MEMORIALS
LOUISE MORIN DOVELL
August 20, 1954--January 8, 2006
FOR LOUISE
by Michael Hureaux Perez
the oldest pain actually rises in silence and settles.
You'd never know it can float or generate air
the way cancer generates air the way it sneaks up
and sucker punches the hardest fighters, the warmest
songsters.
for three weeks we watched Louise go round after round
with antique hurt, watched her small muscled hands
with the calloused thumbs clutch at sheets and oxygen
tubes
and opiate days. But even in the fog of dream she leaned
on space
as always, her compressed glass voice breaking through
the haze
with queries about French trains and stories about
setting aright
hundreds of horseshoe crabs gone to mate on a Connecticut
spit
to keep the poor mesozoic dummies from becoming gull
food.
and tales about the struggle to keep Mikey Pinero
straight enough
to make rehearsals on the lower east side in the old days
and kvetches about how Foreman got rope-a-dope'd
and torn from victory by Ali in Zaire and there she was.
Ever the light middleweight and always the poet, laughing
and aching
dice-ing with death as her last gig arching up on the
balls of her feet
toenails decked with battered red nail polish sledge
hammer words on the fly
knees pumping like Sauvenon Glover in glide intrepidly
goodbye-ing this sad world
which has never learned to trust a total warfare
sweetness
who was Louise who is Louise who went down swinging
in the second round with the deep hurt
but who took starfish sails and jetted out from our tower
of bones
way out in front of the pain at last, at last.
is a part-time writer, actor and
musician who earns his bread by teaching young people. He
hates capitalism, its systematic global atrocities (the
so-called “war on terror” among others), and
its incessant attempts to place market priorities at the
center of all human, natural and spiritual effort.