Your Empty Bowl
1.
The doctor makes a curving incision in the left top
back of my skull and
lifts the cap― “What area
am I here to work on?” But I
just want to wish his son a happy birthday―
It had been my aim, the reason I’d
walked right in
to this Doctor dream―In the morning,
—
my neighbor reports from his year
of losses: a well dried up and the threat of fire, the offer
of haven, now his sister’s
stroke― “I feel,” he said, “like a bowl
that God keeps scooping out―”
It made me nervous, how emptied he was—how every few months
a place, a face, that mattered to him,
crumbled into gone—
My solution was ridiculous, so I extolled it with fervor. I said,
“You should meditate
on an empty bowl, you should go outside and sit
with an empty bowl in real
life―” For weeks,
I’d been battering him over the head with hope and will―as if
hope and will
—
could make magic—
And the little man with the bowl in Central Park that spring thirty years ago
when I did not know
how to change my life―
What a strange little man he was, so small and the bowl
so enormous—
He could barely get each arm around it, as he
picked me out of the throng
on the new spring Lawn, I must have looked
drifty and aimless―
“Make a wish,” he said, standing under me, “Ring the bell—Don’t listen
to the neighbors―”
I looked down
into the giant mixing bowl, and in the bowl a bell—
And what did I want, what did I want, I’d just, the night before
on Second Avenue,
walked by a man
—
stabbed in the chest—
Shine-blur of streetlights in the blood soaking his shirt—
People three-deep in a wide ring around his breaths—
A three-foot distance between his bleeding body and everyone
watching him bleed, and no one
extending a hand, no one speaking—no one
breaking through the circle to say “What? What?” then
sirens, and I knew
someone had called. And I stood there,
outside a ring of forty living motionless people watching one
dying in the middle, and all of us there
really needing some help—
I wanted, I thought, to leave
—
New York—
“That’s it!” The little man cried, as I picked up the bell
and rang it and rang it—
While another man, tall and lanky (the two of them
must’ve been a team), into my ear
with a hiss and a lean, “Your wish
will never come true,” and the little man shouting, “DON’T
LISTEN
TO THE NEIGHBORS—”
And the tall man striding away. And the little man
then offering me
a gamble:
“You give me a dollar, you get back ten,
You give me a ten, you get back a hundred,
whatever you give me, you get back
ten times ten—“
So I gave him a ten. And a week later made a surprise
hundred bucks showing slides
for an auction
at Sotheby’s—
2.
What story am I trying to tell.
The one
of unexpected loss and the one
of unexpected gain, I guess.
The story of No, and then the story
—
of Yes—
At Sotheby’s, I don’t remember
what was for sale. I remember
the wound of money and the fact of it—chasing it, getting it, losing it,
needing it—like blood or breath.
I thought
if my neighbor sat with an empty bowl, maybe
he’d get an idea—some kind of American Aha!—
to fix everything—
But he could sit
for an entire night, glean nothing
but a bowl of dew—not even
—
a poet could eat it.
Before the ambulance arrived, a woman
broke through the ring and ran to the wounded
body. She knelt
in the blood in the street and took up
the stabbed man’s hand—which is when I
walked away. Just like me, to stay
for the bleeding but not the healing.
To tell a friend
to sit outside with an empty bowl
when he confides his loss—why didn’t he
sock me in the mouth—why didn’t I
take up
—
his hand—
Should’ve rung the bell and wished for something else—
Should’ve taken
my own advice and gone outside to sit
with an empty bowl in real
life—
wait for whatever my Aha...
Happy birthday! I’d wanted to wish
the boy in my dream, Happy birthday! Happy birthday! Before I was
waylaid
by the Father of Surgery, who set my skull-top
down like a cap, and advanced
with his silver needles
on the gray lobes of my open brain, saying, “I’m just
going to make
—
an adjustment―”
ξ
"Your Empty Bowl" was first published in The American Poetry Review.
Dana Levin’s fifth book is Now Do You Know Where You Are (Copper Canyon, Spring 2022), a Lannan Literary Selection. Recent books include Banana Palace (2016) and Sky Burial (2011), which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” She is a grateful recipient of many honors, including those from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, and the Library of Congress, as well as from the Rona Jaffe, Whiting, and Guggenheim Foundations. Levin teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis.
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