Pain

Neither Stoic nor Christian 'saint,

You seem unqualified for pain,

And since you're clearly no ancient Greek,

You probably haven't earned divine punishment.

So what can you do but "live with pain"

And people's other weather-beaten clichés.

Although Revelation confidently predicts

"Neither shall there be any more pain,"

That's some way off. And in the meantime,

You'll have to share your household

With something more real than rhetoric,

Even though your candid X-rays disclose

No organic cause for your chronic condition.

Perhaps you're feeling "phantom pains"

That still haunt your amputated youth.

Even when you're not pointlessly hurting

Or missing somebody or someplace

Or even considering merging with the landscape,

You are continually having one of those

Personal, subjective experiences

That bore doctors because they lack

"Any basis in fact" and won't command a hospital bed.

Have you somehow come to understand

That fine weather's an aberration

And those entertaining, halcyon days

Were setting you up for the wind's flagellation?

Maybe your pain is like a poem,

A mystery to be enlivened by interpretation

But never solved like a puzzle. Certainly

Not by doctors with their noses in the empirical,

As if all that Job really needed

Was a painkiller and a good dermatologist.

There are days when you wish your pain

Would hunker down on a toe or finger,

Some extremity you could do without,

Instead of wandering around the universe,

Calling itself fancy names like Angst.

Creative artists don't help much either.

They translate pain into a more accessible

Language, but turn it into the idea of pain.

Take, for instance, the noble Montaigne,

Who spent a long time with a kidney stone

More companionable than his wife.

His ennobling essays could only say:

This is how I live, in spite of life.

And Mozart, hearing his wife Constanza

Screaming in childbirth from the next room,

Composed her cries into inspiring music

That consoles you, but did nothing for Constanza.