I am Not a Merman, and I Told As Much to Primrose Cohen

I was struck with the rumblings and stirrings of those things within me with which I believe I am ethically bound to contend. The slamming and the stomping, the flickers and the penumbra, all specters of disquiet that must mean something. What to do? I wrote. I scribbled and scratched on paper all the symbols I could produce that seemed to, in aggregate, be relevant to the shadows at the corners of my inner vision. It was not neat. It was not pretty. It was messy, in fact, the process I mean. This word was wrong. That phrase was clumsy. This metaphor made me cringe. That simile was too on the bulbous nose of the imp that started the whole thing in the first place. Frustration turned to anger, and anger slid into hopelessness. Finally, it arrived. I glimpsed, just enough, the substance of my pain, and I was able to describe it, to ascribe words to give it form. The obscure silhouettes had become substantive. I had captured the things. As a result, I had tamed them...temporarily.

I thought to share my minuscule victory with my dear yet distant friend, Mr. Primrose Cohen. I stuffed my letter along with my recently penned poem into a large manila envelope. I checked the address rotation and discovered the location of the month. I slobbered on a stamp and sprinted to the Post Office anticipating a meaningful exchange with Mr. Cohen, one that would enhance our intellectual intimacy. I was unaware at the time of what the outcome would be of my verse-filled correspondence.

I didn't hear from Mr. Cohen for about three weeks. That, in and of itself, was not unusual. In fact, it was a relatively quick turnaround. I spent the interim with my usual pursuits: work, the periodic jog past the abandoned construction site that I still have nightmares about, and the act of obsessively reading about whatever subject regarding which I am monomaniacally obsessed during any given phase. Lately, I've been reading about teeth. As I eagerly devoured information about plaque bacteria and dental floss escapes, I had no idea what awaited in the form of Mr. Cohen's response.

I will share Mr. Cohen's response along with my poem in this entry:

My attempt at a poem:

I am Not a Merman

I had no intention of diving

I was thrown

By whom?

I slam on the water

Like a whale being beached.

I flap like a penguin among geese,

I attract unwanted attention

Some gorgon piranha's teeth

Pierce and serrate my scaleless skin

A swordfish mistakes me for a balloon

And punctures me

When she does not hear a “pop!”

She jets away

Her unfathomable eyes dripping

With disappointment

But not concern

Surrounded by my own blood

And failed by rubber limbs

I sink

My eyes blinded

To the words

Etched into the secrets around me.

Having descended to the floor

Of a Humpback's skeleton

I can only peek from behind ribs

as I wait

In ignorance

MB

Mr. Cohen's Response:

Dear friend,

I meant to write to you sooner, but a friend of mine asked me if shadow people cast shadows, and I spiraled for a bit. I'm feeling much better now. It's only a spot of luck that I am able to write you at this time as my trip to my next location has been delayed as I had to order away for parts for the Rickenbacker, which has developed a tendency to collect too much thermal energy. As you know, I am a man of great patience but little tolerance. That dichotomy contained within my personality has made my travel intermission somewhat uncomfortable but not nearly as unbearable as the elevated introspection it has produced. I tried giving myself mood freezing pills, but since I know they were placebos, my own experiment with them was dismal at best. Still, the whole process gave me the opportunity to make measurements and drink absinthe (which further frustrated any hope for reliable results from my experiment).

I was deeply moved that you chose to share your quite personal poem with me. I too, for a time in my late twenties, went though a phase during which I was deeply afraid of transforming into a clumsy marine animal. I had nightmares about trolling the ocean for plankton with leaky lips, biting seals with foam rubber teeth, and being referred to by the media as “The Creature From the Black Lampoon.” It was one of the many peculiar phases that I experienced. I do not judge you for your fear or your difficulty in understanding it. Importantly, my dreams often involved images of Dagan (crucially, not Dagon), and I became concerned that I was indeed undergoing an unwanted and greatly dreaded transformation. However, when I traveled to Ugarit and communed with the priests there and discovered that Dagan was not a fish god after all, I breathed a sigh of relief. As Dagan may have been a father figure, I was inclined to conclude that I was actually dreaming about my father, and my ineffectualness in my dreams was a reference to my inability to cultivate the relationship with him that I wished. It seems that failure and loss had been weighing on me more than my conscious mind realized. My dreams, once understood, brought that realization into my consciousness.

