Beauty and Variations
1.
What is it like to be so beautiful? I dip
my hands inside you, come up with—what?
Beauty, at birth applied, does not transfer
to my hands. But every night, your hands
touch my scars, raise my twisted limbs to
graze against your lips. Lips that never
form the words—you are beautiful—transform
my deformed bones into—what?—if not beauty.
Can only one of us be beautiful? Is this your
plan? Are your sculpted thighs more powerful
driving into mine? Your hands find their way
inside me, scrape against my heart. Look
at your hands. Pieces of my skin trail from
your fingers. What do you make of this?
Your hands that know my scars, that lift me to your
lips, now drip my blood. Can blood be beautiful?
2.
I want to break your bones. Make them so
they look like mine. Force you to walk on
twisted legs. Then, will your lips still beg
for mine? Or will that disturb the balance
of our desire? Even as it inspires, your body
terrifies. And once again I find your hands
inside me. Why do you touch my scars? You
can’t make them beautiful any more than I can
tear your skin apart. Beneath my scars,
between my twisted bones, hides my heart.
Why don’t you let me leave my mark? With no
flaws on your skin—how can I find your heart?
3.
How much beauty can a person bear? Your smooth
skin is no relief from the danger of your eyes.
My hands would leave you scarred. Knead the muscles
of your thighs. I want to tear your skin, reach
inside you—your secrets tightly held. Breathe
deep. Release them. Let them fall into my palms.
My secrets are on my skin. Could this be why
each night I let you deep inside? Is that
where my beauty lies? Your eyes, without secrets,
would be two scars. I want to seal your eyes,
they know my every flaw. Your smooth skin, love’s
wounds ignore. My skin won’t mend, is callused, raw.
4.
Who can mend my bones? At night, your hands press
into my skin. My feet against your chest, you mold
my twisted bones. What attracts you to my legs? Not
sex. What brings your fingers to my scars is beyond
desire. Why do you persist? Why do you touch me
as if my skin were yours? Seal your lips. No kiss
can heal these wounds. No words unbend my bones.
Beauty is a two-faced god. As your fingers soothe
my scars, they scrape against my heart. Was this
birth’s plan—to tie desire to my pain, to stain
love’s touch with blood? If my skin won’t heal, how
can I escape? My scars are in the shape of my love.
5.
How else can I quench this thirst? My lips
travel down your spine, drink the smoothness
of your skin. I am searching for the core:
What is beautiful? Who decides? Can the laws
of nature be defied? Your body tells me: come
close. But beauty distances even as it draws
me near. What does my body want from yours?
My twisted legs around your neck. You bend
me back. Even though you can’t give the bones
at birth I wasn’t given, I let you deep inside.
You give me—what? Peeling back my skin, you
expose my missing bones. And my heart, long
before you came, just as broken. I don’t know who
to blame. So each night, naked on the bed, my body
doesn’t want repair, but longs for innocence. If
innocent, despite the flaws I wear, I am beautiful.
Petra Kuppers
THE SOUND OF THE BONES
Since I was a little girl, I have been fascinated with Greek mythology, sung in verse. That world explained my world to me. In these stories, there were always so many people I could feel myself into, try out different characters one at a time. Of course, I would not just be limping Eurydice, her foot bitten by a snake, now on wobbly feet trying to escape the world of the shades, only to be betrayed by her lover’s glance—I would be searching Orpheus, too, using his sweet words to extricate his beloved out of Hades, only to lose her again. And I would also be Agave, the queenly leader of the Bacchae, those wild women who eventually rip the singer apart in their drunken, ecstatic revels, or, even, Bacchus or Dionysius himself, laughing at the young king who tries to defy a god who has set the king’s people on fire with wine and love. Transformation, transgression, cruelty and sex: these were the Greeks I devoured from early on.
And although I would have to reach far, far back to find actual memories to support my observation, as I grew older I felt sure that this fascination had an origin in my own bodily being, in the difference I finally pronounced and outed as disabled many years later. I have found on Mount Olympus my land, my people. People who limped, fell down where they stood with inexplicable pain, people who were daily visited by tortures, and yet lived, and were defiant, not meek. I found the Sirens—women with body parts made of brass, called disfigured and yet singing beautifully. I found my avenger fantasy, Medusa, the woman who could kill with one look—who could turn to stone any boy who’d come to laugh at her.
Greek myths, and Greek themes—I still find them, and they find me, in the pages of disability poetry. Sometimes, they seem obscured by a political will that denounces them for their meaning, their hold over disabled cultural lives. But they are names of old stories, and powerful, as feminists know when they long to hear Medusa’s laugh: they are not easily contained, not framed and done away with. Just like tricksters and other figures of many other traditions, they infiltrate, and their longings leave their mark deep in my bones.
