Beauty Is a Verb

by Jennifer Bartlett

  there were more horses leaping the fences in the moonlight.

  I tried the path past the spread of buildings & fields,

  but it was frozen now because night had come, held by ice, the way

  no longer to town but further in, the way frozen

  into a bad initial climb on which I could get no purchase because of the ice:

  so I went to the house—it was white, clapboard—& up on its big porch

  & was met there at the door by a chinless white man, sweet & foppish both

  my chinless Englishman was, who sd the man I was for was in the tub but that he

  could use the electricity to melt the ice & threw a massive switch like in the movies

  that caused crackling & popping outside & flashes at the edge of sight, at the edges

  of the picture,

  framing it briefly

  beyond the porch,

  the white man explaining that they were in competition with the H.B. Company,

  which owned the horses I’d seen earlier,

  that the gentlemen of that company were trying, as always, to buy them out,

  which was to attempt, he sd, an impossible task:

  I made it up the slope but got lost again

  in the woods up top until morning & then found myself

  lost on the roads I came to on which the signs

  were ambiguous & at a gas station I askt directions & they sent me

  up the rocky rd that intersected the main road there

  assuring me the named road I wanted

  turned off the apparent continuation of itself

  the name continuing way on into the uplands even further, past

  the pavement’s end—

  so I took it, climbing over the rocks, a jumble

  of rocks until I got finally to some stairs

  (wch the rocks had become

  up to a door in the side of a red wooden house perched

  at the top, in the rocks at the top

  of the hill.

  (first dream of the Giscome Portage)

  from PRAIRIE STYLE: Two Monster Poems

  VERNACULAR EXAMPLES

  You can always say what you are. Half the time the allegory’s music, how song goes with its cornets and saxophones. Do you have something to say to me? Closure re-gathers the shape of the original undoing, the place where memory changed or picked up. Or it’s human-looking: big-boned, about as noisy, parts missing or left out, parts overstated. A loud brother to the divine, an admonishment; I was two men, I was something, I was “something monstrous.” Jokes just drain the spirit.

  THE OLD NORTHWEST

  The dear old Northwest, laced up at the wrist like Frankenstein, and shambling like him too, the old Northwest. (The name applied to that monster, in those movies themselves he was nameless and unnamed; and he never spoke, he was truly simple. What was said later, say two big girls hulking around after you, that that was the name they looked like. And you the singular passion—a blunt argument—that ranged around the dear old Northwest.)

  Some questions push or shove like they were magic or like they thought they were. The monster’s based on something looking enough like anybody to be a reference—you see him when you fear yourself and give him ways to talk, what he’d say if he could pick up a horn and have something to say; or make up stories and tell them in his voice because voice comes to that, voice goes to that.

  Amber DiPietra

  from MY NOTEBOOK HAS A RIGID SPINE

  OR HOW TO OPERATE THE BODY IN WRITING

  Note: This excerpt is the beginning of a talk I wrote for the Poetics of Healing, a series of lectures and panels curated by Eleni Stecopoulos with the support of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University and The Creative Work Fund. The series included poets in the medical field as well as poets who were survivors of war or trauma. I was the only visibly disabled person in the series that year. While very grateful for the invitation to present at one of the events, I felt that the content of my talk had to focus on my ambivalence toward the idea of healing. My talk was complicated by certain facts: I was speaking alongside doctors from the teaching hospital that I was struggling to gain admittance to as a patient; the venue where the Poetics of Healing was being held was up a steep flight of stairs; and the approaching date of the talk coincided with the realization that I needed to find ways to spend less time at the computer doing my “writing” because this work exacerbates my chronic pain and physical limitations—a somatic need which, I feared, contradicted my pride at being a writer of disability poetics. At the time I wrote this talk, I was also trying too hard to figure out what kind of poet I was and what form and style I was working in.

  ALIGNMENT

  It has been difficult to prepare something for this series. I had intended to write an essay on the word “healing,” and specifically, the way it does not quite translate to terms such as “rehabilitation,” “accommodation” and “advocacy” in the lives of persons with disabilities. I had wanted to make an investigation into why “healing” sounds so much more poetic or impactful than these terms and what can be done to infuse the language of medicine with the moving efficacy of a term like “healing.” To make a new poetic pact, I had also thought to write only airy poems that contained no trace of expository physiology, but just the gestures of a kinesthetic phantom self. None of this worked out, at least not now.

