Beauty Is a Verb

by Jennifer Bartlett

  Even in remission, MS defines land. I walked the cowpath that paralleled the backs of the houses in Deer Valley and on towards the great basin where a two-track visible by satellite intersected my path at a water tank and feed station. The route was level, easier than the hikes up the ridge I used to take. Even the coyotes shared the trail, and I poked at their scat with my cane to see what kind of diet they’d been consuming; I poked at their scat with my cane because I could. The gnarled, once-trimmed juniper with a remnant of barbed-wire fence wrapped around its trunk is where I sat down. And then, after resting, I walked home. I absorbed the environment: gumweed, paintbrush, a small stead of scrub oak, everywhere snakeweed and yucca.

  A few years later, a goathead meant a flat tire on my wheelchair, while dried, hoof-trodden caliche demanded a wheelie every arm pull. Stairs became a cliff face: my Moriarty house had three. With pain I mustered them, even when I used the chair for distances. The following winter, after a partial recovery, the woodstove nonetheless remained conspicuously empty, the woodpile by the shed full: my use of propane doubled. I kept sticking with the house, with the land, with the fear I’d have to leave, with the fear that I’d want to leave. I kept sticking it out even though opening a refrigerator door had become painful, and I knew I wasn’t going to be hauling any more wood. I had wanted to hermit. I had hoped to die rural. I left the city because of one disability and I couldn’t admit that a second disability was going to drive me back. I couldn’t admit that I was going to have to leave the land because I was afraid. I was afraid I couldn’t take care of myself in isolation. And I was afraid of the alternative: people.

  And then one day I got up from my desk to find a rattlesnake coiled on the brick floor of my living room. This was a new incarnation of fear: danger without malice. I spent two intimate hours with the snake and something snapped. A pendulum in my head swung clean from people as predators to people as potential support. I called the sheriff. A deputy came and helped me catch the snake and release it off the property. And then I wrote poems to the rattler. For months. The snake in my memory was my guide, lover, prophet and teacher, allowing me to tackle with words my fears and griefs, my loves, allowing me to gain perspective. The result was a verse theater piece, The Relenting: A Play of Sorts.

  By the time the book was released by New Rivers Press, fish-eye cameras tracked all my entrances and exits. I had moved into a “green” building right smack in the middle of downtown Albuquerque. Leed Platinum. Energy star. Mixed-income. Subsidized. Rent cheap as the sticks. I neighbor the train tracks. I neighbor the bus station. A movie theater. A rescue mission. I have neighbors. I have friends, an actual community of artists and writers.

  And still, I pause in the parking garage to examine a four-and-a-half-inch beetle. By the time I get to the third floor of the apartment building, my head swims. The sound of the elevator disrupts my equilibrium, and I brace myself against falling. I brace myself against grief. I remember catching a head-whipping skink, holding a towhee, the night travels of stag beetles across the concrete slab of my bedroom floor, a hawk on a fence post. I forget to make any urban identifications.

  I listen to the traffic and train whistles. The church bells and disembodied “fuck yous” that rise through my window. The siren songs.

  I feel safe. I feel happy. I feel sad.

  I write it all down.

  Sometimes on First Street, I see a hummingbird under the overpass or a homeless person in the bushes scrounging for something stashed a while earlier.

  from The Relenting: A Play of Sorts

  WOMAN (speaking to SNAKE)

  I wish this moment were simpler than a woman trying to negotiate with a snake.

  Desert Carnivore, I’d love to give you an excuse

  that would pass in school or for a missed lunch date.

  Yet, I already know better—I have always known better.

  When don’t justifications pale or do some grand disservice to something that could be as honest as acknowledging divergent priorities or accepting an everyday failure?

  Here in my living room, my sad and mundane story merits no regard:

  disabled woman who just a few months back got out of a wheelchair;

  woman who’s likely to need it again.

  There is no place for pity.

  You don’t care whether or not today is a good walking day,

  might prefer to bring me down,

  encourage disease to disown my arms and legs,

  leave me living torso.

  Already you rib me,

  your dexterous body nothing but internal spokes attached to a skull.

  Am I any different, chest heaving?

  •

  WOMAN (speaking to SNAKE)

  Sure enough what’s untouchable is desire:

  thirty-six of Botticelli’s curves in a museum piece roped off,

  fragments of roundness that loop in the imagination of pure shape,

  visceral wish to touch.

  You are not snake, you are abstraction of circle.

  I’m tempted; I’m taunted.

  The alarm of your tail resounds already in speculation

  and yet, look at you—

  peaceful coiled hush.

  My mind stretches towards you,

  inches around the maze of your spine,

  and meters away from you,

  recoiling,

  my own body S-ing.

  This apartness,

  this knowledge of essential separation pains me plentiful.

