Blue.
Or orange. In the bathroom
Koyaanisqatsi “a state of life that calls for another way of living”
Builders are so expensive these days.
It’s the recession,
a regression,
a doom for the exploitation of the earth:
mined out, leaching,
red and white scars where the soil shifts.
Lemon yellow:
lemon so much less jaundiced,
jealous,
gelb, can you imagine that being good for you?
But the sour, and astringent, pulling it together, all together now, it’s the
nesting idea: we live in insecure times.
Let’s live in a Steiner house,
One here and one there, and no edges.
Organically, I fall all over myself to get to the sun
I hide in the cellar
my head pounds.
Eyes fall out.
Eyes grow hollow.
The back of the neck far away from the forehead that screams pinched from
above and pulled and
the bed offers not enough black.
Paint the world black behind your eyelids.
Blackness creeping over the world.
Paint black the room and the city and this strip of land and the snow and the
river and the whole of the US and the earth and the round marble in space
and space, and space itself, and the spaces between space
and then there is black to be painted
and space is black.
•
Aria — Mezzo
Invagination implies a confusion about the side you are on.
Which team do you play for
and what about the organs?
The heart
is more or less in the middle
you know, and you only hear it louder
on one side because there is more
for it to resonate with, the lungs
wrapped lobular
around the action-packed muscle
in its sac.
metabolic acts lose direction
stuff gets shuttled aside into wastelands
I have to make the best of it.
Trash art, found object sculptures
exquisite corpse
never mind the old crystal image
feel it now,
this translucent sacrificial dagger sawing away at the membrane.
inflammatory responses attack the pollutant
help wouldn’t hurt so much
let me speak with my liver
Daniel Simpson
LINE BREAKS THE WAY I SEE THEM
For several years, I apprenticed in writing poetry with Molly Peacock. Since Molly lives in Toronto, and I live near Philadelphia, I e-mailed her my work about a week prior to each phone conference so she could have time to look it over and prepare her response. When the lesson rolled around, I would call her on a speakerphone and tape our hour-long conversation. This proved to be an immensely useful process for me, since I didn’t have to distract myself with taking notes during our “back and forth” about the poems; I could take those notes and make revisions later.
What impressed me most about my initial talks with Molly was the kind of questions she asked me before she critiqued a single word of mine: “How did you come to write poetry? With whom have you studied? What poets have most influenced you, and how? How has your poetry changed since you started? How would you describe the poetry you are writing now?”
When we turned to the poetry itself for the first time, Molly observed: “I notice that in many of the poems you sent me, you seem to make an effort to keep lines of nearly equal length. Is that intentional?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Tell me your thinking behind it,” she said, “because I find it a little puzzling.”
I explained that Gregory Djanikian, my mentor and instructor at the University of Pennsylvania, found that even lines created a pleasing appearance on the page, and so, knowing how much I admired and resonated with his work, I took his suggestions about visual shaping of the poem into my own aesthetics.
“But that’s exactly what leads me to wonder why you would care about the visual appearance,” Molly rejoined. “Having lines of relatively the same length can make a poem look beautiful on the page, but that’s a painterly thing to do. Why do you care how it looks on the page? You’re blind, and that seems like a particularly sighted concern. Besides that, you’re a musician. Wouldn’t it make more sense in the context of your life to treat the poem and its line breaks more like a musical score than a painting?”
I had to admit this made some sense. As we talked more about it, I remembered how I always had to guess where the line breaks should come in this “even up” approach. Perhaps I wouldn’t have had to guess so much if I had been using the unabbreviated form of Braille, known as Grade 1 Braille, where there is a one-for-one correspondence between print and Braille letters. I, however, like most Braille users, write Grade 2 Braille, the standard for books and all forms of communication, which is replete with abbreviations for frequently encountered combinations of letters. Thus, two lines that look even in Grade 2 Braille will not necessarily come out that way in print, once all of the contractions have been expanded.
“For now, at least for your next couple of poems,” Molly said, “why not try this? Don’t worry about making the poem look pretty on the page. Just listen to your natural cadence and let the line breaks act as indicators in a musical score as to where you want the performers to breathe or to place more emphasis. And if one line sticks way out like a big shirt billowing on a clothesline, and the next line hangs like a limp little sock next to it, so be it. What do you care?”
I was intrigued. Besides, I generally take the attitude that if a mentor has agreed to devote time and attention to my development as a writer, I owe it to him or her to try his/her recommendations at least once.