  A split in my process has arisen, one that is forcing my writing into a kind of fugue state. I have aligned myself with an avant-garde poetics—a realm of writing in which identity disappears, or is ejected, or is seen as aesthetically inferior or passé—at the same time, in my life, I have come to identify most strongly as a disabled person who has a set of political, professional, social and personal concerns relevant to that disability. Writing, then, becomes a pre-emptive attempt to determine my angle of incidence. I do not act, but measure the contours of a form I might take. This measurement stems from a desire to veer as far as possible from the stock characters of triumphalist media—that form which minimizes content by capsular and spectacular headlines (“Everest Climber Has No Legs!”) or the sickly sweet odor (flowering trees glimpsed through hospital room window, the sugars in urine) of the old-fashioned “illness memoir.”

  The disabled self is always a reader of his or her own body. The disabled body is a trifold pamphlet composed of medical terms, insurance jargon, social service lingo, self-help verbiage, advocacy mottos, and more currently, ontological and epistemological rhetoric on the disabled everyman who will save us from post-modern burnout. By that last part, I mean the theory that since disability pervades all identity categories, it also dismantles them—that disability is socially constructed and, thus, everyone, in a sense, is disabled because we are all disabled by something. Certain disability theories formulated along these lines almost make the term “disabled” vanish and yet seem totally disconnected from the somatics of “being disabled,” from what the body feels.

  Being, already, a reader of my own trifold pamphlet, I do not want to author poems or essays in which I further evanesce away with my self in favor of a poetics of abstraction that de-emphasizes agency and makes thick, if not slippery, material of language. I need, instead, to write a poetics that is porous, a membrane. A text that sucks the reader through its many holes and vaporous areas while offering also a sampling of real tissues, body-systems, that another body can assimilate. To bring my body in—and yours. In my writing, I am in search of a transparent, mobile language that moves, even when it occludes. This speaks directly to the processes of the body. An elbow either unhinges or it doesn’t, and yet there are all the increments between. Skin, the ulna and the humerus, the annular ligament, cartilage, cells, carbon. The more present the body, the more mutable the self. Though, also, the self is always becoming rarefied in this particulate instant of lengthening or contracting. How or how not. Anyone’s arm, your arm, my arm. Here and there, where you read or hear this.

  Upon o
bserving some somatic psychology students in the halls of Naropa, Bhanu Kapil has written:

  [I see] a kind of slow motion dance/traverse in the corridor, in a pod of some kind, their feet a mutual tentacle. You can’t go wrong with a sloppy hybrid. Ever. Because they are the hybrid that, preanimal, hasn’t carved out a spectacular niche.

  So, here is my piece without niche. It exists as notes. I think of it as an artificial joint that has not been installed in a human body. Or, the exposé of an imposter. You will see that this is how I operate. In real-time, with hold music.

  bunny baby fast and slow

  Cortázar tells the story of a man staying in a young woman’s flat while she is away. Writing to her, he confesses that he vomits live rabbits—averaging one every few days—and that they are slowly destroying her pretty European parlor things. At the end of the letter, he tells her—this Andrea—that she may come home to find them on the street, flattened on the curb—having dashed the bunnies one by one and lastly himself, out of the high window.

  He is what it means to be lovesick. Italics are how I heart these old-timey words. I’ve grown so old in love now as to have learned silly things in language.

  I met a man before I read this story. In earlier days, I held long conversations with him in my head. I wonder how long it’s been since he’s called his mother. I talked to mine yesterday and I expect her to be on the phone to me in an hour, while it’s late afternoon here in California and before it’s all the way dark in Florida.

  it’s not broken baby try to stand baby look what I

  brought you bring me baby

  “They’re running rabbits,” my grandfather used to say and all us little girls would scream—them tugging, me limping, running to the couch to fling ourselves back and throw up our sandaled feet so that we wouldn’t be gnawed on by the long-eared horde that was about to rush the patio. My grandmother rolled her eyes. He said this because years ago, he misunderstood ‘running rampant’ and continued to use it as a threat to keep granddaughters in check. He’d click his tongue at his wife, wink and say, “It’s true, baby.”

  baby where did you why be careful baby

  My mother said never wear your good underwear when you have your period. Thirty years old, I still think of this when I select the pink sheer, the pale green thong, and the high-waisted 1940’s black. It was too much for her to have said to me at fourteen—a child with swollen knees, night sweats and fevers; they carried me across parking lots and backyards. I resented any advice about a fecundity I was only tenuously guaranteed to have.

  means

  I just want

  glom onto

  small attenuated explodings

  over and over again

  When I first got to San Francisco, I fell in the street. A man bounded over and said, “Baby, are you hurt?” I am not a feminist or a scholar. I want sex and language only for their beauty. Doubleness—just what my weakness has won me. Come loose, bouncing from the interior of illness, between two b’s.

  By this he means not little girl, crooked parts—but a tensile leaning towards. Because he can see, with me there beneath him, that I can have will held hold my own.

  “Can I carry you?”

  don’t be baby pull it tighter baby did brought you

  something baby have trouble going to the bathroom baby mean to me

  “I’m sorry,” my mother said, “I was being a baby.”

