Beauty Is a Verb

by Jennifer Bartlett

  a storm doesn’t go on all morning long

  nor does a sudden shower all day

  but where do these come from

  from heaven and earth

  and even heaven and earth

  can’t keep at it for long

  so how could human beings

  make anything last (p.28)

  Buddhist wit and conceptions of cosmology, selfhood, embodiment and knowledge have been particularly salvific and salving because both diseases were initially misdiagnosed, the celiac disease and soy allergy going under the name of “acute gastritis” for over seven years of incremental debilitation. Not even knowing how to say what was wrong and often in psychic distress and pain, I spent a lot of time with, in Zen scholar Charles Egan’s words, “Existence and void...mixed up” (p.161). Finally being able to name my conditions meant being able to treat them; treatment enabled me to begin to perceive clearly the emerging dynamic in my life between ability and disability, even though I couldn’t and still can’t control it. One thing for certain: the alleged boundary between ability and disability is as pernicious a fiction as the alleged boundary between mind and body in Western culture. “Real is not real,” the Yuan Dynasty monk Wujian Xiandu reminds us, “and not is not-not” (Egan: p.147).

  Nonetheless, I’ve found that the more committed I am to an embodied consciousness, the more I find myself reckoning with contingency and paradox. This is a fact that even Western medicine is beginning to recognize—helped along by recent research in neuroscience. In Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Antonio R. Damasio asserts that “the self that endows our experience with subjectivity is not a central knower and inspector of everything that happens in our minds...mind arises[s] out of an organism rather than out of a disembodied brain” (pp.227-229). Damasio’s description of “The Body-Minded Brain” is remarkable for its congruence both with poststructuralist ideas concerning identity’s “always already” constructed quality as well as Buddhist notions of permanent flux and transformation: the representations your brain constructs to describe a situation, and the movements formulated as response to a situation, depend on mutual brain-body interactions. The brain constructs evolving representations of the body as it changes under chemical and neural influences. Some of those representations remain non-conscious, while others reach consciousness. At the same time, signals from the brain continue to flow to the body, some deliberately and some automatically, from brain quarters whose activities are never represented directly in consciousness. As a result, the body changes yet again, and the image you get of it changes accordingly (p.228). Since body and brain must act in concert continually to construct our interdependent sensations of consciousness and selfhood, Damasio argues, “we construct the mind of the moment”(p.229). Each time I read Damasio’s book, I’m struck by the profundity of this phrase, a radical claim that might seem more at home in a volume of Buddhist theology than in a mass-market paperback about neuroscience. In fact, each time I revisit Damasio’s phrase, I’m called back to Laozi:

  best is a mind not made up

  then that mind is everyone’s...

  live in this world breathe it in breathe it out

  let the world dissolve your mind

  it and everything in it fixes upon your eye

  and your ear and needs your mothering (p.59)

  This is how my own ongoing embodiment has led and continues to lead to a poetics deeply indebted to “non-normative” somatic, physiological and cognitive processes as the basis for poetic forms, forms frequently engaged with classic texts from both Western and Eastern traditions of wisdom literature. All along my body has been its own book of wisdom, articulating far more about the terms of living than my mind can always be conscious of. And at this point, it has taught me at least one lasting lesson in poetics: I have to write from a place of uncertainty and flux, despite my deepest desire for certainty and stability, because the nature of things—both interior and exterior—is transience.

  Okay. Sure. On those days when I walk with a minimum of pain and digest my food without incident, I do feel “temporarily able-bodied,” and I am grateful. But still those days when I’m unable to walk or digest my food without symptoms are totally impossible to accept with equanimity. Instead of assessing the situation and seeing it objectively as a part of a continuum of experience, mostly I am like Yongjue Yuanxian, the monk-poet of “Lying Meditation.” One of my favorite poems from the Ming Dynasty, it places its speaker deep in the struggle of distinguishing between what is and what seems to be, his consciousness intricated in the phenomenological, body-minded brain that we all share:

  On my seven-foot rope bed

  with arms bent, I sleep with the clouds.

  Existence and void are mixed up;

  Saints and sinner are cast away.

