hot damn, you are dead
nuts, right on. That is the essence
of all of this, isn’t it? So let me tell you—
they begin as piles of bones,
the animals in my dreams do.
Each night, they clink & clonk
& rise like a time lapse video
of sky-scraper construction.
One animal turns into a man
& the man gives birth
to a dead dog. In just seconds
the other animals have rent them apart
& then, I’m awake. Night-
swallows knife through the morning
fog as I stand at the window
listening to the coyote song.
My entire body is killing me,
& I have witnessed my own death
& lived—I whisper my wagers
against disaster into the dark air.
Other Good
Anesthesia dumb, scalpel-paste
Rawing my tongue, I found
Myself star-fished in sky
Spinning days. I stared into my eyelids’
Bustling magic, the black
Of my hands. Oh, how darkness
Swaggered, dealt fluorescent-blurs
& the choke of the sea. This is my everything—
Bright shuddered my cheeks,
Shadows whistled through their teeth.
Hallways thrummed & snorted,
The surgeons in my brain
Pissed with no hands.
Each day nurses wore their best
Tin-foil skirts, buried
Their caresses in my side
While pillows whispered
In spite of your scars you are tickled
To death of life.
I couldn’t understand this
Always being held. Lung-machines
Sang louder. Wavesong & useless.
Midnights & swearing. Blue.
Who prayed for me—my thanks
But I can’t keep anything down.
Who knew it had nothing to do
With the wind by how light
Flickered with falling knives?
And No More May I Be
So this is calamity: calendula-
oiled hands cupping a mouth
that sings through the caving
away thunderlight as the weeks
keep swinging by—house finches
shivering groundward in the catgut
blight. Black boughs absent of any
living weights. In the rain a man
ducks into his coat to light a smoke.
The park bitter with echoing space.
The park freezing. In the rain a man
ducks into his coat like the split-
ribbed chest of a dead horse
swallowing a wet-cheeked boy.
Benches slick red. Benches freezing.
In the rain a soaked man
watching in the rain. In the rain
my hands pink hands numb
in the rain. Beneath the skin
a humming is. Geese wreathed
in their own winter-coming
breath. Skinhulled. Taut
skin bustling. Bottle caps old
buttons half-buried hard in the dirt.
Laurie Clements Lambeth
RESHAPING THE OUTLINE
Having dispensed with the neurological tests and their curious implements (pizza wheel for the sole of my foot, reflex hammer, tuning fork), having ceased the comparison of MRI results over ten years, recognizing the progression of my illness, the doctor asked what I’d been writing lately. I said I’d been writing about multiple sclerosis (MS)—about MRIs, areas of damage that turn from brilliant white spots to “black holes,” irreparable. We had counted something like seven new black holes during the exam. I remember the doctor paused and lowered her head in profile, as though laboring to offer wisdom.
“I think you’re very...intelligent, and very...creative,” she said, turning her face toward me, “but writing about your MS isn’t going to make it better.”
How does one respond?
“Oh, I’m perfectly aware of that. I’m under no illusions that anything at all will make me better.” I wanted to tell her that my writing and my disease have existed side by side from the moment I was diagnosed at seventeen, my new physical life giving birth to my life in words.
Poet Gregory Orr points out that while in English “to bless” is to confer divine benevolence on someone or something, in French the verb blesser means to wound. The two are linked, he suggests, beyond logic. This coincides with my experience; the disease that wounds channels in my brain and spine, that disrupts my ability to feel through skin, that distorts my vision, that tightens some muscles while weakening others, is indeed the blessing-wound that changed my thinking and brought me to poetry.
My first recognizable MS symptom—although there were others I didn’t yet understand—was a numb left hand, as though plastic wrap surrounded each finger. Over time it rose up my arm, then down my left thigh. The outlines between things blurred. Unable to detect the difference between my skin and fabric, my thumb and a buttonhole, my hair and the elastic I stretched to contain it, I slipped into a dimension where there was little distinction between the outside world and the inner contours of my own body. I had planned to be a cartoonist, so most of my drawing was defined by outlines. And now this shading moved in, this nuance. About six weeks later the numbness subsided, but it left its physical traces that would rise up again, and more importantly, a permanent mark on my consciousness: outlines shifted, faded.
In the catalog to his 1809 exhibition of paintings in his brother’s sock-shop, on view two hundred years later at the Tate Gallery, William Blake stresses the importance of the outline: “How do we distinguish the oak from the beech, the horse from the ox, but by the bounding outline? How do we distinguish one face or countenance from another, but by the bounding line and its infinite inflexions and movements?” He goes on to warn, “Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again.” Chaos. There is indeed a chaotic quality to a disability that shifts and interrupts, leaves and reenters one’s life in new, surprising ways that at once echo earlier experience and carve new notches into the body.
