Catalogue

1.

My blurring eyes, my deafened ears—

O careless sadism of the years!

Sun-loving and sun-ravaged skin—

One-sided love has done you in.

My teeth—less said, less missed!—my heart—

My runaway, my telltale heart—

Heart whose misfirings can defeat

The pulse of this iambic beat!

(While hypochondria detects

Whatever ill it hears of next.)

2.

In couplets that are not heroic

I try to say, in accents stoic:

For every rusting body-fetter

Perhaps my wit will work the better.

I will not be subservient

To every ruined ligament!

I'll prove on my anatomy

A body-mind dichotomy!

3.

Brave words! No use! I cannot force

Such an unnatural divorce.

My body! You have stood by me

Through insult and through injury

Some eighty years. How can my mind,

Seeing you slow, not lag behind?

Its sharpness dulls, yet feels each ache.

How not to mourn for your sweet sake?

My generous, my failing host,

O do not yet give up this ghost.

Kindle for me a little spark,

For I am whistling in the dark.

Credit

Author

Naomi Replansky

Naomi Replansky was born in the Bronx on May 23, 1918. The daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants, she began writing poems at a young age. By her mid-teens, she was publishing poems in literary journals and anthologies. Replansky studied history at Hunter College but did not finish her degree, opting instead to go to work. During the 1940s and 1950s, she worked in a factory in New York City and as a translator in Los Angeles. In the latter decade, she earned a bachelor’s degree in geography from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Date Published

01/19/2018