Biography of a Bipolar
At first friends share the ecstasy that comes before the burn:
“That night he was going crazy everyone
was too drunk to care.”
But after years all learn:
“His conversation grew brilliant and alarming.
Students were frightened by his lecture on Hitler.”
“He wrote the most pitiful letter;
though I was not angry, he spoke of us fighting.”
“His religious notions, never stable, flowered
into oddity; his judgment went haywire.”
“He was barricaded in his room in his skivvies when the police came;
he was surprisingly polite.”
The poet obligingly provides snapshots from hell:
“I meditated Detachment and Urbanity but the old menacing
hilarity was growing in me.”
“What use is my sense of humor when the brain blinks
like a radio station rapidly distanced?”
“I lay there secured but for my skipping mind.”
After the delusions pass, he lacerates his soul with reason:
“Seven years ago Bloomington stood for Joyce’s hero and Indiana for
the evil, unexorcised aborigines, while I suspected myself
The Holy Ghost. The glory and banality of it are corrupting.”
The poet’s wife learns to suffer a fool who falls in love
with students, madhouse nurses,
any woman but her:
“I don’t think he realizes the damage.”
New drugs offer old hopes of Panacea:
“To think of all that suffering for lack of a little salt in the brain!”
Theories suffer the usual changes:
“Recent research shows mania’s a summertime disease,
perhaps an excess of light.”
…
(Robert Lowell)
This poem is excerpted from Mr. McClellan’s book: Reflections From Mirror City
