FOR RUTH READ,
ON HER SEVENTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY

There’s an old white house in Norwich—

     Church Street, to be exact—

That attracts the strangest people—

     not promote; just attract.

They come from all directions;

     they come in trucks and cars;

they come in creeds and colors;

     and all with wounds and scars.

I’ve come here many times myself—

     with family, with children, with laundry;

in horror, in terror, in love, and in pain,

     with furies hard upon me.

For this is the House of Healing,

     a haven for those out of hope;

alkies and junkies and put-it-in-front-of-me’s—

     give me enough rope.

Here we find sanctuary,

     all strangers, come sister and brother.

The lady who lives here loves us;

     no less can we do for each other.

That’s all, they say, that God wants from us;

     it’s a lot like the way He works.

If you’re looking for Him, stop here;

     you could look a lot further, and do a lot worse.

Footnotes to “For Ruth Read, on Her Seventy-Fifth Birthday”

When I talk about my “poetry career,” I often describe the period between the late 70s and 1992 as a time when I had become disillusioned with poetry. I averaged maybe one poem a year, “and then only when the Muse held a gun to my head, threatening, ‘If you don’t write this one, I’ll never give you another one.’” This poem is from that period, although in this instance, Ruth Read herself was the demanding Muse.

1. Two notes about “alkies and junkies and put-it-in-front-of-me’s—”

a) Most people who write in English believe that when you have to pluralize a word that doesn’t really have a legitimate plural form, you do it with an apostrophe: of numerics, for example, the 60’s; of last names, the Kelly’s. In this belief, most people are wrong: the correct forms would be “the 60s” and “the Kellys.” In keeping with this principle, I should have written “put-it-in-front-of-mes,” and in fact I did. But many people have had a hard time reading that, and consequently a hard time understanding the line. Forced to choose between grammatically-correct-butunreadable and readable-but-wrong, I opted here for readability.

b) Within the Recovery community there are, on the one hand, those who think alcoholics are very different from drug addicts and, on the other, those who argue that addiction is addiction, whatever the substance. And in the middle probably a large majority who might lean toward one side or the other but don’t think the question is worth fighting about. My personal addiction history is all about alcohol, although I’ve had enough surgeries to appreciate fully the attraction of pain-killers. But I have to admit that in my drinking years, I would have drunk, smoked, eaten, popped, injected, shoved up my ass, or otherwise ingested anything that anyone had put in front of me. It was just my good fortune that no one ever put anything else in front of me.

2. “you could look a lot further, and do a lot worse.”

I was really proud of this line. Ruth’s husband Frank had died a few years before this poem was written, and their love for each other was such that it would have been unconscionable to write this poem without including some mention of Frank. At the same time, how to deal with so sad a subject in a celebratory poem?

Of all the memorable things Frank had said, the one that I fastened on was something that Ruth told me he had said to her after first meeting my first wife: “Jack could have looked a lot further and done a lot worse.” It was like sneaking Frank into the poem through a back door. I think he would have appreciated that.

Curiously, I had met Frank once several years before I ever met Ruth. Frank, who had risen to the rank of colonel and had been a base commander during and after World War II, had accepted a reduction to sergeant in the subsequent demobilization. When I started college, he was honcho of the ROTC program. We freshman were required to wear beanies, and anyone wearing a beanie was subject to being pressed into service by anyone who needed cheap (read “free”) labor. It happened that a couple of my friends and I were hauled in to move some filing cabinets around Sergeant Read’s office. He was gentle and soft-spoken with us, and appreciative; there was certainly nothing traumatic about the event, nothing at all remarkable. But seven-plus years later, when I met him as Ruth’s husband, I remembered Sergeant Read.