  Don’t say there are no things at all:

  A bright mirror floats alone in the sky. (Egan: p.161)

  5 poems from

  THE EMPTY FORM GOES ALL THE WAY TO HEAVEN

  afternoon

  clarity arrives

  brief virtue

  cloud cover

  alters symmetry’s

  trellis and shadow

  classic image

  two late T’ang dishes

  one flowering

  one empty

  illness asks

  as though it were

  an aesthetic choice

  will it be mind

  or body emptied

  first brief

  clarity before

  a day’s gray

  scale study

  old tin tub

  soapy water

  tilts over

  its rim hits

  linoleum

  nice image

  for nausea

  washing hot

  one end

  to the other

  I remember

  my mother

  poured warm

  water over

  how small

  my body

  has become

  again

  western window

  eastern window

  sickbed between

  illness shares

  its few virtues

  with art pain

  as anomalous

  as imagination

  in not being “of”

  or “for” anything

  even language

  lacks the quality

  of their solitude

  pure process

  like art illness is

  mostly the mystery

  of why one window

  opens slowly

  why one window

  remains locked

  hours without

  words I can’t

  form space

  contour can’t

  hold anything

  interior my body

  never empties

  of what it has

  to do ache

  wavers in the tin

  tub where also I

  bobbed for apples

  until my face hurt

  and hunger can’t

  urge me a child

  sitting in snow

  to open my mouth

  language returns

  like Li Ho

  on his donkey

  wrote one line

  per scrap he’d bag

  and shake out

  at day’s end

  to make human

  and earthen one

  horizon poetry

  sum of patience

  forged in heat

  loose barb

  tip broken

  cracked red

  it sliced through

  flesh once

  Ona Gritz

  A CONSCIOUS DECISION

  I know why you write about me so much,” my son, Ethan, said to me once. “It’s because I’m so important to you.”

  Writing has been a natural response to parenting for me; a kind of over
flow. In poems, I’ve sought the perfect word to describe the particular blonde of Ethan’s hair. Honey-colored, I wrote, because, as it changes with the seasons, his hair takes on the various hues of that thick, sweet stuff lined up in jars. I’ve attempted to describe the still, not-yet animated face I glimpsed in the birthroom mirror seconds before he woke to the world. Calm as milk in its cup. I’ve written about the rifle he used at summer camp. How the hand that once lay splayed on my chest as he nursed has held an actual weapon. He’s a teenager now, but recently I drafted a poem in which I witnessed his tentative first steps, noting anew how they mirrored my own palsied walk.

  My palsied walk. Disability is another subject that frequents my poems, but not because it compels me the way motherhood does. Writing about it has been more a conscious decision than a matter of inspiration.

  When I was a child, there was a brown paper grocery bag kept on the floor of my closet, on the left-hand side toward the back. Inside was a single shoe, ankle high with a leather strap above the laces, and a hole near the ankle where a leg brace attached. The brace was a thin metal pole with a leather cuff that buckled near my knee. I had to wear this contraption while I slept. Heavy and stiff, it got caught in my blankets and sometimes caused bruises on my knees. Though I understood that what I had was cerebral palsy, I thought of that shoe as my disability. More precisely, I thought of it as my secret inner ugliness. After all, it was kept hidden and mentioned only in private as my mother helped me put on at night.

  My cerebral palsy is relatively mild. I lack fine motor skills in my right hand, but learned early to compensate with my capable left. It’s nothing, I was told. I walk as though favoring a sore foot. Barely noticeable, people said. These comments were meant to be compliments. I was lucky, it seemed, because I wasn’t too different. Because I could more or less pass.

  True, there were times I was forced to face my limitations—coming upon a winding staircase with no banister—walking down a slick, icy street to get home. But mostly when I thought about having cerebral palsy, what I focused on was how people saw me. It pained me to think that someone might not find me pretty because of my uneven legs and awkward gait. I didn’t know then that worrying over such things is a kind of luxury. My quirky walk gets me where I’m going. I can speak clearly, cook, shop, clean and use my good mind to read, teach and write. Scarcely hampered by it, I saw disability as primarily a cosmetic issue. That changed when, in my thirty-fourth year, I took on a job that was, in many ways, beyond my physical abilities.

  The following tasks are near to impossible when you lack fine motor skills in one hand, and when your gait is less than steady: Positioning a newborn to nurse at your breast. Safely bathing that newborn. Swaddling him. Walking while holding him. Opening a refrigerator while holding him. Eating while holding him. Drinking while holding him. Preparing a meal while holding him. Answering a phone while holding him. Climbing stairs while holding him. Descending stairs while holding him. Pushing a stroller while holding him. Lifting a stroller onto or off of a bus. Lifting a stroller onto or off of a train. Keeping pace with a fast crawling baby. Keeping pace with a fast running toddler...

  I’ve had cerebral palsy since the day I was born, but it wasn’t until my son was born that I truly experienced disability.

  The first morning after I brought Ethan home from the hospital, I cried to a friend that he wailed every time I put him down.