Gregory Orr observes, in his essay “Poetry and Survival,” that poetry has the power to take crises—loss, pain, illness, instability—and give them shape. To order the chaos in our lives through language: “Rather than the transcendence and abstraction counseled by philosophy and religion, the personal lyric urges the self to translate its whole being into language where it can dramatize and re-stabilize itself in the patterned language of the poem.” Poetry helped me investigate and reinforce the blur I felt between body and world, and gave me the space to insist upon the bounding line’s fluidity. In metaphor, for instance, I could bypass all that tenor and vehicle business and create images that were simultaneously literal and figurative, hovering somewhere in-between. It was this way that MS entered my poetry—not in subject, but in the ways it altered my perception of my body’s place in the world, as though the outline of what I could call “me” was a broken line, permeable and wavering, and what was inside that perimeter was a shimmering transparency, at once me and not me.
For eight years I did not write about the disease, aside from one particularly rough poem in my senior year of high school. The subject was too expansive and tentacled, too emotionally unpredictable, too difficult to harness into free verse. Orr’s description of the lyric poem’s role as the provider of order via “patterned language” rang true for me. I needed the cage of a villanelle—so restrictive, in that very few lines can truly further the poem along, and yet so obsessive a form—to house the poem. In fact, even that high school poem was propelled by repetition, what Orr would call “the consoling power of repeated sounds.” After living with MS for eight fairly uneventful years and being woken up one night by something like a seizure, neurons misfiring, arms and le
gs flailing beyond my conscious control, I wrote about the experience in my villanelle “The Shaking.” The poem takes on two possibly melodramatic hazards for poetry: love and sickness. Either could have gone horribly out of control, but the project of formal containment allowed for necessary perspective to tinker, prune, dissect and question, long after the poem was originally published.
As MS more fully entered my poetry, my experience of disability deepened, or vice-versa. They helped each other along. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that poetry is therapy, it is a means for me to take something that may not be considered desirable or beautiful (dragging a leg, losing the sense of touch), investigate it, sculpt it and create something outside of my body that is vividly physical, in subject and in form. I am moved to craft different formal responses to each somatic experience. In my first book, the most obvious formal departure can be found in the prose fragments addressing memory loss, low vision, ocular pain and incontinence. These subjects are difficult to handle in poetry without risking melodrama or perceptions of shock or self-pity, so it felt deeply satisfying to tighten prose into a voice that is at once stark and lyrical, then to juxtapose those fragments against more lyrically expansive poems.
Two poems included in this book, near companions if not for the time elapsed between each poem’s composition, address the difficulty of communicating impaired sensation: “Hypoesthesia” and “Dysaesthesia.” These narrative lyrics attempt to describe lack of sensation (numbness), or the feeling of pain without source, dysaesthesia: “wrong feeling.” In each, there is a sense of the possibility of formal connection that is not actualized. This is not how their shapes were planned; I write far more organically than that. But the feeling in each is a sense of hesitancy, a disruption in fluidity, reflective of the inability to share physical experience, even at our most intimate or domestic moments. In “Hypoesthesia” this is actualized in certain long lines and sentences disrupted mid-stream and continuing mid-line in the next stanza, as though they were dropped straight down. In “Dysaesthesia” the slanted gutter down the middle performs the same task, except this poem is addressing pain, so its language and form are more halting, frantic. Their brokenness exists far more on the surface than in “Hypoesthesia,” where the speaker finds some pleasure and gratitude in shifting her sensibilities.
In either case, fitting form to the poem, lending it shape and order, granted me a tremendous sense of power—not to change my physical condition at all (why would I want to change?), but to relay its essence and create a thing of beauty that speaks simultaneously about the individual and a more universal sense of alienation, all of us trapped in chaotic bodies, the potential of unrest ever-present in every body, which I hope, if the poem’s shaped well and the reader willing to follow, will foster empathy, not sympathy, for the blessing-wound.
Hypoesthesia
Hypoesthesia: numbness, the absence of sensation. Absence often feels like something.
—INSIDE MS
All those years
I made love to a man without thinking
how little his body had to do with me
—MARK DOTY
For now (who knows how long now is) his touch is nothing but warmth and trace
trailing his hand up my thigh and around my stomach. I feel a little
something crystallize after each pass of his hand, then it’s dust.
Whoever thought sex could be so literally senseless? The first time (my first time)
I cried a little because I did not want it, but gave to make my boyfriend stop asking.
