You, Mother were the House, you were the
Color Schemes: Black
couch, Yellow rug,
Bright Blue or Kelly Green fabric wire chairs. I confess to
singeing the green
chair with the marijuana roach while my brothers and I partied
during Parental
Absence - we snipped out the burnt threads and green magic
markered the area to
match the fabric and, miraculously, escaped detection.
Your home no more - possessions
scattered, edging toward ruin like
box of 60's Life and Time magazines I
left in leaky storage shed this winter.
* * *
When we visited the Tibetan Rinpoche last summer he called one day,
to the main house where we had just
lunched, "Peter and Nancy should go to
S.'s House."(S., long time wife and
attendant to Rinpoche, had died earlier
that spring). So we walked up the hill with
the Bhutanese attendant to where
her home was. At
first I was confused - the small house was maybe half
finished. We had to
climb over a trench to go inside. Some of the floor was
bare plywood, the
walls still missing sheetrock, the kitchen cabinets were in
but no appliances- the house now a monument
to Impermanence.
Later Rinpoche asked
if we had gone to see the house and nodded his head as
he watched us, gauging
the lesson's effectiveness.
*Tibetanherbal
preparation said to seal rebirth from Lower Realms
[Originally
published in NHS 2003, http://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs03/marti.html.]