Life Review
By Joan Mazza
My head is a washing machine churning
a personal history of memories mixed with
the scent of a men’s cologne I can’t name
and a dog I still grieve after. I want her back,
her back pressed against mine, her attentive
affection, paws that smelled like popcorn.
Oh, those new sheets, towels, tablecloths
with napkins and placemats. Awash
in affluence! Luxuries lined up, candles,
too, burning on the coffee table.
Sacrificial altar! Charlie said, when
he stepped from afternoon sunlight
into darkness for an intimate afternoon
of fleshy enlightenment. I’m not churning
history, I’m sorting it out, applying
the benefit of hindsight. I’m present
to my days here in Virginia, surrounded
by trees, far from asphalt and cement
and the rattle and stink of traffic. I enter
the past to unfold layered feelings like
vintage linens in a cedar chest. No. Dirty
laundry forbidden to analysis because
they threatened to expose the doctor in his
shining greed. Did you fuck your shrink?
someone asks with a laugh. Not exactly.
When healing harms, where do you go?
The rough carpet of concealment covers
all. Talk it through or talk to bury it
in the tonnage of words soon forgotten.
Russ said, You’re always going back.
Criticism or projection? More like
a prediction of the future. Long dead,
he won’t read this manuscript or what
I’ll say about his sexual delusions
that Publix checkout girls flirt with him,
or that he might make me pregnant when
we never once had intercourse. So many
details puzzle me, and I puzzle them out,
a Rubik’s Cube of repeating words: touch,
time, breast, Bob, Bernd, blabbermouth.
All my life, I’ve said I have been running
out of time. Now hours and days line up
before me, like baskets of tumbled
laundry waiting to be sorted, pressed,
folded, layered on dark wooden shelves.
Joan Mazza worked as a medical microbiologist and psychotherapist, and taught workshops nationally with a focus on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), and her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, The MacGuffin, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia, where she writes a daily poem. www.JoanMazza.com