Your answers might not be the same as mine, but I hope that you find them. I suppose my initial primary concern is that you expressed a feeling of serving time in a skeletal jail. Iron bars might not a prison make, but metaphorical ribs are a terrible place in which to be trapped. I would like to provide you with a potential plan for escape. Call your father, or if he has passed, call the person closest to him who is still living. Without revealing everything, ask that person about your father's final days. If you have called the right person, your answers will come without you having to try to articulate your questions. If you need any further guidance on this matter, please write again, and I will do my best to assist you.

I will go now as I must walk to the local automobile repair establishment where my beloved Rickenbacker is awaiting its replacement radiator and hoses. I hope they have arrived today as I must drive to my next workhome and begin my treatise on the blaspheming of Mithra by a small but zealous group of Herculean bullies. It's a surprisingly brutal affair in which the conflict ends with a seemingly unlikely but altogether predictable slaying of a bull. Believe me, in Mithraen standards, you'd rather be the scorpion than the bull. More on that later. I wish you the best on your current journey.

The truth is out there

But it's also in you

Primrose Cohen

I was stunned and nonplussed by what I had read. I had assumed my poem was more Adrienne Rich than Carl Jung. Had I felt that it was my father who had pushed me into the salt water doom to which I had sank? Was what I initially felt was an expression of powerlessness and despair something more relational? Was it not my weakness but my loss that drove my muse and my pen on what I now view to be a fateful evening of scrawling? I had to know.

My father had passed some years prior, so I made a call to Old Parson Okkman. The Parson was something over one hundred years old and still holding services. As many wise old men do, Old Parson Okkman spoke in a baritone gravel and smelled of oatmeal. I hadn't seen or spoken to the aging sage in years, and I hoped he wouldn't consider my call after dinner to be too abrupt, but I was compelled and my dialing finger propelled.

Old Parson Okkman answered the phone on the third ring. I apologized for calling after dinner. He recognized my voice. I told The Parson that I had occasion and inspiration to think of my father, to consider our disaffection, and to talk to The Parson about my father's death. Old Parson Okkman cleared his throat and told me in his ancient voice that he was glad that I called. He spoke with those vocal intonations that are brought on by seeing joy and suffering, love and hate, life and death many times over.

The Parson described my father's final night, the candlelit room, my father's last sip of birch beer, and my father's final words whispered to The Parson as my father lie in his death bed while The Parson held his hand. Tears streamed down my face as Old Parson Okkman told me of how much my father missed his wife, my mother, and regretted that he could not gaze upon her a final time. He talked of the old days when he played baseball in the sun and just liked swinging the bat whether he hit the ball with it or not. Before passing, my father spoke of me. He regretted our estrangement. He wished I was there with him as he passed, but he told The Parson it was okay. My father said everything would be okay because one day I would call Old Parson Okkman and ask The Parson about his final moments. He asked that The Parson remember them clearly in order to relate them to me. My father said he loved me no matter what then passed into the next world.

The Parson invited me to services. I said I would come, but both of us knew I was lying. I thanked him, hung up, and cried some more. I found a picture of my father and lit a candle. I talked to him for hours. Then I stood at the window and looked out into the woods lit only by a waning moon. I tried to make out the shapes of the small creatures roaming about along the treeline as I drank. My eyes dimmed, and I put out the candle and went to sleep. I dreamed I was a calf who, instead of running from the rodeo cowboy, just mooed while he tied me up because I knew they were going to untie me later and give me milk.