In the summer of 2006, during a disability culture graduate seminar at the Institute for Medical Humanities in Galveston, Texas, we held a crip poetry banquet. We had just spent an afternoon watching and discussing poetry in non-written formats, such as Shelley Barry’s film/video Trilogy, which shows us that “scars need to be crowned, too,” stitched and loved and clad in beads, and a video of Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner’s Deaf performance poetry where hands give birth to words and worlds in wide swooping gesture. That evening, we went low-tech over crab meat and shrimp in the private room of a restaurant. Dionysian wine prepared us for the task: a reading of crip poetry.
That evening of the poetry banquet, around the table, my students and I discussed a word that vexes me and thrills me, cripple, and how it echoes so differently to disabled and non-disabled audiences—an issue often on the table in our shared time, and one that provides much exciting material for discussion. The language skills of my bones, as well as those of others in our class community who identify as disabled, read a halting step meter differently than those of someone who strides out straight and full, and we found often that members of crip culture are attuned to the small shifts of pain breath, or fluttering fingers, or a furrow building between the eyes.
In Angel of Healing, Welsh poet laureate Gwyneth Lewis gives voice to an old ars poetica. Her angel, another mythological figure of poetry, speaks: “Every disease is a work of art / if you play it rightly.”
She teases out the implications: “By this he meant: whatever the form / Imposed by arthritis, or by the gout / Your job’s to compose yourself around about / Its formal restrictions, and make that sing, / Even to death /...”
And yes, the poet’s body as the source of a poem’s breath shapes the specific alignment of contour ridges and experiences that make sound. Her own sound lilts stro
ngly on my tongue, a tongue that got used to and familiar to English sounds in the bilingual valleys of Wales. Lewis’ Welsh-English tones are still so much closer to home to me than American poetry. But while I share that kinship with her, crip culture offers me another land and language. To go beyond the individual form, tensely just on the limit, self and non-self, communicating-just-about: that is the trajectory of poetic force. To give a poem a home in the country called disabled, as American poet Neil Marcus does in “Disabled Country,” means to stake out a claim that goes beyond one’s individual body:
If there was a country called disabled,
I would be from there.
I live disabled culture, eat disabled food,
make disabled love, cry disabled tears,
climb disabled mountains and tell disabled stories.
To claim disability as an identity, rather than a shape for an individual body, means struggle, submission, elation, comradeship and a location. The form around which a body of work composes itself is no longer the tension between the abstraction of language and the specificity of one’s individual bodily being. Instead, a third can enter: a way of knowing, a structure of feeling, of being in community that does not subsume the individual, but can provide a different baseline, one in which the disease or difference has a different register, and where some things can be left unsaid, implicit, homely—a shared myth. Marcus ends his poem:
In my life’s journey
I am making myself
At home in my country
To make oneself at home: to find stories, fit old ones to new landscapes, invent traditions, give birth to language. Publishing in the U.K. mental health system survivor journal Poetry Express, Wilma Kenny writes in her poem “Odyssey,” “Like a reptile / I clung to a tree of normality,” and again, it is myth that gives shape to a disabled country that can hardly be spoken, and only painfully heard, as Odysseus, lashed to the mast after stopping up his sailors’ ears, listens to the songs of the sirens. Scavenging on ancient wanderings can provide the building materials for shape-shifting habitations. Here, chameleons can find tenuous purchase, a clasping of vowels and consonants that offer a hold, shape and heft that sustains.
That land, disabled country, has many shapes, forces and myths—and the Greek myths are some of the building stones, some of the books, that those who claim disabled country can use. They can build contradictory homes, with different keys for different people, make people think of their limbs and their senses, their breath, as they enter this world.
One of the citizens of disabled country is Philip Dowd, an Australian poet. In his poem “New/Unnamed,” he rides on a different river, catches a different wave, finds and lives a different breath. He also acknowledges access issues in disability culture poetry: an asterisk opens up meaning and explanation, asking me to bring different sensibilities to poetry appreciation, to look beyond a poem’s shape on a page. I read and honor this gesture as a commentary on the histories of exclusion that crip culture people have faced in education and beyond:
Cerebral palsy moves as in tides
Sometimes high, sometimes low,
And I must follow.
Tidally something cosmic
Moves through me
The comic
The forge
Haphaestus.*
My body changes
Patterns
Become
Shifting
Desert like
The sand and time.
Born again
With each muscular contraction,
The excitement
The challenge
The new me.
begins
* Greek god of fire and Volcanism was the artisan of the gods and perceived disabled.
