Year: 2014

Shortly after being paired with my first guide dog Corky at Guiding Eyes for the Blind I saw I was happy and that I hadn’t predicted it—and it was rich—a sweet, day long bounty.  I  felt it from the moment I woke. I felt it all day. It wasn’t a simple happiness. With Corky I now sensed something I began calling “love-luck”—“love-luck” in dog-company; love-luck and gaining confidence. Love-luck was simple; love-luck was the most complex thing I’d ever experienced. All day a dog was with me, a grand dog. I was somewhere between Eden and New Jerusalem. 

Yes I was feeling better than I’d ever felt. Buddha said: “Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it.” I was giving Corky all my heart, every ounce of it. 

 

The trainers worked us and our days were filled with tasks. I’d never felt good in traffic and now I was crossing streets with assurance, and with an additional quality, a deep calm in the heart—“love-luck” had many angles and was with me in every hour. Giving myself to Corky meant I was more aware, more awake than I’d ever been before. It was sensational to feel awake and calm amid thundering trucks and taxicabs honking agitated horns. 

 

**

Awake all day and learning. It seemed there were a hundred techniques to this dog business. We learned how to enter and pass through revolving doors. Corky went on the outside—the larger side of the moving cubicle, and I learned to guard her tail from being pinched. We practiced this several times, my lovely dog in agreement, over and over again through the spinning wicket. We took baby steps, inching our way ahead, pushing the door slowly. “These will soon be replaced by wheelchair friendly doors because of the Americans with Disabilities Act,” said L. “But you need to know how to do this in case you find yourself someplace where this is the only type of door.”  “Here’s to alternative doors,” I thought. “Who invented the revolving door?” I wondered. “Some torturer—maybe the same guy who conceived of the Iron Maiden.” Later I actually looked it up, the revolving door was invented in 1888 by Theophilus Van Kannel, a Philadelphia inventor, who is reputed to have had a phobia of opening conventional doors, especially for women. Go figure. In any case, I resolved to avoid the damned things wherever I could.  

 

Even trips up and down escalators in a department store required careful dog handling and precise footwork. “You want to keep your dog a step behind you; turn slightly and put your knee before her—keep her from jumping ahead,” said L.

“As you near the top you’ll feel the moving hand rail become horizontal—that’s when you start should to feel with your foot for the leveling off of the steps. Now turn straight, release your dog, and tell her forward. If you do it exactly this way, she won’t pinch her toes.” 

 

It was a classic ballroom dance: turning, feeling with hands and toes, turning again, leading my partner, all to the rhythm of whispering metal stairs. Strangers on the adjacent “down” escalator saw a Labrador riding up and smiling. For Corky this was old hat. She seemed to actually like the escalator. Personally I’d always been vaguely afraid of them. “Love-luck” happened in small ways as well as large. We now could perform a two-fold, two-creature escalator minuet.  

 

**

 

I learned Corky would curl up tight on the floor of a car, right beneath the glove compartment in the front seat. We practiced the maneuver, man and dog, in and out of a sedan. I stepped part way in with my left leg and called her. She climbed in delicately and lay down. Then I sat, pulling my right leg in. “Its like being in a tank,” I said, though I’d never been in the military—it was cramped and awkward. “Clearly one needs to know some yoga,” I added. But Corky could ride this way if we had to. And I knew how to accomplish her positioning. Guide dog work was all about the accomplishment of daily techniques, all of them necessary if you’re brining a dog everywhere. “Yes there are techniques one needs to know for a lifetime of love,” I said to Corky when she got out of the car. 

 

The techniques of love are about safety, companionship, and looking out for one another wherever you may go.

By Andrea Scarpino

 

“My head monk asked how it was walking. I said it hurt without shoes. And he said, ‘It hurts on the foot that’s down, but the one that’s up feels really good—so focus on that one.’ And I realized that all pain and pleasure is where you put your attention.” ~Deepak Chopra

The book tour: pain and pleasure, highs and lows.

