57 - The Sweet Creations

The Sweet Creations
By Ray Russell

I

Even now, from time to time, I see them,
those conscientious, bright, and busy workers,
briskly dusting, polishing, and scrubbing,
in and out his living room and kitchen;
then, switching to an antic avocation,
performing entertainments just for him:

Extravaganzas glittering with gewgaws
pried from his past--old toys and paper cut-outs,
forgotten slang and songs of distant decades;
while careful to avert and hide their faces
whenever he would peer at them too closely.
("I'm not allowed to see them," he'd explain.)

"No smoking," he would warn you as you entered,
and he had given up his pack-a-day
because they didn't like it. Quick to please them,
he transferred all the greeting cards and photos
that covered his piano's gleaming top
to the TV, in tidy stacks, like tiles.

His newfound energy was almost welcome--
he'd seemed to shed the weight of eighty years.
" I'm tired," he told me with a sigh and smile,
'but it's a happy tired. I can't remember
when I've felt so good." I turned away
and thought: senility has come to stay.

Ray Russell is the well-known poet, script writer, editor, and author. His fifth novel, The Bishop's Daughter, will be published later this year by Houghton Mifflin. His Princess Pamela was an offering of The Literary Guild last year. Prose and poetry under his name have appeared in The Paris Review, The Midatlantic Review, and Verbatim. He was the recipient of the 1977 Sri Chinmoy Award for Spiritual Poetry. His essay on "The 'Wicked' Bibles" was published in THEOLOGY TODAY (Oct. 1980).

58 - The Sweet Creations

II

But no: it was the fault of medication
administered to fight a flaming rash,
itself the offshoot of a different drug,
the doctor told me. And the old man winked:
"Hear that? They're sending me another signal."
(They kept in touch with him by clicks and buzzes.)

I understood an origin of folklore:
the elves and leprechauns and poltergeists,
all gnomes and brownies, pixies, imps, and djinns,
that famous cobbler's small nocturnal helpers,
angels, demons, Pan, the Devil, God
were born of some brains' chemical imbalance.

The doctor said, "We'll take him off those pills,"
and presto!-overnight, his friends were gone,
into the darkest of oblivions,
where memory is powerless to reach;
the sweet creations of his sweetness, dead;
the noise and bustle of their labor, throttled.

Just to play safe, a week or so of rest
was recommended, so I took him to
the hospital and three square meals a day.
(Dried out and underfed he had become;
the brilliant, non-stop shows had made him shrink,
for, dazzled, he'd neglected food and drink.)

III

Before he was discharged, I had this dream….
The two of us had left the hospital.
We're walking back to his place, dressed in hats
(which neither of us wear in waking life)
and he says, as we pass a house of worship,
"Shouldn't we go to church?" I answer, "Yes--

but, Dad, this is a synagogue." "So what?"
he counters with impeccable dream-logic:
"We're wearing hats." "You're right," I say. We enter,
two Gentile atheists in hats, and pray.
My Catholic wife said of the dream, "I love it--
your inner self was giving thanks to God."

I frostily agreed that the unconscious
is certainly the stronghold of unreason,

59 - The Sweet Creations

including ghosts, divine and otherwise.
Next day, the hospital discharged my dad,
and hatless, we returned to his apartment.
He was a widower alone again.

I was relieved; my father had recovered;
but through my fear and panic I'd discovered
a flicker of the man my boyhood knew,
and I began to miss the faery crew
and bless the drug that held the charm to free them.
And even now, from time to time, I see them.