Hal Sirowitz

A WHOLE LOT OF SHAKING GOING ON

I could tell he was perturbed
by my arms continually shaking
from the Parkinson's Disease.
He acted as though I should
be able to stop it by willpower.
But willing my arms to remain
still was like telling the earth
to skip an orbit around the sun.
The earth is always going to do
what it was meant to do. And the same
with me. I'd rather just rock and roll
instead of 'Shaking, rocking and rolling,'
but since my body was now a stranger
to myself, I had no choice but to watch
it dance out the tune only it heard.

* * *

SCULPTURE ON THE GROUND

'Sculpture is the stuff you trip over when you are
backing up trying to look at a painting.'
        Jules Olitski

My Parkinson's made me jerk
involuntarily and before I could
put my left arm back in place,
next to my left thigh where
it belonged, it made an arc
and knocked over the artist's
sculpture of his mother. I
thought it looked better
on the floor than on a pedestal,
because the mother was earthy.
But the artist went up to me
and said, 'Did you drop
anything?' 'I think I knocked
over your mother,' I said. 'It was
just a representation.'
'Representations can be realer
than the object, 'he said.
'I'm sorry,' I said. 'Don't
tell me,' he said. 'You
didn't knock me down. Tell her.'

Hal Sirowitz the author of four collections of poetry commencing with Mother Said, followed by My Therapist Said (Crown). He also published Before, During and After, followed by Father Said (Soft skull press). Fifteen years ago he was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's Disease. He has performed all over the world and on NPR's All Things Considered and Fresh Air, MTV's Spoken Word Unplugged, PBS's Poetry Heaven, etc. He is in many anthologies, including Billy Collin's Poetry 180, Garrison Keillor's Good Poems, Poetry in Motion from Coast to Coast. He is a past poet laureate of Queens, New York.