 

After I read my poetry at Arlington High School, where my friend Gracie was a student before she was killed, a young woman asked, “Do you think Gracie would like what you wrote about her? How do you think she would feel having you talk about her all the time?” And the honest answer is “I don’t know.” And the honest answer is, “Maybe embarrassed. Maybe angry.” Another student asked if he could read his own poetry, and he did, and I complimented the shirt he was wearing, and he said it used to be his uncle’s shirt, that his uncle had died last year.

 

Which is to say I felt a deep sadness being in Gracie’s school. And a deep gratitude. And a hopefulness: all these other 17-year-olds with their poetry and grief. Pleasure and pain.

 

Joseph-Beth Bookstore in Cincinnati. Cincinnati, where I went to college, where the low-residency program in which I have taught for nearly seven years is based. I wrote individual emails to former professors, sent a press release and reading poster to my Cincinnati colleagues, invited my Cincinnati-area relatives.

 

In the audience: one of my students and his son, Gracie’s aunt and cousin, a wonderful mix of friends from the Women’s Center where I used to work, my partner Zac’s parents, bookstore customers wandering by. An audience full of loving faces: pleasure. An audience absent of poets, of the people with whom I daily work: pain.

 

So it goes.

 

I read from my book. My book. To big and small audiences. To people who have studied my words carefully and people who hate poetry. To old friends. To strangers.

 

And it is hard, sometimes, to read these poems filled with my grief: death of my father, death of a murdered friend, death of Gracie. To stand again in that grief.

 

The pleasure of sharing my words with others. The pain of sharing my words with others.

 

And I try to focus on the positive: the student who asked me to sign his book, the first poetry he had ever purchased. The man who said the only poetry he likes more than mine is Louise Glück’s. (“You should definitely like her work more,” I replied.) My father’s former student, who told me about visiting him in the rehab center after his strokes. The friends with whom I talk writing, publishing, books, with whom I share meals, drinks.

 

As Gracie wrote me when she was a little girl, “Andrea, these are all the good things.”

A week ago today I had the welcome fortune to attend a symposium at Syracuse University on bio-ethics, disability, and medicine. The event featured a keynote talk by Bill Peace with presenters Brenda Brueggemann, Barbara Farlow, and Sheri Fink. The theme of the day was, essentially, “in what manner can people with disabilities live in the age of pre-natal genetic testing, expensive medical technologies, diminishing public support for social programs, and the unvanquished shadow of eugenics?

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person according the the UN. Yet the moral principle is not certain with disability. One reason for this is that medicine (broadly) cannot distinguish between the science of “curing” and the art of “healing”–a difference which appeared in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. As medical technology became more sophisticated so did the pressure to relieve patients of disablement. The inability of physicians to cure a disability meant failure rather than an opportunity. Healing means living and doing it well. People with disabilities do live beautifully and successfully, but often they do so in spite of their physicians.

I spoke two days ago at the University of Texas School of Medicine in San Antonio. My audience was composed of physicians and medical students. “The worst thing you can say to a person with a disability is, I’m sorry, there’s nothing more I can do for you.”

When doctors say this, they are not healers. It’s incumbent on physicians to imagine successful lives for patients whose “condition” can’t be cured, which means they must know more about the world of rehabilitation, art, and accommodations.

I’m sorry, there’s nothing more I can do for you, is essentially mal-practice.

 

I say no one lives the way I live

But the iris interferes—dark and thin—

My way was first, I’m here…

 

Early morning. I’m set straight by a flower. 

 

**

 

Wings. The poets always write about wings. I prefer hooves. I’m more interested in Pegasus’ feet. 

 

**

 

Still I love a world 

where nothing is 

as it seems. 

 

And I love the phrase don’t kid yourself…

 

**

 

I have done a terrible thing, I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.

 

—Wolfgang Pauli, on asserting the existence of neutrinos. 

 

**

 

I can’t get the old woman out of my head, she knitted sweaters, kept a crow in her shop. Can’t remember which island in the Aegean…

 

**

 

My dog wants to walk. Hello. Marvelous. 