  “I can’t even fix myself a bowl of cornflakes!”

  My friend, a mother of two, laughed like it was all too familiar. “Don’t worry,” she assured me. “Moms get used to doing things with one hand.”

  What she didn’t understand was that the one hand I had that was capable of pouring cereal and milk, of using a spoon, was the same one hand that could safely prop an infant’s head. Hardly anyone knew this about me, and I found that fact frightening. Faced with caring for my baby and myself, I no longer wanted to pass as able-bodied. I wanted to be looked at squarely, limitations and all, so I could get the practical advice and physical help I needed. For that to happen, I had to take my disability out from the bottom of the closet and claim it. My great discovery was that it felt good to open up. To say, Actually, it’s not “nothing,”it’s this and begin to describe—first in conversation, and soon after, in poems—what it’s like to live in my particular body.

  Hemiplegia

  Left, my bright half, gets all of it...

  soft sharp prickly wet lined.

  But press your head against my right shoulder,

  I sense weight but no warmth. Your cheek,

  to my right touch, stubble free,

  whether or not you shave.

  Under my right fingers your silver hair

  holds no silk, nor can I feel it part

  into single strands. I’ll tell you

  how I know you in the dark.

  Left whispers the details.

  Right listens and believes.

  No

  The nurses shaped us into positions.

  Cradle hold, football hold. My hands

  couldn’t take you to the right place.

  Cerebral palsy I mumbled, apology,

  explanation. As though those experts

  of the body didn’t already know.

  Finally, they propped cushions around us.

  Your lips touched my breast

  but instead of suckling, you dozed.

  This had the nurses worried.

  I worried how I’d feed you alone.

  That night, your wail woke me.

  I scooped you up, found the nurse’s bell.

  When a new one came, I shyly

  explained the pillows, the palsy.

  “No,” she said coolly and I stared.

  “No. That baby needs sleep not milk.”

  I tried again: “he’s hungry.”

  Shaking her head, she left our room.

  I attempted the football hold.

  The cradle. Tried setting up pillows

  then sitting between them. They fell.

  Keeping you in my arms, I paced, I sang.

  We cried in unison, both of us

  so helpless, so desperately new.

  Prologue

  A beach block gets so quiet

  with the season over,

  the ocean louder.

  Year-rounders grow restless.

  Neighbors flirt and my father

  who worked nights, the only man

  around on those long afternoons.

  Getting home later, missing supper,

  spitting out words that made

  my mother shut the window

  against that salt, that cold.

  You don’t know where I been,

  he’d bluster. You don’t know

  where I go—until she folded inside

  where I was folded,

  another unknown, forming.

  She believed this caused

  my cerebral palsy. Water

  takes the shape of its container,

  and we are mostly water.

  Because You Can’t See My Photographs

  I seek out the past in voices, pulling you over

  to speak with men whose words are edged

  with my father’s New Yorkese, or to hear songs

  I listened to in his finned blue car. Sometimes,

  I name shapes to convey what I mean. Bowl

  for the feeling of standing surrounded by

  mountains as a teen, torpedo for the rounded

  point my pregnant belly made a decade before

  we met. Once, I placed a friend’s infant on your lap,

  telling you my son had been heavier than she,

  that his scalp smelled like sleep lingering in sheets.

  I have box after box of pictures, curled rectangles

  that are blank to you. Still if you could travel

  back to the schoolyard in Queens where I played

  as a child, I trust you’d recognize the girl I was,


  you who tease her laugh from me so easily.

  We Are Everywhere

  The first one I see, on Bleeker,

  has a rigid leg that traces half moons

  as she moves. The next, spotted on

  Houston, uses crutches to swing

  her whole self forward, a leap

  for each of her boyfriend’s strides.

  Right now, a woman with auburn hair

  and a gypsy skirt waits for the light

  in a motorized chair. The walk sign

  flashes green and, magnetized, I follow,

  willing her to notice I’m kin.

  Stephen Kuusisto

  DIGRESSIONS ON POETRY, PROSE

  AND A LINGONBERRY BUSH

  Poetry differs from other forms of expression in two essential ways: it does not aspire to tell the literal truth and it can get at the truth with unreliable methods. Or to put it another way: you can glean the truth from a poem but the process is quasi-occult, like reading the entrails of birds. The Roman Legion always did this before setting out on a campaign. It’s possible that by reading avian intestines the Romans bought themselves some extra time to hang around the capital and that, in turn, this would have improved the morale of the troops. Such is the incalculable power of art—even those who do not care about it can derive benefits from living in an artistic culture. But I digress.