Disintegration Poem by gershon hepner

Disintegration’ irresistible
as your stock falls in the love exchange
and deemed to be no longer listable,
but may recover in the longer range.

Inspired from a passage in Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland” describing the breakup between the Hans, the cricket-laying chief protagonist, and his lawyer wife Rachel who wants to go back to England after being in Manhattan during 9/11:

We sat opposite one another in silence. Then I tossed my coat onto a chair and went to the bathroom. When I picked up my toothbrush it was wet. She had used it with a wife’s unthinking intimacy. A hooting sob rose up from my chest. I began to gulp and pant. A deep, useless sense of shame filled me––shame that I had failed my wife and my son, shame that I lacked the means to fight on, to tell her that I refused to accept that out marriage had suddenly collapsed, that all marriages went through crises, that others had survived their crises and we would do the same, to tell her could he be speaking out of shock or some other temporary condition, to tell her to stay, to tell her that I loved her, to tell her I needed her, that I would cut back on work, that I was a family man, a man with no friends and no pastimes, that my life was clearly nothing but her and out boy. I felt shame––I see this clearly now––At the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the great outcomes were but randomly connected to our endeavors, that life was beyond mending, tat love was loss, that nothing worth saying was sayable, that dullness was general, that disintegration was irresistivble. I felt shame that it was me, not terror, she was fleeing.

5/25/08