Rode my bicycle to work today for the first time in months. It's a 35 mile round trip with a half hour lunch and nine hours of meetings and C++ in the middle. I think I'm brain-dead, but don't exercise my living will till after you've read this year's StAnza lecture, which I found via the New Poetry list. It's got something to piss off nearly everybody, and it's therefore almost thrilling (or would be if I weren't in the condition my condition is in).
Which I've realized also has something to do with the fact that fifteen years ago yesterday, two days after my daughter Lee's 6th birthday, I came home from work to find my first wife had taken her and left. A week or so later I found out that my wife, damaged by a pituitary tumor, the drugs prescribed to treat it, and by having been convinced by Duke University Hospital psychologist Susan Roth that she (my wife) had been raised in a murderous Satanic cult, had accused me of molesting my daughter. It was nearly a year before the accusation was dismissed with prejudice, and in the meantime our house was repossessed. Shortly after that my dog died, I lost my job, and my wife and daughter disappeared. The second of these two poems, the quality of neither of which I am in position to judge, led Lee to briefly contact me two years ago.
What I Know
Always, always, always, I know this first —
My dearest girl is gone, my daughter Lee
I loved but not enough to keep with me —
Of all the things I've failed to do, the worst.
Her poet mother's supple brain was cursed
To learn the language of pathology.
When surgery failed they turned to drugs and she
Began to dream of torture, dreams she nursed
To memories of children murdered by
Her father and her mother and her will.
I could not hold her to the truth. She found
At Duke a doctor who decided I
Was fondling Lee. A judge said no, but still
She took my Lee and hid her underground.
Old Songs
When I got home my wife was gone, and so
I bought a mandolin — eight more strings
To tie me to a world I didn't know,
In which my daughter's kept from me by rings
Of law and fear. Almost the only things
Her mother let us share before the end
Were meals and music. Maybe she still sings
"I'll Meet You in the Morning" with a friend,
And thinks of me, and remembers how we'd spend
Those Wednesday afternoons with jugband songs,
Bluegrass, and Scottish airs. I could depend
On her to get them right when I was wrong —
Her ear was better. She was eight years old.
What songs we sang when she was mine to hold!
8:30:58 PM 
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