August 22: "Istanbul," Little Lake, "Hope Rx"

This evening, a poet friend and I met for an hour or so by a little lake in my hometown.  It was wonderfully warm--a late-summer day that was green and full of insects and geese and water.  We met to honor the memory of our friend, Helen, who passed two years ago.  It was one of Helen's favorite spots for getting together.  During the pandemic, we spent many a night there with our journals and pens.

Many people remember the pandemic as a time of sadness and isolation.  And, yes, the world was a shit show.  People were depressed and dying.  Science was politicized.  Jobs were lost.  Donald Trump, the President of the United States, was screaming/toilet Tweeting about fake news.  In a lot of ways, everything seemed infected.

Yet, I enjoyed the need to sequester at home.  To limit our exposure to outsiders.  It played right into my inner introvert.  When I got home at night from working at the hospital, I could go for long walks with my dog.  All the newest movies were released to streaming services, so no need for expensive trips to a movie theater.

Most of all, I appreciated how truly precious time with close friends became.  

Billy Collins is bathed . . . 

Istanbul

by: Billy Collins

It was a pleasure to enter by a side street
in the center of the city
a bathhouse said to be 300 years old,
old enough to have opened the pores of Florence Nightingale
and soaped the musical head of Franz Liszt.

And it was a pleasure to drink
cold wine by a low wood fire
before being directed to a small room in an upper gallery,
a room with a carpet and a narrow bed
where I folded my clothes into a pile
then came back down, naked
except for a gauzy striped cloth tucked around my waist.

It was an odd and eye-opening sensation
to be led by a man with close-cropped hair
and spaces between his teeth
into a steamy marble rotunda
and to lie there alone on the smooth marble
watching the droplets fall through the beams
of natural light in the high dome
and later to hear the song I sang –
‘She Thinks I Still Care’ – echo up into the ceiling.

I felt like the last of the sultans
when the man returned and began to scrub me –
to lather and douse me, scour and shampoo me,
and splash my drenched body
with fresh warm water scooped from a marble basin.

But it was not until he sudsed me
behind my ears and between my toes
that I felt myself filling with gratitude
the way a cloud fills with rain,
the way a glass pipe slowly fills with smoke.

In silence I thanked the man
who scrubbed the bottoms of my feet.
I thanked the history of the Turkish bath
and the long chain of bathmen standing unshaven,
arms folded, waiting for the next customer
to come through the swinging doors of frosted glass.

I thanked everyone whose job
it ever was to lay hands on the skin of strangers,
and I gave general thanks that I was lying
facedown in a warm puddle of soap
and not a warm puddle of blood
in some corner of this incomprehensible city.

As one bucket after another
of warm water was poured over my lowered head,
I stopped thinking of who and what to thank
and rode out on a boat of joy,
a blue boat of marble and soap,

rode out to the entrance of the harbour
where I raised a finger of good-bye
then felt the boat begin to rise and fall
as it met the roll of the incoming waves,
bearing my body, my clean, blessed body out to sea.

Human connection in life is very important.  I know that.  During the height of the pandemic, human connection was limited for everyone to close family and loved ones.  (I'm not talking about the idiots who gathered without masks in weird protests that resulted in sickness and deaths.)  There is something very holy being in the presence of people you care about and who care about you.

I think that's what Collins is getting at in this poem.  The act of being washed he describes is incredibly intimate.  For those minutes that he lies prone, lets himself be scrubbed by the man (a stranger) with close-cropped hair, the speaker is connected and vulnerable to another human being.  He emerges from the experience renewed, resurrected.  Clean.  Blessed.

That's what I felt tonight, writing with my poet friend.  We were renewing each other in our sadness and longing for our missing friend.  Scrubbing each other clean.  Blessing each other and the place Helen held so dear.

Saint Marty has been resurrected.

Something I wrote this evening . . . 

Hope Rx

by: Martin Achatz

Yesterday, my doctor scribbled

on her prescription pad the word

"HOPE" in all caps, underlined it,

included instructions "BID AC"--

twice a day after meals.

I made an appointment with her

because I'd fallen, twisted my ankle,

was worried after five days of pain

that I'd fractured some small bone

that was now healing in a weird, bent

way.  I told her I didn't want to limp

for the rest of my life or cause spine 

issues because of my lopsided gait.

She listened, nodded, lips pressed

together, then took my foot in her hands,

bent it one way, another way, kept

asking Does this hurt? with each

maneuver.  Then she handed me

the prescription, told me to call

after ten days if I was still in pain.

Last night, I took my first dose--

a green evening by a lake, writing

poems with a friend--and my ankle

didn't hurt.  This morning, I took

another dose--a vanilla mocha

from a local coffee shop, thinking

of my friend Helen's laugh

as I sipped it.  I can already feel

the tension in my foot loosening,

as if I'm wading in a summer stream

after a night of hard, cool rain.