That was a different kind of senselessness.
I wanted to cry this time, too, another first since the new flare-up broke:
feet, knee, thigh, stomach, hip, hollow of the back, neither my body nor my skin
but a loose-fitting carapace, bubble, prosthetic even.
Are you touching me,
I thought to ask, but instead watched as he kissed each part and caressed
and did what we do when I feel right. I didn’t say I can’t feel that,
but let his hands and mouth travel.
For the first time in my life I let go of my body a while and looked down
with fascination at the man I love in the process of loving me—:
the way the window’s meager light managed
to illuminate his nails with each finger’s lengthening, how it raised
his tendons (like spines) before his knuckles into glow. Stunning
to see his eyebrows and lashes crush, devoted,
with each kiss planted along my belly, to feel only the cool afterward.
Strange that now would be the time I comprehend our otherness, these bodies
wanting more: luminous, impossible whole.
The Shaking
I know I scared you last night by shaking,
the only time you were forced to share
a dream that shook me to waking.
Your left hand pressed upon my aching
thigh as it kicked and flailed; how compare
your strength to synapse whims, wild shaking?
You know my nervous system could be taking
over any time; disease is unfair.
Remember: it seems bad when you’re waking.
Many times I’ve trembled when you’re making
love to me, my round shoulders open, bare,
but never have I broken into such shaking,
when my body shows us our lives breaking
apart. Still, you hold me. Your kind is rare,
who know (or pretend) dreams seem worse upon waking.
Surprising you stayed: here you are, forsaking
quiet nights for me. Will you be there
when it worsens, my gait palsied with shaking?
Who could be strong enough to hold back its waking?
Seizure, or Seduction of Persephone
I convulsed so hard I broke
open, broke the earth,
erupted and pushed out
a narcissus by the roots.
It doesn’t matter where
the flower broke on my body,
through the skin, a pimple,
my head, or the belly.
I could not tell you.
What I can say is this:
my limbs flailed and seized
in the bed. I watched, both
inside and outside, skin
the sheet of a Richter scale,
delicate needles charting
the shifting of earth’s plates,
limbs all speaking
unknown tongues, plotting
maps and pathways deep
into the body. As he held
me still in that bed,
how was I to discern
if he then learned
his way through the flesh
into my need, or if
he chose this blue moment
to come out, rupture
the field from within
my own unruly body?
Seduction: nothing but
a man’s hand depressing
and a flower jolting out.
Some void here between my hips.
Dysaesthesia
When I tell Ian my hands are on fire,
when I first pull them from the warm bed
and release them to the air’s sting,
begin the morning routine, measure
dog food, twist open ridged lids of jars
upon which I scratch my palms,
when I lift and unscrew the milk bottle,
fingers sparking without cause,
when I pour coffee, rubbing the hands
on any rough surface because they smolder,
when I tell him I watched myself drop
the spoon as though in a movie, not me
that wincing, palms turned up and why,
their inner tremble radiating holding nothing,
I remember James Dean
in the police department, so
angry
he pummels a desk, and I said last week
when we watched it again, wait for it:
he broke his hand there in the take—that’s real pain,
and I read my hand like his, roiling under skin
while he clutches his wrist in close-up,
when I hear myself gasp and can’t help it,
just the shock, I can say spark or burn
or electric, and Ian asks me if I mean
the hands are hot as in temperature.
Not hot, just on fire. Flameless, sourceless—
how else to say it but fire, this mistake
creeping between spine and skin? How to discern
this pain, these hands, who operates them?
Brian Teare
LYING MEDITATION
I’m not a practicing Buddhist, but the longer I live with two chronic diseases, the more often I turn and return to Buddhist theology and poetry as ways of helping me to conceptualize and accept the unpredictable. I can’t know when my body will be disabled or when my body will be able. Gouty rheumatoid arthritis means daily low-level pain in my feet and knees, but monthly there are days of significantly limited movement and yearly I experience crippling bouts of swelling that last anywhere from two to ten days. Celiac disease and a severe soy allergy mean that even a minor deviation from my increasingly narrow diet—due to poorly labeled packaging, “hidden” ingredients, cross-contamination, misinformed wait staff or my own ignorance—gives an entire day or more over to symptoms. Thus, while I wouldn’t feel comfortable claiming a “disability” in the strictest sense of the term, the epithet “temporarily able-bodied” favored by some disability activists makes a lot of sense to me. “[B]revity is natural / it makes sense,” writes Laozi in Thomas Meyer’s translation of the Dao De Jing,
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