  Logic and sensuality ride the length of my spine,

  twined together,

  a braid of wish and wash:

  I do not want to be punctured;

  I do not want to puncture.

  This barrier of physical distance,

  a mere three and a half feet,

  could be broached with a feather

  from the dove that breaks morning

  on the line outside the house.

  Peace?

  Stasis?

  Fallible seduction?

  I cannot frighten you. I will not.

  Wicker-Work: A Sestina for Zukofsky

  In the mental hospital I am a fan of your interpretation 1

  of torsion. Bar nothing I know poles— 2

  some flat-martyred mind split down the center by light, 3

  bilateral symmetry. Doctors leaf through MRI films 4

  and think thoughts split between aw-shucks compassion 5

  and abject snooping. My brain is luminous, 6

  scooped with polka-dotted-lampshade inflammation. 6

  Chomp chomp goes the T-Cell—spotted elucidation— 1

  of everywhere myelin is being pawed over. Concern 5

  is merited—multiple sclerosis leaves my brain divided 2

  into little bubbles of dysfunction, cartooned 4

  into increments of prayer: bulb-3

  ous head of a green thing. Photosynthesis 3

  makes light 6

  of the-locked-up-get-let-out-onto-the-poor-picture- 4

  of-a-high-walled-courtyard—grass!!! We conceptualize 1

  cigarettes, scratch our nicotine patches, pace two 2

  directions. Back and forth, sympathy 5

  strut. “Can you tell me what it’s like 5

  to off yourself?” Sad guy says. I respond, “Not bright— 3

  but your logic errs! I didn’t vault 2

  over over!” That, after the fine art of admission, radiant 6

  mouth saying, “Sure, I’m suicidal.” I don’t understand 1

  why the intake nurse needs that motion picture 4

  Lips Lips Lips Lips to let me in. Silver haired screen 4

  with her protocol of limiting access to the ward we love. 5

  What food! What art therapy! Puddin’ analysis 1

  of sadness, as iridescent 3

  as dreams of escape will become, turnstile gleaming 6

  with sweaty prints of our fingers, tipped towards any axis 2

/>   rotated counterclockwise opposite 2

  to despair. Oops. The lair of sentimentality flicks 4

  aside newsprint. Self-pity is a bugger on my chest, beam- 6

  ing. I stumble in all sub-atomic-ways. Brain care 5

  is mandatory or I get legs as logs. So sad. That’s flare. 3

  I’m sher ‘nuf sick though comprehending 1

  disease is polenta. 2 Too mushy. Meaning 1

  one big screen 4 for all patients. We dazzle 3

  in the blue glow 6, sicks of the contemporary ward. 5

  My Inquietude Constrained Briefly

  by Louise Bogan

  Not marble, I am rather quartz and mineral cement,

  sandstone the wind takes down,

  daily hourglass, exposing mica, sun-flecked debris,

  erosion’s bitter crown.

  My mind harps on the form that might contain

  topsoil wearing thin, the self

  made vulnerable as any remote landscape

  slipping off the continental shelf

  into depths of phosphorescent display. Meter

  can’t curtail the way

  thoughts overgraze emotion, the body abraded

  particles on some slick slope. The decay

  of restraint rocks me, high

  desert or lowland. In the adolescent pit

  of a mine, I stooped to pick up flint

  and released sea, eternal, unfortunate red emit.

  The Undering and Other Great Inhumanities

  on 3.6 Acres

  for Wendell Berry

  Remonstrance is no use. I already live

  where a downed fence is a plastic tube

  running under my dog’s skin, draining

  the wound. Even the armchair in the den

  held a slumped cottontail, smooth gray

  spindle of intestine protruding from a solitary

  puncture wound. It’s peaceful here. Javelina

  snouting the hurricane fencing, sunbeaten

  days and every night sky, even clouded,

  lit with stars unknown to the city, stars

  vanquished from the sight of the dead

  or overmedicated. There are so many types

  of erosion. I lament not the cholla blossoms’

  pink descent nor the hot yellow stream of piss

  released from my dog after the second

  injection. In the yard I sit listening to a blade

  of grass crackle and bend under the weight

  of a grasshopper. Death plagues me, the way

  plagues and blights come and go, daily

  happenstance. My brain, however, is subject

  to ravages best documented with technologies

  of the damned, profane knowledge of black

  holes that are not made with a post hole

  digger. I labor against all of it, even the sluice

  of emotion that might run me off my own

  land. The straight lines of my toil reap

  no pinto beans, no edible crop, no rodeo,

  and still, I hold out this might matter, might

  keep me from aggrandizing the eventual

  lullaby of grass plot, earth-turning, stone-piled

  undering that we all must know, the death

  that may or may not be natural when the mind

  erodes faster than the ranch behind my house

  under hooves of cattle. Did you know disease

  is not anything other than a living entity?

