I was hurrying in the railway,
Blind man with his dog, dragging luggage,
Drifting sideways, talking to myself,
Modernist vaulted skylights
Above where one pictured
God peering down through soot
For he too saw through a glass darkly
When he deigned to examine us
As I was certain he did just then
In Milan, April,
The poor jostling all about us.
Spreading tales of war across two tables—dogs at my feet
Chimney smoke, Russian tea in a glass,
How young the mind still is
While the exophthalmic Greeks strut
And waves behind them
Wash like hay on hay—
War stories late afternoon
My neighbors thinking of dinner
Spring arriving high in the trees
The neighborhood fills with particles of green.
I want to be the sort of poet whose words build homes for people,
Who reaches agreement with granite and oak to come near—
Habitation is a restlessness among all things, homes require magic.
If possibly there was anything I could do
To give you warmth, well I’d do it.
In my world most things are hidden save for my heart.
I go inside the electric line,
The dream of crows,
Stretched out like a trumpet note,
Upswing, blue, long as ten lives–
Swinging my arms, jouncing,
Flat as a stingray
In fizz of static pulse,
Not a place, but
Where I was always from.
“Let them, when they once get in
Sell the Nation for a Pin;
While they sit a picking Straws
Let them rave of making Laws;
While they never hold their Tongue,
Let them dabble in their Dung.”
Excerpt From: “Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel.” iBooks.
Some days while trying to imagine how to live and what to do—not an exercise but the real thing for you’re disabled, and agencies, services, medical programs that have kept you alive are being dismantled—you must raise your head from despair and picture your enemies dabbling in their dung.
The opportunities always involve wheelchairs, the infirm, the terrible old, or the deformed young. Let them rave of making Laws—or better yet, unmaking them. Trump and his pin selling and smearing minions are hard at work making certain that no child with a disability will get an education or a meal. No family with such a child will get medical care. Cutting medicaid by a third will kill people.
The operative phrase is “trying to imagine how to live and what to do…” Though I’ve been unemployed, have lived in section 8 housing, have survived with the help of food stamps, have received Social Security Disability—though all these things are true, I’m one of the very luckiest disabled for in my mid forties I landed a job and I still have one. I’m one of the ten to fifteen percent of the the disabled who’s employed. But I only survived to “become” a tax payer because of the programs mentioned above. And it never escapes me for a minute that Trump’s proposed budget will render even more cripples both unemployed and largely homeless.
I’m wildly angry. Horrified. Helpless. Sealed in my distemper and terror. I feel like a man I used to know who owned a cottage on the shore of a very stormy lake. One day he went down to the water and began beating it with his fists. “Godamn you lake!” he shouted. I want to shout in the street. Wave my little fists at the wind and trees.
People I know and love are going to die under this administration. On Facebook I see people saying that surely Congress won’t let this budget happen. But this is not the Congress of Tip O’Neil and Everett Dirksen. This Congress will in fact let this budget happen. All I can think of is that man who went down to the shore and beat the water.
My local congressman is a rebarbative and shallow dude named John Katko. He’s held no town hall with his constituents and shows no signs of doing so. I can’t even go downtown and shout at him.
How to live? What to do?
Keep writing. Keep speaking out. Keep your wits about you. Don’t let fascists steal your soul. Nurture goodness. Drink six glasses of water a day if you’re lucky enough to still have clean water.
First time I heard Bach—I do, 1959, winter, New Hampshire, leaning close to the fabric speaker of our Webcore mono electric gramophone, state of the art, symphony number 4, blind eyes bandaged following surgery, hands so small, feeling vibrations in my fingers, first Braille…
But I don’t remember what came next, was it Sibelius “Finlandia” or that horrid recording of Burl Ives singing “Big Rock Candy Mountain”—I can’t recall…
’59 was the year older children told little ones we were eating “radioactive” snow.
You know how it is—the doctor leans in
puts his hand on your knee
whispering so your loved ones can’t hear—
it’s time for you to improve
as if you’re a conscious river
as if under the ice you can change course.
Illness was topographical:
A specific psychiatrist
seeing the lanyard
I wore as a necklace asked
was it a fetish—unable to see
the accoutrement of latch key children—
for we must have made the world
and all its marl.
This was the house
of the mad, 1970, poor
broken clay lacking will
they quietly brought the earth
and spooned it into
each and every
one of us.
Photo description; Yellow Labrador guide dog against black background. Text: Have Dog, Will Travel, by Stephen Kuusisto, memoir scheduled for release Spring 2018 (Simon & Schuster) #HaveDogWiillTravel #WhatADogCando
I’m pleased to announce that Rachel Zubal Ruggieri is the winner of the online contest to name my new memoir. “Have Dog, Will Travel” which will be published by Simon & Schuster in March of 2018. Rachel will receive two free copies of the book and her name will appear in the acknowledgements. Thanks Rachel!
