Norman Fischer
MY BROTHER AND I
My brother and my father were both eye doctors. My father had the idea he could help
blind people to see using sound waves. He discovered that the length of some visual
brainwaves was actually the same length as sound waves in the brain, so he began to
manipulate brain waves with lasers, and invented, as a side benefit, laser eye surgery,
which he did not pursue. This technique was later developed in the United States.
My brother became an eye surgeon because of this. My father and brother
shared a medical practice, but they quarreled, and though they remained in practice
together, the quarrel lasted until the end of my father’s life.
We had a third brother. When I was 14, my brother 12, our third brother, 9 years old,
died accidentally in his room. No one heard his cry for help, and he died. Ever
since, my brother, whose room was next door to that of the youngest brother, has felt
guilty about this.
When my brother got cancer he ended his medical practice and began to care for
himself. “All my life I cared for others. Now I take care of myself.” He is more self
-centered since his illness began than he has ever been.
We have both been married to our wives for more than thirty years. But our wives
despise one another. I don’t know what to do about this. It is time for my brother and I to
be close, but this prevents it.
ELISEO’S GRANDFATHER
Eliseo’s grandfather was a famous scientist who traveled around the world presenting at
scientific conferences. He married the love of his life, a beautiful woman, more than a
decade younger than him, but they could not conceive children. Because of this they
established an exceptionally warm and close relationship, intimate with one another on
all levels, always together, traveling, thinking, working. So, when after fifteen years of
marriage, with her in her late thirties, and him in his early fifties, they did have children
— four, in quick succession — they did not pay much attention to them. The children
lived separately, in different homes they had established in different countries, and the
couple visited them all from time to time. This created distorted and fractures lives for
the children, among them Eliseo’s mother, who resented her parents throughout her life,
for their selfishness.
Eliseo’s grandfather developed Alzheimer’s in his late sixties. He could not
speak. But he could still remember his wife. When he saw her coming down the long
winding staircase in their palatial home in Geneva he was at first blank, confused, but
then, after a moment, a light returned to his eyes and he said the only sentence that
remained to him: “Ah, there she is, the love of my life.”
Because he could still recognize her, the family felt he was still himself, and so
should not be sent to live in a care facility. So he remained the rest of his life at home,
where he died.
Since the grandfather had had children so late in life, Eliseo, a small boy, knew
him only as a very old, demented, man. But he retains a sense of awe for this
grandfather and the grandeur and tragedy of his life.
IF THERE WERE NO WORLD
Where are you going to go now, when it seems the road’s end has been reached? She
was right of course about my melancholy, which I blame not on my essential character
or on what’s happened to me but on the damned northern climates, the sky always so
rain- or cloud-soaked you never see the sun. And why should anything ever connect to
anything else, nothing connects, everything is self contained. It was a long time ago,
after all. What should I be blamed for? I did not stalk her as she claimed I did. I only
wished to unburden myself. The stores were empty, or they were closed. The storm I
mean, the cause of it all. One storm after the other if not a storm preceded by a storm
which followed it. But no worry, in time everything gets sorted out. Time is that sorting
out. The new time mixing it up yet again. So that things are perpetually damp. If it in fact
it came after the old time. A tall Japanese tonsu made of very light wood, crudely, and
yet elegantly, five large drawers with thin curving metal handles. Small round knobs on
other pieces. Nesting tables, the Japanese kind. Or Indonesian. Places where there is
such rich nutty tea. Or sweetened tea. But no head injuries today, and that’s a blessing.
But what, if anything, is a blessing? Difficult to haul up all those steps. There are always
so many injuries, no planning is possible. Projecting into the future is a fool’s errand.
The future is impossible. Not possible. Fragments of flesh, pieces of a shipping dock. At
first blood, actual blood, and the stench, the smoke, but then later subsumed under the
category of language, especially in clauses that suggest states that do not exist as
such, but one hopes will at some point because they can be imagined and wished for.