  A harmony of preservation and destruction,

  neurological cobbling together of being and not.

  I lament the erosion of my mind, the way effort

  alone will not let me live my values, how

  I have to ask doctors’ help to keep me living

  rural for as long as I can before the inability

  of my legs or eyes or cognition will lead me

  back to some sad city, overstimulated shelter

  from everything that ought to be allowed

  to take my body down like any other coyote kill.

  This would be my “wish to be generous,” to bow

  sometimes to mystery outside the hospital, to let

  my blood spill on the prickly pear, fruit-bearing.

  TOWARDS A NEW LANGUAGE

  OF EMBODIMENT

  Norma Cole

  WHY I AM NOT A TRANSLATOR—TAKE 2

  I was going to talk about why I am not a translator, but I’m not. I do translations, I’ve done many, mostly from French to English, but I still don’t think of myself as a translator.

  I had given a talk on translation at Suzanne Stein’s sublet in San Francisco a year and a half ago, to friends who had gathered around her dining table, a talk titled “Why I Am Not A Translator” that began with a list of subordinate clauses I handed out, starting with “what,” as in “What Rosmarie Waldrop has to do with it,” “What Claude Royet-Journoud has to do with it,” “What Stacy Doris has to do with it,” “What Etel Adnan & Simone Fattal have to do with it,” etc. Every one of them had gotten me to translate any number of books, but it was always so much more than what one thinks of as translating. Sure, it was pretty much straight-ahead translation—if you can say “straight-ahead” for the kind of experimental poetry I work on—but it was more exciting, more irritating, more crooked. More about editing than you’d think. But mostly I thought—and think—about it in terms of poetics.

  At the same time as I was thinking about translation, about AWP and about this ten-minute talk I am actually starting to give right now, I was reading René Daumal’s Rasa or Knowledge of the Self: Essays on Indian Aesthetics and Selected Sanskrit Studies, particularly an essay called “To Approach the Hindu Poetic Art.” As some of you know, René Daumal was a French writer born in 1908 in Charleville, the same town where Arthur Rimbaud had been born in 1854. Daumal, a writer of the avant-garde, who penned, among his many essays, poems and novels, the acclaimed unfinished novel Mount Analogue, at sixteen taught himself Sanskrit, wrote a Sanskrit grammar and translated some very important texts, including the Chandyoga Upanishad and the Bhagavad Gita. With failing health, hiding out in Paris during the Occupation with his wife, who was part Jewish, he died of tuberculosis in May 1944, just two weeks before the Allies landed in France.

  I was reading Daumal’s essay and thinking about my class at the University of San Francisco, and about the course in “Visionary Poetics” I’m teaching, and about the things I wanted to make sure to discuss with my students, and I ran across these sentences:

  The existence of thought without words but not without forms is nevertheless necessary, for example, to all translation work. Every good translator does his utmost, without actually realizing it, to translate his text first into sphota, in order to translate into the second language; but he would be an even better translator if he were consciously aware of this process.

  I’d obviously run across these sentences many a time before, but suddenly I started to think about them in a more concentrated way.

  First, the word sphota, what does it mean? We have to go back a paragraph: “Is there, between words and things, a rapport of simple convention or an eternal appropriateness?” In other words, the rapport of simple convention means the normal words syntax depends upon, like prepositions, or “sonorous words” (dhvani), the onomatopoeic and alliterative, as in:

  Hark! Hark!

  The dogs do bark!

  whereas the eternal appropriateness means ideas that pre-exist words and objects. Word-seeds. Sphota.

  Ideas that pre-exist words and objects. A test case in neurobiology: when I had my stroke four years ago, two areas of language were affected. One was a motor problem. Speech production was knocked out in the brain. Therefore I couldn’t talk at all. And I’ve had to refigure, little by little, how to make speech occur with mouth, teeth, tongue. Think of Christopher Reeves in the swimming pool, trying to make his legs function. And then, for many people who’ve had strokes, the brain swel
ls, doesn’t settle for a while (perhaps two or three months), so we have aphasia and can’t think of words: the words for up or down; the simply conventional words; and the words that stand for ideas. I am here to tell you that one has ideas even before one has the words to say them. Ideas, or images. No tabula rasa.

  So, that being the case, “every good translator does his utmost, without actually realizing it, to translate his text first into sphota, in order to retranslate it into the second language...”

  I am not altogether happy with this. I mean, why shouldn’t one pass from the word in the first language straight to the word in the second language, without even thinking about ideas?

  “I’ll reveal for you, in words as simple as mooing,” says Mayakovsky.

  “I would like

  to live

  and die in Paris”

  he wrote, translated by Stephen Rudy.

  “I would like

  to live

  and die in Paris