Stuck without an idea for my next poem, I pondered Molly’s suggestion that week...and then it came to me: use the billowing shirt and limp sock as opening images in a poem, and let the lines containing those images reflect them in length. This is where it took me:
Man Story
His rage hung in the house like a shirt billowing on a clothesline,
her silence
like a sock
beside it.
Decades ago, unmarried,
reading upstairs, sneaking off with Sally,
or flying model airplanes after school,
his dreams, like giant streamers or sky-writing, stretched out far behind him,
accompanying him everywhere.
“We’ve heard this story a million times before,” you say.
“It’s nothing new, so why do you go on about it so?”
Because it’s nothing new,
and some like him came back from two world wars
and everything was supposed to be put behind them like the dead family dog
but then more came back from Korea and Vietnam,
the Gulf,
changed
utterly
to sit in multiplex movie theaters watching
as their great-grandfathers or men just like them made sure
someone else’s wife and children got a life raft off the sinking ship—
to hack and spit in poorly-ventilated refineries
with sophisticated shower drains
that trapped the precious platinum residue
which washed off them like water-color paints.
The conscious choice to look at line length in this way somehow liberated my unconscious mind and my slightly more conscious “formal poetic” mind to collaborate in a new way. My unconscious mind took an echo from Yeats’ “Easter, 1916,” and turned it into the two shortest lines in the poem: “changed” and “utterly.” Only later, when my conscious mind looked back on these two one-word lines did it imbue them with
something symbolic; their brevity came to represent the abruptness of the change that war wreaks on someone’s life. (One moment, you can walk; the next, you can’t. One moment you feel relatively innocent; the next, you are a killer.) What I call my “slightly more conscious formal poetic mind,” being a half-step behind the unconscious mind, realized, after the fact, that since I was allowing myself to play with lines of extremely varying lengths, I could consciously choose to make form follow content in a line like “his dreams, like giant streamers or sky-writing, stretched out far behind him.”
In the poems I’ve written since “Man Story,” principles of cadence and musical scoring guide my line breaks, but more moderately. I haven’t felt the need to write another poem with such acute attention to “billowing shirt” and “limp sock” lines. At the same time, I have never again concerned myself with a painterly evenness of lines.
School for the Blind
Chair,
bed,
dresser.
New world
scaled down
small as the
cream-soft palms
of the four-year-old
left tonight
at the boarding school
in an open dorm,
(aisle nearest the lockers,
second bed down)
suitcase from home,
touch bed-spread
his hands pried
from his mother’s skirt.
Best thing, she said:
braille and new playmates,
still home for the weekends.
Then they drove off.
Kathy and Connie
got to watch Lassie.
Down he lies.
Down he lies.
But tomorrow morning,
his shoelaces tied,
he will decide
to make new friends,
learn every language,
study the birds
to know how to sing,
read every book,
plot his escape,
and fly from the playground
on airplane swings.
Broken Reverie
I am not going to write a political poem,
but in my neighborhood, a truck is in reverse.
It has been backing up for a long time.
It beeps incessantly.
It has ruined my reverie.
When they were rebuilding the train station,
trucks backed up all night long.
Some people wrote the newspaper.
Get rid of those beepers, they said.
It’s not good to write political poems.
They are so obvious.
That’s why, any minute now,
I’m going to get back to my imagination.
But my blind friend made a simple decision one day—
simple as, shall I wear the knit dress
or wool pants to work?
She was just going to buy a sandwich;
she would leave her dog in the office
and take her white cane.
The truck had no beeper.
It was hard to know
in all that city noise
whether to stand still
or keep moving.
Soon I will be able
to stop writing polemics
and start writing poetry.
People want something fresh.
They don’t need me
to repeat the obvious.
About Chester Kowalski I Don’t Know Much
One morning, while we waited in line to see
the school nurse, he showed me how to fool a friend
through the power of suggestion.
Smacking his fist with his hand,
he pretended to crack an egg on top of my head,
then let his fingers drift like yolk down my hair.
I don’t know where he learned it.
Perhaps a bigger, cooler, sighted brother,
who didn’t have to go to boarding school,
duped the week before in front of girls,
had tried it out that weekend
when Chester had come home.
Or maybe it was his father who, like mine,
would show him the Full Nelson or a nest
some hornets built out back behind the shed.