This poem opens me onto a land of contradiction, of watery dryness, tidal burn. Here is a desert forge, a dry basin that is old and new. The lines are short, condensing as they go, to the “begins”—open-ended, a new sentence, pushing forward. An “I” appears belated, entering the land of the poem after the conditions of being, those tides—beholden to some other star, or moon, or something that exerts its force. What could be elegiac, long-flowing—an acknowledgment of a control elsewhere, a surrender in romantic verse—is precise, specific, condensing downwards into individual words: “Haphaestus” and “begins.” To read this poem, I gasp, quickly, as the lines chop across my breath, making me weigh the length of each syllable, the cost of the word. The intake and outflow of breath are audible to me as I read, again and again, following the punctuations into pauses. Again, a different bodily being presses against my ear, onto my tongue, into my windpipe. I sing a new rhythm into my bones, and enjoy the ride.
Is Dowd singing himself into being, like Whitman did, willing connection—or is he sung? Who sings, and how do Haphaestus’ anvil and hammer strike sparks out of movement? The forge is at the heart here: the heat of creation, of coming into being. Hephaestus is the maker-god, the anvil-god, the one who makes nice playthings (like the first woman, Pandora) for the other inmates of Olympus. He is the craftsman of the gods, who can create out of nothing: Poesis. Vulcan in his Roman guise, this god remembers the material of his body. He doesn’t just hasten away, unthinking—for he limps, and better thinks through where he’s going. His foot is an undefined mass, yet-to-be-shapen (like Byron’s, the devil, the fallen angels)—always a draw with the poets. He is also Venus’ husband, horned a few times, but game for a laugh about it, it seems.
I can hear that hammer coming down, hammering matter into fiery shape, in each breath drilling the lines of the poem, the “New/Unnamed,” that can be made by the god of cripples. The weight of the hammer, “each muscular contraction:” Words are heavy, and create a new beginning. The “I” of the poem is wrenched between forces of astral bodies, god-bodies, but can withstand the heat, and spreads itself out, like “sand and time” across a new land, a new body, a new breath. What “I” this “begins” will point to, mould and sing, is not fixed yet.
Would a non-crip culture reader read differently? Would the first two words of this poem, “cerebral palsy,” paralyze the reading, would the chopped breath become the in-take of the breath of fear, or worse, of pity? I do not know, since I live by the bylaws and rules of my land, disabled country, even if I rally against them from time to time. I like my insider status, even if it gives me no more insight into Dowd than my German passport gives me into another citizen there. Tourists are always despised, and there’s fun to be had in the crip culture game, where I can suspend the attack of palsy, paralysed, cripple and limp, and riff around their wordy sound.
Poetry, and this skillful rearrangement of words and myths into new countries to live in, can add much to crip culture, measure its width and depth, turn our faces away for moments, at least, from the sub-cultural paradigm that requires us to bravely grin as we grope towards pride. Poetry offers a respite, a site of contradiction, a land uncharted: here be dragons.
The Origin of My Wheelchair
It had foremothers, yes,
cradles an ancient history
drenched in veteran’s blood, snakebite,
sepsis and the chlorophyll-rich juices of the healer.
But when I touch the steel wheel, I feel
that it grew as a silver plant
in a waterless waste, drew from a deep clear well,
a shoot pushed hard through the crust,
thrust past caked clay and grey rock.
With the effort of metal and bone,
the plant grasped the air, no resistance
pressed fast moving cells,
it arched up, spiraled back onto itself,
completed a circle that pushes far out,
forward, on and on:
my body, propelled by evergreen forces,
touches fire and earth, forge and flow,
my finger tight on the rim.
I know what I wish for:
below not only clouded blood,
clay clod, and
the deep worm’s coil,
below runs the clear, clean water.
Crip Music
A beat behind, sycophant, you
Sisyphus, roll and run,
Sybil whistle in the dark
the shoe steps the rhythm
behind, behind, you
with the crutch cane stick beat
the cripple who ripples across
the street with the wheel on the rack
rackle and giggle the cripple
till the music stops.
We step out
and then, and then,
the sound,
melody of cane,
melody of crutch,
melody of wheel,
and the tap of the stick,
the tick of ventilators,
dilate, pulse,
push breath through the street,
roll forward and on.
from Spherical Song Cycle
Mercury
Colors are stardust. Minerals cooled with the core.
Iron is red, copper blue, and sulfur yellow.
Let’s live in a Steiner house,
edges round
no angles
saturated in color
glazed, in complex patterns, jeweled walls to code my life
Is it my purple phase?
Nervous system, nervously wriggling just next to my skin, so hungry for the Vitamin D, which is how I think of sunlight, of course: it’s good for me, right now, in moderation. I will monitor.
Beauty Is a Verb Page 10