POETRY MONDAY
Richard Berlin
Although Richard Berlin is a psychiatrist in private practice in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the author of many scientific papers, I know him as a poet – and a fine one, at that. I first encountered his work when he read from his newly published chapbook of poems, Code Blue, at a local bookstore some years ago. There were other poets reading, but his poems stood out for their honesty, direct language and subject matter that was rarely dealt with in poetry. We are still lacking, to a large degree, poetry from the world of work, and here was someone who was writing it out of necessity and urgency.
Since then, Berlin has gone on to publish a full-length collection, How JFK Killed My Father, which was published by Pearl Editions and won the Pearl Poetry Prize.
His most recent book is not his own poetry but a collection of essays by other poets, Poets on Prozac (Johns Hopkins University Press), which, despite its pop title, is a serious look of the effect of mental illness and treatment on the creative process.
Here, by Richard Berlin, are two new, unpublished poems, “Freud” and “While Talking to a Psychoanalyst at a Party” and a third, “What a Psychiatrist Remembers,” which received a Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.
Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
Freud
I am old, often ill, and only work for 5 hours with students and patients. There isn’t a long waiting list anymore, clients in need of help prefer younger people. Until recently my fee was $25 an hour; as a result of the general impoverishment, I have lowered this to $20 or $15 . . . some of my adult children are out work and have to be assisted or supported.
—Sigmund Freud, age 76, answering a request for analysis
I never imagined you so frail, reduced
to seeing patients for less than the fee
at a mental health center. No, my image
comes from bronze statues analysts display
on their shelves, from Studies in Hysteria,
and a mid-life photograph taken when
your hair was dark and your trimmed beard
had turned gray. You wear a wool suit
and stand with your arms crossed,
your tie a black wedge mirroring
a starched collar, one white cuff exposed
at your wrist, left hand clenched in a fist.
The photographer lit your face from the left,
leaving the right in half-moon shadow,
your mouth sealed shut in a tight line,
one illuminated eye drilling into mine.
Can you see all my doubts, everything
I still don’t know? Can you see my beard
turning white, my ambition still burning hot
as the tip of your cigar, the ash breaking apart,
drifting down like the first flakes of November snow?
While Talking to a Psychoanalyst at a Party
I imagine a restored Rolls Royce Silver Cloud
with running boards, an oak trunk, the silver
eagle perched on the radiator, a dashboard
covered by ivory toggle switches edged in brass
and tiny red and green lights like a city at night,
the tufted leather in the back seat, well oiled
and burnished with age, as large and comfortable
as an analytic couch, my legs stretched out
for a long ride on U.S. Route 20, the old diners
and gas stations, the run down motels and neon
signs, an endless blue sky filling the day,
and a night studded with stars, the driver
blocked from my view, our destination uncertain,
the engine humming, the ride so quiet, so slow.
What a Psychiatrist Remembers
I remember rain hammering a green tin roof,
the light at each prescribed hour.
I remember perfumes and anxious sweat,
who preferred the big leather chair
and who liked to hide in the sofa’s corner.
I remember watching hairlines recede,
weight gained and lost from faces
like snow drifted high and melted by sunlight.
I remember empty men who devoured my words
and those too full of themselves.
I remember invisible families
I could describe as if gazing at an old photo,
how people rehearsed new lines
like actors in a foreign city.
I remember women and men on fire
and the frozen who needed me for kindling.
I remember forgetting
a session with a man whose words
whipped me like his father’s belt,
my small amnesias for anniversaries,
who said what when,
and how much my lapses hurt them.
I remember sitting like my patients
when time expired,
entire lives grasped in a 50 minute hour,
how at baffled moments
I leaned too far back in my rocker
and knew the fear of falling.