I never asked him what his father did,
or what kinds of cookies his mother made for Christmas,
or his middle name,
but at night we breathed
the same fetid air of the open dorm
with thirty other eight- to ten-year-olds,
boys with healthy, shallow lungs who had played full tilt,
then said their prayers by rote—
“Now I lamey downda sleep.”
I didn’t know how much I didn’t know
about him until they said he’d drowned
in the swimming pool. I walked past his empty bed,
heard them pack up his things,
and felt my breath against my hands.
A Few Things
I don’t know how they keep you on a cross
when they first start the hammering.
I don’t know how they make chocolate.
I don’t know which parts of a tuna they put in a can
and what they do with the rest.
I don’t know what I’ll do with the rest of my life.
I don’t know any more who sat
behind Bobby Sabol in fourth grade,
but Allen Hawk’s dad worked for the phone company.
I don’t know why we tell so many sad stories.
I don’t know what the Skinheads next door talk about
or what the cockatiel lady likes for lunch.
I’ve heard that birds resolve disputes through singing contests.
I don’t know what a rainbow looks like,
or that my life would be better if I could see one.
I don’t know why I’m writing all of this down.
I know all the vegetables in V-8 juice.
There are at least a dozen ways to say “snow” in Inuit.
I know vulnerability is related to hope,
but I can’t say how.
I don’t know who killed the grooms in Duncan’s room.
I don’t know at what point you should retire a working dog.
They have three rollercoasters at Knoble’s Grove.
My mother belly-laughed when we got splashed on The Flume.
Or maybe it’s four. I can’t remember now.
I don’t know why some people give up and others don’t.
Laura Hershey
GETTING COMFORTABLE
I just spent the past twenty minutes getting comfortable. “Move the head pillow down and a little to the right,” I told Ruth, my attendant. “Push my shoulders up and to the right...a little more. Now push the pillow down again. Straighten out my hips please.”
What I really wanted to do was write. First, though, I had to get comfortable. “Now could you pull my right knee to the left. More.” It will be a while before another attendant comes—which is a good thing, offering promise of some quiet time, with just my partner Robin, without my having to instruct, advise, respond or wonder whether an aide is hearing and/or seeing the private words I dictate to my computer. But that precious time undisturbed is also time unaided. “Shift my hips a little more to the right. Then pull my feet down. Also, can you move my hands up a little.” For a while at least, my body will have to stay in whatever position Ruth leaves it.
“Move my shoulders up and to the right,” I said. “Hmm. Okay, now pull my hips down just a little...Now shoulders up again. No, straight up.”
This went on for a while.
“My back still doesn’t feel quite right,” I said. “I think we need to start over. Sorry.” I said “Sorry” even though Ruth had shown no sign of annoyance. “Could you lower the head of the bed. Take out the pillow for now...Okay, now, pull me up straighter by my ar
ms, pretty far up...even further. Now scoot my hips to the right again. All right, let’s raise the head of the bed again...There, stop. No, maybe a little higher. Good. Now will you put the pillow back under my head. Move it down and to the right. Pull my chin up, up and a little to the left. Now pull it straight up. And pull my right knee to the left.”
I stopped to assess my position. “All right?” Ruth asked. “You comfortable?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “So could you set up my lap table and my computer?”
“You sure?”
“Yes,” I said, a little impatiently. I was anxious to write.
For a long time, and still sometimes, I have hidden the part of my life that involved the services of another woman’s strong hands, arms, legs, back. I saw no literary potential in scenes like the one above. They were merely background music to my story, I thought, not the story itself. My simple, seemingly straightforward, first-person sentences conceal the truth of the help I need in order to carry out my daily actions. I say, “I went to the bookstore and looked through a dozen books and finally bought this book of poetry by Adrienne Rich”—(not, “Carmen drove me to the bookstore, and held a dozen books up for me to look at, turned the pages for me, put all of them back onto the shelf except for one by Adrienne Rich. Then Carmen got my wallet out of my purse for me and handed my credit card to the cashier, who rang up the sale.”). My grammar gave no ground to the idea of dependency, for that’s what I’ve heard it called in fundraising appeals and theoretical discussion. Instead, I spoke of my actions the way I feel them, as self-determined events filling my days. To people my scenes with a supporting cast might conjure me, the main actor, as a tragic figure, as a body with need but no will.
Readers, I feared, may not be able to read such a writer, may not relax enough to follow me on the paths I choose to chart. A reader must trust her writer, even if that means meeting only the physical writer, a floating intellect. So I deleted the dance of turn, shift, lift, pull, push.
Beauty Is a Verb Page 11