 

 

“The one I worship has more soul than other folks,” said Auden. Then he added, “than any I have met so far.” Even poets need to be accurate. For accuracy’s sake I admit I’ve met some “big soul” people but they were pick-pockets also. 

 

**

 

I will be an old man just like other old men with watery eyes. But I won’t be cheaply sentimental. For accuracy’s sake I’ll be richly sentimental. Like my dog. 

 

**

 

Here’s to the old moonlight of romance, reflected in water, the water in a cup, the cup made of tin. 

 

**

 

Here comes Lord Byron, clunk clunk. Nimble, principled, cripple. Templar “tapper” to be sure. All of Greece was his reasonable accommodation. 

 

**

 

I gotta get right with the banana clock.

 

**

 

Irony and humor, lice to the body of pain. Or not. For accuracy’s sake I admit the lice may be bigger than the body. 

 

**

 

Good morning blues, blues how do you do?

Well I’m doin’ alright, good mornin’ how are you?

 

You see, when you really have the blues they’ll talk back. 

 

**

 

Someone asked me about tenderness. How to find it. The recipe for empathy is written whenever and wherever dogs turn in circles before lying down. Or yesterday, my wife, came upon her horse asleep. She talked to him softly and he opened his eyes and nickered. Small joy. Shared. 

 

   

I’ve never been bored. Perhaps the Manichees will toss me out. 

One must always worship without rules—

for instance I climbed several trees in my youth 

though I was blind and once 

I found an owl’s nest 

when I reached for a branch 

and my idiorhythmic heart was stormy green. 

 

 

 

    

Let me say something about my lute: its made from a birch which, as you know, isn’t always a musical tree. Birches grow by serendipity in marsh land—they are tall, thin mistakes. This is my instrument then, this thing making music from nature’s unseemly muddle.

Here’s to the devil of pejorative noises, rustic with goodness and polemical pen, who’d blow a trumpet without remorse though we trusted him. He’s American, Christian, slick as a specimen dish. Today he’s Joel Osteen, but he’s always a roulette pronouncement. Elmer Gantry, Billy Sunday, Jimmy Swaggart. All of them knew how to take your money. People on the left think these fellows are exploiters of crude hate—but I’ve always seen them differently as the thieves of goodness for they steal from their largely illiterate or alliterate followers in the name of a Christ their laity can scarcely know and surely can’t understand. This makes the American Public Preacher-hood the most cynical sect of all. Tawdry, lurid, greedy, smug—and I think it says a lot to note they’re less trustworthy than auto salesmen.    

My mother loves me but not in her heart. So her love is like water leaking from a neighbor’s apartment. As I grow older I see there’s no landlord and I take up amateur plumbing, stanching my mother’s accidental love however I may. Now that’s she’s dead I still hold the wrench—the one missing teeth—the accommodation of deflection will be necessary again. My poor mother, who loved so little. But at least I can embellish the wrench with corn flowers.

**

I live in a cold, northern city in North America. Though its spring its still snowing. One sees how sad the houses are—like the houses in Neruda’s poems—the houses are suicidal. The crows sail around in their unambiguous death watch.�

My mother loves me but not in her heart. So her love is like water leaking from a neighbor’s apartment. As I grow older I see there’s no landlord and I take up amateur plumbing, stanching my mother’s accidental love however I may. Now that’s she’s dead I still hold the wrench—the one missing teeth—the accommodation of deflection will be necessary again. My poor mother, who loved so little. But at least I can embellish the wrench with corn flowers.

 

**

 

What a thing to be a man-child with corn flowers. I can’t fix anything. But I love wild flowers and celebrate a patch of sun. I love my mother in memory though she was always a darkling disaster. 

 

**

 

I live in a cold, northern city in North America. Though its spring its still snowing. One sees how sad the houses are—like the houses in Neruda’s poems—the houses are suicidal. The crows sail around in their unambiguous death watch. 

 

**

 

New super heroes: Urchin Boy; Cornflower-Cat; Zero-Sum Sister…

 

**

 

How I wish I could be stronger, that wishfulness compares with peace. I wish for peace. A strange joke, born into a violent and inarticulate world, and wishing for something like grace.