  The day before, I’d come home from school to find a note slashed out from her. “You are a selfish brat, you never think of me. You knew I had time to read, but you just had to take the book to school with you.”

  Like warring siblings, hoarding our share of one Watership Down. Between her bedroom and mine, a warren whose denizens loved deeply and sometimes tore each other apart, ear from ear.

  I reasoned she didn’t need it; she could spend her day off with her boyfriend. And I would have the book to myself in the high school library where I ate my lunch alone.

  “Fuck like bunnies,” one of the girls outside the cafeteria said.

  In her apology, mom admitted to be meaner in her hurt than she’d intended. I, for my part, never owned up to being just as mean as she believed. In these fights, her teeth were always sharper, but I had my dark and waiting, hiding holes.

  That may have been the week the boyfriend left. That week, I lay in bed thinking of tight dens and male and female rabbits; how there was barely room in the struggle and the rush of blood. I could lie still. Damp and frenetic like that to wait.

  baby wash dark with lights baby in the pan baby do you like

  was I baby snoring baby please

  “Unfold your arms, baby. You look like a little rabbit sitting like that.”

  My grandmother took my wrists and gently pulled down on them. I kept my elbows hooked up around me out of habit, so I’d be ready to shove myself to some other place, to give the high wheels of my wheelchair a little push. I hated her for saying what was true and thought, one day, she would be dead and my mother too. Who in the world would unfold me then?

  Two round syllables

  as several accounts

  neatly fingered

  and staked

  to raise the hand

  on any

  sentence

  The professor said that line about your mother is like a flashlight turned on. I understood he meant for its clarity, because I had managed to say one simple thing. I heard it as a beam shined up a hole. Bleeding from another entrance, different than mom imagined. If my nose twitches at that, it’s still necessary. To say underground and hard-won. The sensation of rough confession,

  [I think about how TV shows love Anne Carson for all the wrong reasons. Did The L Word never read those lines I did? One part bending the curve of a Sappho fragment into her own shape and the next part on hands and knees, offering a rogue academician the red tulip of her anus, one last time before he leaves forever. It’s all an act, the act of curling up and thrusting out to try and catch the I. This trash about the tulip is approximation.]

  the success of which comes only in the inclination.

  whole days baby

  can

  you take them

  The first time I fell asleep with him, I dreamt of buying bunnies for my mother. 3 p.m. tropical thunderstorms and cars crashing death war disaster. We stood in the middle of a Florida mall while it went black against the lime kiosk light, quietly turning a wire carousel. This one held postcards, with real, fuzzy bunny heads sprouting out of them. She took them by their ears and pulled them lightly off the rack. My body was full and thick and then when the world started to crack and it was earthquakes in San Francisco (because that was what all my family worried about—not reckless MUNI drivers or AIDS) I filled my mouth up like a pouch with all of them—my mother, my grandmother and my grandfather and the bunnies they’d picked, haunches pumping to race them out of the crumbling mall.

  in your mouth

  like that

  Easter Sunday, we took the man’s niece to Dolores Park to watch The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a band of decadent, lesbian nuns and some gay guys dressed up like bunnies. His brother’s wife only spoke to the little girl in Spanish, so this is how I narrated things to her. In my halting, mangled Cuban slang. What I could remember from when my great-grandmother spoke to me this way before I was old enough to go to school. Mostly, I was trained by Mercy to demand, “Dame un besito!” and when my great-grandfather got near me, to scream and twist my head as La Meche whisked me away from his offered kiss, laughing through her cigarette smoke.

  He sat me on the grass (because my knees had, after much effort, unfolded years ago, but now, did not fold up sufficiently as to allow any crouching) and put the little girl on my lap. In front of us, a man with pink hair and a big fat man were assuming their bunny heads. Just to our left, a homeless man was peeing against a bench. I glanced over, hooked my arms around the baby and pointed at the rabbits, “Mira! Mira los cajones!”

  He lean
ed his mouth into my ear. “Conejos, hija. Rabbits. You just told the baby to look at that guy’s balls.”

  I hate it when you pull staples baby out with your teeth baby OK baby don’t stop do you need to spit baby?

  “That’s uterus!” my grandfather scoffed, and no one could stop laughing long enough to correct him.

  to touch my place where the words come out

  this name, a shaped space that fits

  I can say this man gave me calla lilies, they keep their long throats clean, but there are story parts I shouldn’t show my mother. Like holding his little rabbits and how I had to blow my nose. At the same time. Instead, I tell the part about how we both got colds soon after we started. A litter of crumpled tissues, I find them lovely white in the morning, munching dust under the bed.

  everyone and rendering each

  speaker as a container