Ten Ribs (Ode to Cubby)


Pine sap between my fingers
On bed of needles
Cut by can lid
Tinfoil pain
Pitch and blood
Spit rinse and suckle thumb
Sun baked water
Cotton, skin
Cool in the shade
Distant screams like dunking pools
Book laden, joyful fools
As intimate as apples bobbed
Slick over tight waxy skin
Such arsenic and young nylon

But here, not so!
Kippers and misanthropy
Acid brittle pulp pages
Blunt hormone people watching
Summer legs, semester hum
Itchy restless loitering romantic
Drifting on the wide currents of youth
Fixations on death
Little deaths, big deaths, fast deaths, slow deaths
You don’t feel the sharpest edge
But can’t you feel the precipice?
I’d do anything not to
The unbearable sublime
Little poisons, panted breaths
Distractions, adsorptions
And deadly deadlines
The whole world is in front of you
Will you ever again be so idle?
So aimless and open to possibilities?
Will you ever again sprawl languid beneath the campus pines
Reading dead authors breathing the summer air and watching the summer bodies
As you do so now, in your cozy – nigh whimsical – anomie?

***

In 1947 Hubert Selby Jr. contracted bovine tuberculosis as a merchant marine
In an experimental procedure to save his life, they removed ten ribs from his body
This was to get access to his lungs
They had given him streptomycin and there were complications
One lung collapsed, and they ended up removing part of the other
He wasn’t supposed to make it, but he did

Ten ribs

That’s ten Eves that they pulled out of him
What an Adam he was, though in no Eden did he dwell

From one rib he created an anger that burned inside him like a furnace when no light could be found, to drive on against the pricks their unbearable absence

From a second he created forgiveness for pain and numbness for addiction and for the hurt brought by anger

From the third he created a will to love the unloved the unlovable and lost, the motherless child such a long way from home

From the other seven he created novels about the horrors of the human soul, and the wounded odyssey of compassion, of love

Ten ribs...

He died in 2004, at the age of 75