"Treating Paul Celan"

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POETRY OF THE TIMES

They’ve healed me into pieces. —Paul Celan

While considering Celan’s suicide

I think back to Virginia Woolf drowning

herself and the psychiatrists who said

her soul was too sensitive to live

in an age filled with the madness of war,

though today we would call her “Bipolar”

and say it was the weight of depression

that made her fill her woolen coat with rocks.

Paul Celan never made it to Bloomsbury,

never starred in a Merchant-Ivory film,

but I keep hearing his “Death Fugue” poem

and wonder if he ever learned to savor

Parisian coffee and croissants after

the war, his father dead from typhus,

his mother with a Nazi bullet through her neck.

I daydream I’m treating him at the Salpêtriére,

my office window shaded by a plane tree,

Celan seated across from me describing

nightmares even an SSRI can’t cure.

I imagine my diagnosis, the way I would listen,

my metaphors. But after we’ve met

for the time it takes to smoke eight hundred

packs of cigarettes, after all the medication trials,

the damaged sighs and side effects, I wonder,

Would Celan still drown himself in the River Seine?

Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 26 years in Psychiatric Times in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Tender Fences.