by Bart Edelman
Rage disorder is what he said—
The shrink with a nose,
Halfway from here to Timbuktu.
Oh, I knew he was right,
Like the others before him,
But I had no more fight in me
And lay down to die—
One of many deaths that month.
Believe me, dear friends,
I’m trying to keep it together.
Hence the recent examination,
When I submitted to treatment,
Made an attempt, at least,
To follow the prescribed plan—
Lest I become a mere statistic
On some ghastly actuarial table.
Who knows where it began:
A father forever in love with fear,
A mother at jealousy’s front door,
A brother twisted by sisterhood,
A dog of questionable pedigree.
Still, I could have beaten the odds,
Not succumbed to anger so deep,
It haunts this slow, ancient retreat.
Bart Edelman’s poetry collections include Crossing the Hackensack (Prometheus Press), Under Damaris’ Dress (Lightning Publications), The Alphabet of Love (Red Hen Press), The Gentle Man (Red Hen Press), The Last Mojito (Red Hen Press), The Geographer’s Wife (Red Hen Press), Whistling to Trick the Wind (Meadowlark Press), and This Body Is Never at Rest: New and Selected Poems 1993 – 2023 (Meadowlark Press). He has taught at Glendale College, where he edited Eclipse, a literary journal, and, most recently, in the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. His work has been widely anthologized in textbooks published by City Lights Books, Etruscan Press, Fountainhead Press, Harcourt Brace, Longman, McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall, Simon & Schuster, Thomson/Heinle, the University of Iowa Press, Wadsworth, and others. He lives in Pasadena, California.
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“As for ourselves, we see the things you have made because they are. But they are because you see them. We see outwardly that they are and inwardly that they are good. But you saw them made when you saw that it was right to make them..”
— Augustine in his Confessions
header image: “Black and White Fall #7” (cropped) © Kairos Photography
