Rita Mae Reese

Rita Mae Reese

ON THE PROBLEMS OF EMPATHY

Twice a year the orphans come.

Like Job’s children, pawns in a bet

made with the Devil.

You and your mother watch

from the porch as Father Whiskey’s car

rolls up the long dirt drive.

The orphans inside ignore the fields,

the cows, the pond, the patch of woods.

When you were younger,

you begged for a brother,

or even a sister.

What should you say to an orphan?

You think of your mother’s

habitual prelude to sympathy:

“There’s nothing easier

than burying other people’s children, but …”

The orphans are beyond sympathy.

Sympathy being one of the problems.

How far does it go?

Not quite to the horizon.

Not even to the trees beyond the pond.

The orphans, their still-breathing,

lye- and cabbage-smelling bodies,

are also a problem.

Father Whiskey with his lazy eye

thinks a good Catholic family

with only one child is both

problem and solution.

One eye looks at your mother.

The other looks at God

looking at you.

Sympathy requires action, or at least words;

empathy is a private affair,

which is nevertheless a basis for community.

However the distinctions are imprecise and need further work.

Father Whiskey sees God looking at you as if

—if you believed in the Creed, the Holy Ghost,

and all that he has tried to tell you,

if you could even look a statue

of Mary in the eye—

then you could reach out a hand,

lay it on this boy’s scrubbed forehead,

make him your brother.

Later, in college, in a winter of mind and place,

you will read Edith Stein’s

On the Problem of Empathy.

Now though she is of no help to you.

You stand on the front porch

and wait for the miracle

to begin in your shoulder

and travel down through your fingertips,

the way you’ve heard lightning

tries to escape the body.

In a few months there will be different orphans.

Then the time comes but no orphans.

Years later, in a city where you can’t speak

the language, you will pass a woman

sitting on the pavement, a burnt-out shell

of a woman holding an infant. The infant is sleeping,

on his head a robin’s-egg-blue bonnet, spotless.

Your problem is you feel too much, or not at all.

Their grown bodies move past you.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

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Rita Mae Reese: “Once on a road trip to Atlanta, Georgia, I came across a copy of The Habit of Being, the collected letters of Flannery O’Connor. Then, I had no faith to speak of, not even in myself. In one of the letters, O’Connor wrote to a friend: ‘If I live long enough and develop as an artist to the proper extent, I would like to write a comic novel about a woman—and what could be more comical or more terrible than an angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch grinding her teeth?’ I return to O’Connor’s stories and letters again and again, each time recognizing more of my comical, terrible self and—more surprisingly—the seeds of faith.” (web)

Rita Mae Reese

HOW MANY?

[A] biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may have as many thousand … one on top of the other, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand …
—Virginia Woolf

The women with me might as well be ghosts

and maybe me too

though we can order food in the diner

next to the table of 20-somethings

and their cacophonous lives

so loud we have to nearly shout

for each other and the waitress

—another sort of ghost, I suppose—

to hear. At our table, we are trying

to talk about the collapse of a condo

a thousand miles away and how the news

at first reported only one death

as if the building had been largely uninhabited

or as if its inhabitants could walk through walls,

let ceilings and the entire lives of neighbors

plummet straight through them.

The building that collapsed maybe (probably)

from neglect held over 150—the exact number

changes with each report.

The news travels at a speed

far more terrible than mercy;

every day, we fall further and further behind.

It is almost time to go,

and we may not talk about this again.

How many selves are we here at this table?

And who would like the check?

—from Poets Respond
July 6th, 2021

__________

Rita Mae Reese: “This poem is in response to the collapse of the condo in Florida, a sudden disaster that keeps unfolding slowly in front of us.” (web)

Tonight on Rattlecast #100: Alison Luterman! We’ll start off with Poets Respond Live—join us live at 8pm EDT …

Rattle: Poetry

… without pretension since 1995.

December 17, 2022

July 6, 2021