Like an uttered spell or any utterance meant to cause to come to pass necessarily in
another world something that doesn’t now exist in this one. She’s been melancholy
since she was a girl because of the weather where she lived. And because of the
wealth. Wealth always makes a person melancholy or, on the other hand, gives that
person the wherewithal to obscure her feelings indefinitely through purchasing power
and distraction. In the southern climates they say people are more cheerful which I
believe to be the case. Which I have observed first hand to be the case. Which is in any
case the case there as I have read in reliable accounts. From long ago. Which I am
disposed to believe. Which I hope for, for their sake, the ones who live there, where
there is less wealth. But there is more wealth. Yet wealth isn’t a category. It is a kind of
tragedy. But wealth creates spaciousness but only in a vertical direction, above the
heads of the wealthy. Various unclassifiable demons angels fairies banshees or ghosts
occupy that airy space. But happiness is not necessarily preferable. Why must one
always feel some way why not several ways at once, or various ways in such rapid
succession that there is no naming of them so as to register them as feelings one
experiences as such. If there were no world there would still be feelings about the world.
And that would have to suffice.
POEM FOR JIRYU
Nothing can be said about anything
But there are a few actual facts
Garudas only eat living dragons
After they flap their 1,000 mile wings
Causing a tidal wave that kills many dragons
Leaving only few living dragons
Which the garudas naturally eat
Santa wears a red suit
Never a blue one
Though the sky is blue, the cloud white
These are examples of things that are true
And not false, of words that
Fit the picture perfectly
As all words do; when you walk
On a rocky path walk on
Rocks that do not wobble
The foot in walking knows where to go
Poems defeat poems
Which is how they know
How to walk as poems walk
If you can get in
Surely you can find a way to get out
AFTER JACOB KAHN
I am desperate for a word to mean what
I think it does, for this cup of wine
To transform my mind into a whirling disc
For the totality of the events in my life to add up to
A perfectly lit numeral, key to unlatch the locked
Chamber of my sorry heart, I’m
Going to wait here exactly as long as I
Am in this specific moment
Until all the fragments cohere
And what I’ve had in mind all along
Stops dangling like a furry spider in front of me
There’s not enough plasma in the world
To render this equation moot again
To recall for posterity’s sake the ancient tune
All of this is coming from a great distance
Inside you, and if you want proof of this
Consider the air itself
And its absence
AFTER JK 2
Eye black
Makes you punk again
And the deceptions
Of sincerity
Color you blue
What I want
On every occasion’s
Not to be trusted
For the other guy
Stuffed that thought
Into my mind
If I wanted solutions
I’d have avoided the problems
In the first place
Which is why I hop along
Phrase by phrase
Against the grain
AFTER NORMA COLE
Memory they call the truth
The same sun dreaming
Exact location overlooking a tree
Mahmud Darwish poem “Think of Others”
As you sleep and count the stars
Can you erase hunger?
Weaving and spinning the amulet
Sensation displaced in the voice of another
Cement itself
Words not meant for massacre
Contain the summer nights
Bound reality
How round things topple over
Islands of silence
Ordinary evening is to be in danger
The chatter of the world is just a breath
Conditions are melting in the present moment
When the state withdraws from the social contract
We’ve worked in bookstores:
We’re doing it now!
NOTHING DETERMINES
Nothing determines
Outcomes other than
The conditions that make
The world as it is
Or was before you
Arrived on the scene
The world without you
Is a beautiful thing only
Your presence caused a drift
In the wind that renders
All as if relevant
Only to your story
Which relaxes around twilight
When certain flowers close
And the heat of day descends
The world free of you is a
Happy world for no one is
Then in it it is light
As a feather it floats off
To join other similar worlds
And is happy
…
Trees escape your story
They float way beyond the thought you have
That you seem to exist
Perhaps as the person you are
Or that others take you to be
Trees are the counterform tilting up
What inclines downward
So as to awaken the slumberers
Norman Fischer is a poet, essayist, and Zen Buddhist priest. A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, he has been publishing poetry and prose since the 1970's. His most recent poetry titles include Through A Window, Nature, There Was A Clattering As.. . and Men in Suits. Forthcoming from Chax Press (that brought out his Selected Poems 1980-2013 in 2022) is his collection PoEM. His latest Buddhist title is the forthcoming The Great Road: Zen Master Dogen and the Art of Continuous Practice. He is the founder of the Everyday Zen Foundation.