Home from the Hospital with Uncle and Aunt History

Last summer I wrote a sequence of poems featuring Uncle and Aunt History—two avatars of consciousness, politics, and outsider-ism. They’re shamans who, along with  visiting the dead, also love rock and roll, old libraries, and Voltaire’s bath tub.

The incitement came from Claes Anderson, a Finnish poet who began one of his poems: “Well, that’s it, said Uncle History.” That’s it. History is finally fed up. The joke (such as it is) is that history takes longer to be pissed off than the rest of us.

Sometimes I wrote two or three poems a day—a Kerouac thing, first thought, best thought. I was weighing the improbability and luck of  being alive. I could have written a poem called “Uncle History Has a Heart Attack” (and still might…) but my coronary bypass surgery in April of 2025 was nearly impossible to process. I was alive against the odds and didn’t know what it meant.

Uncle and Aunt History stumble across the fields after harvest. The world is dingy: muddy boot prints are everywhere. There’s blood on the stones. One of the first poems I wrote went like this: 

“Come on along,” Uncle History says

Channeling Robert Frost—

“You come too…”

But then he forgets his way

(Backwards looking

Does this to you)

Crustacean-travel 

One might call it

And its easy to fall down

As the ancestors

Left stumbling blocks

And easy

To forget 

Where you started

Lost among mud colored houses

At dusk 

“Where did I begin?”

“Whose path is this?”

“Yes I’m talking to myself”

The self-behind me

This last minute affair

Of nostalgia 

And fear

On the barren tracts

Where a forest once stood

Just outside the city

I’m guessing you know the landscape I’m talking about. Twisted rebar pokes up where trees used to be, and where once there was a filling station. Whose path is this? This is what you ask yourself after they’ve cut you open and stapled you back together. 

Jay Neugeboren, who, to my mind, has written the best memoir about recovering from heart surgery entitled “Open Heart” details every moment of a patient’s experience from the shock of diagnosis to the relief of recovery. Bypass surgery which we now think of as hum drum, is a wondrous thing and Neugeboren tells the story of having undergone the procedure with nuance. Anyway I found I couldn’t write this story. I let Uncle History say what I couldn’t:

Uncle History has always hung around hospitals…

Before they discovered ether 

Patients screamed their lungs out

(From “patiens” 

One who suffers 

And the verb “patior”

Which means I am suffering)

He saw how non-transactional it was

Everyone suffered 

Tuberculosis for the doctors

Women bleeding out

Asklepios with his snakes

No one emerged alive

Which was and is

The source of history 

Uncle carries a stalk without blossoms

Inside his coat…

My surgery was brutal. When I was in intensive care I fell in and out of consciousness. One morning I woke to see a black bear walking past the glass wall separating my room from the external corridor. I asked for strawberries because that’s what the bear would have eaten. I believed in that bear. 

There’s the rub. What precisely did I believe in? Is belief ever clear? Is there some kind of exactitude to it? I believed in the bear. And the berries. 

**

Uncle and Aunt History are alone in a hut in Lapland and they’re fidgeting because they don’t know the names of things that are commonplace:

“It’s a hard road”

says Uncle History

But hardest

For the road builders

As there’s no name for them

You can look it up—

No name

Just euphemisms

“Pavement pros”

“Asphalt guys”

Even the Roman’s

Had no term for them

Though “slave” works

What does it say

That such

An important job

Has no word

Uncle 

Thinks he knows

But he reckons

You can only

Get to it 

Through silence

And walking in circles 

I actually was walking in circles since I live on a cul de sac and around and around I went in my slow recovery. There are lines attributed to Basho: “Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.” Uncle History tapped me on the shoulder:

No one can fool Uncle History 

Better than history 

So who better to call on

Than Herodotus 

“Of all men’s miseries 

The bitterest is this: 

To know so much 

And to have control over nothing.”

It’s funny really 

Facts and floods 

Happenstance 

And horror

No one driving the car 

This seems right—

Aunt History knows better 

There’s pain at the center 

Of everything 

Facts can’t be ignored 

Which is 

Restraint itself

There it was: “To know so much/And to have control over nothing.”

**

Few non-disabled (whatever that means) understand that for us cripples, the business of accommodations starts inside us. Every disabled person is a neo-Platonist, imagining the device that will get you through. Aunt History knows this:

Aunt History Carves a Crutch

When you’re disabled “those” others

Think they can see right through you

Your watery eyes, thin bones…

They don’t think this

About mushrooms 

Or coconuts 

Or kitschy carved 

Pinocchios 

And of course

To a large extent

They’re not thinking at all

They’re just seeing 

The dumbbell clots

Of fussy prejudice 

And you, trembling one,

You got in their way 

As they were seeing themselves 

But don’t call “them”

Narcissists

For like nothing else in nature

They’re afraid of death

And again

You simply got in their way… 

Thoughts while home alone

Knife on wood…

**

There I was, alive in the wild carrot leaves, trying to figure out my next move. Meantime I knew a few things for certain. I wasn’t afraid of dying. On the eve of my surgery I felt calm. And I also knew (and know) that my recovery is an ongoing affair and I will never be the same and I’m carving the crutch.