Of the book, Simon & Schuster writes:
HAVE DOG, WILL TRAVEL
By Stephen Kuusisto
This original memoir of a blind poet who gets his first guide dog is a testament to the power of teamwork and a lyrical love letter to guide dogs everywhere. At the age of 38, Stephen Kuusisto–who has managed his whole life without one–gets his first guide dog. They embark on an intimate relationship of movement, mutual self-interest, and wanderlust. Walking with Corky in Manhattan for the first time, Steve discovers he’s “living the chaos of joy—you’re in love with your surroundings, loving a barefoot mind, wild to go anyplace.” Profound and unforgettable, this is the story of a spiritual journey, discovering that joy with a guide dog is both a method and a state of mind.
I’ve had a bad cold for over a week. Strictly speaking this shouldn’t interest you. Even if you’ve had a similar thing chances are good you haven’t made a big deal of your headache and congestion. You’ve enough irony to resist claiming status for yourself. After the age of ten we’re no longer granted notoriety when we’re not feeling our best. And yet whenever I have to take an antibiotic (yes the “thing” settled in my lungs) I inevitably turn emotional. I’m not weeping right now but I might start any minute.
**
My nation’s long festering hatred of the poor has burst like Krakatoa. Capitol Hill is raining lava on Americans who can’t afford health care, child care, sufficient food, or who lack the means to finance their own educations or keep a roof over their heads. In other words, a week spent at home struggling for breath has reminded me just how many millions are facing calamities that should be unimaginable in a country which purports to be a democracy.
**
“Why do they hate health care so much?” a friend wrote on Facebook yesterday. The answer is terrible, steeped in eugenics and the popular slogans of fascism. Anyone who’s not healthy (which means he or she doesn’t possess an assignable value) is a “useless eater” as Hitler famously said of the disabled. The sick, infirm, crippled, mentally ill, the elderly, et. al. contribute nothing to the state. The fascist state is always conceived as a well oiled machine which can’t afford any broken parts.
**
This is in essence my view of the GOP’s meretricious health care law–that it treats the poor as chattel, that the party of Lincoln long ago turned toward a view of the unfortunate as being disposable; that this comes from an affection for slavery and animal exploitation. When I see Paul Ryan I see a man who kicks kids with crutches and shoots their dogs.
“In certain respects, the regulation of animal exploitation is similar to the regulation of human slavery in North America. Although many laws supposedly required the “humane” treatment of slaves and prohibited the infliction of “unnecessary” punishment, these laws offered almost no protection for slaves. In conflicts between slave owners and slaves, the latter almost always lost. Slave welfare laws, like animal welfare laws, generally required that slave owners merely act as rational property owners but did not recognize the inherent value of the slaves. Slave owners were, of course, free to treat their slaves, or particular slaves, better. But as far as the law was concerned, slaves were merely economic commodities with only extrinsic or conditional value, and slave owners were essentially free to value their slaves’ interests as they chose, just as we are free to value the interests of our dogs and cats and treat them as members of our families or abandon them at a shelter or have them killed because we no longer want them.”
—“Animals as Persons” Gary L. Francione
**
I am not making a sheer seat-of-my-pants pronouncement. I have enough cultural understanding to know what the canards and unexamined biases of my age look and feel like. Which means I know blowback when it hits me in the face. You know the voices: “Small businesses were really hurt by Obamacare.” “Learning disabled children are ruining schools for everyone else.” “Why don’t you go back where you came from?”
Facism is what’s for dinner.
**
“America”
America with your history of eugenics.
With your hostility to the global charter on disability rights.
With your jails, stocked with psychiatric patients—worse than the Soviet Union. We are Gulag Los Angeles; Gulag Rikers Island; Gulag Five Points in Upstate New York.
America with your young Doctor Mengeles.
With your broken VA.
With your war on food stamps and infant nutrition.
With your terror of autism and lack of empathy for those who have it.
With your 80% unemployment rate for people with disabilities.
With your pity parties—inspiration porn—Billy was broken until we gave him a puppy.
With your sanctimonious low drivel disguised as empathy.
With your terror of reasonable accommodations.
With your NPR essays about fake disability fraud, which is derision of the poor and elderly.
With your disa-phobia—I wouldn’t want one of them to sit next to me on a bus.
America when will you admit you have a hernia?
When will you admit you’re a lousy driver?
Admit you miss the days of those segregated schools, hospitals, residential facilities—just keep them out of sight.
When will you apologize for your ugly laws?
When will you make Ron Kovic’s book irrelevant?
America, you threatened Allen Ginsberg with lobotomy.
America you medicated a generation of teenagers for bi-polar depression when all they were feeling was old fashioned fear.
When will you protect wheelchairs on airlines?
When will you admit you’re terrified of luck?
–Stephen Kuusisto
Planet of the Blind 