What if a poem was in your left wrist
As it was for Emily Dickinson?
Please don’t think I’m glib.
Poems occur where soft tissue,
Delicate bones and ligaments
Strain together
Without our notice,
Like the imagined wings
We sketch for horses.
I didn’t see you all day—
My love, you went far.
You know the old joke
About philosophy:
René Descartes walks into a bar.
The barman says, ‘Would you like a drink, sir?’
“I think not!” replies Descartes…then he disappears.
Everyone do your own.
I’m no better.
I still want some gods
Inside the wind.
Poof!
I still find myself among thistles
Wormwood in the vodka
Last night’s dream burning
In the grate—outside
Schoolchildren walk
Bundled against the rain
**
The sea horse’s coordinates—
Only map worth sketching
\With this chewed pencil
**
Count on me
Says the pea-stalk horse
**
Birches clouds books
In the United States where symbols are so often monolithic it’s easy to ignore how ghastly a statue is because oppressive emblems are commonly believed to be unremarkable. Still there comes a time when some monuments can’t be blinked away. Let’s take Margaret Sanger for example.
Sanger was was a eugenicist. She was an “equal opportunity” eugenicist as she believed people of color and the disabled should not be born. Today she’s mostly remembered as a champion for women’s reproductive rights but make no mistake: she wanted to prevent black births and eliminate the disabled.
Still a bust of Sanger is proudly on display at the National Portrait Gallery alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. I think it is fair to say that if Sanger had had her way neither King or Parks would’ve been born. Certainly she’d have voted against the birth of any disabled child. I’m a member of that group, blind since birth.
The National Portrait Gallery does have a sign mentioning Sanger’s work with eugenics. This puts the gallery’s curators a step ahead of the defenders of confederate statues, most of whom want untroubled devotion to a vicious past. Sanger’s bust stands on its pedestal warts and all. Isn’t that enough?
Perhaps. Maybe we should simply put cautionary footnotes on all our nation’s offensive monuments.
Yet I don’t think Sanger should be in the gallery at all. She actively advocated for the deaths of minorities. This is a litmus test: in life did you stand for human dignity and equality or not? Sanger fought for the rights of women to have control over their reproductive lives. She’s heroic for that. Until one admits she wanted some people in the lifeboats and not others.
I say she’s a vile figure. She lectured to the KKK. That’s a second litmus test. Anyone who spent her or his time in the vicinity of a burning cross deserves lasting condemnation.
The full history of eugenics in the United States is still being uncovered. The Carnegie Foundation, J.H. Kellogg, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, Leland Stanford, all promoted theories of racial superiority and advocated for eliminating certain minorities.
Some statues are horrific. They belong in an atrocity museum and not in places of customary veneration. Certainly Margaret Sanger doesn’t belong in the same room with Rosa Parks and Dr. King.
It is not possible to jar the soul with coffee
But how I want to—up in the sky with you—
Closer to whatever
I can’t have, and with only a sip.
How easy it is to be a child
In a grown body.
**
I rowed far out on the lake at night
Though I couldn’t see—
Blind outside and in,
Water talking.
**
When I first read the poems of Tomas Transtromer
I too wanted to play Haydn on a piano
After a dark day of toy politics
But I saw quickly “the piano”
Was his horse, not mine.
**
For love be the string and the hand
Be the apple
Or what’s before a whisper
But never be ________.
**
Cotillions of empty, odd pairings of local wines
And a general absence of conversation.
Printed handbills announce silent auctions—
Half lives burn down in clay, sweetie,
**
There’s nothing like watching that sweet old donkey lean down for hay.
There’s nothing like the prospect of overreaching do-gooders in higher education to stir the dormant juices of conservative pundits. In today’s Washington Post one finds George F. Will’s starchy prose condemning liberal insensibility at Yale University: “Yale Saves Fragile Students from a Carving of a Musket”–a bromide that’s so nearly insensible I wonder about Will’s civic future as it’s obvious he’s forgoing the potential value and goodness of human beings.
Will is incensed that administrators at Yale are concerned about the placement of an altogether remnant and ugly bas relief on the facade of Sterling Memorial Library. In truth it’s a hideous thing, a carving of a thick lipped Indian and a gnashing pilgrim, each clutching their cliched weapon—a bow and arrow and a musket. Make no mistake, they’re in combat, and no love is lost in this stupid, rebarbative vignette. George Will thinks it’s art, or at least, something to be cherished. You wouldn’t know that when the carving was made the curriculum at Yale (and elsewhere) centered on “the white man’s burden” and featured a heaping helping of Social Darwinism. Will cannot imagine that this mise en abyme has an untoward semiotic history. He’s chosen to read discomfort with the stone cartoon as a pean to the contemporary (perceived) coddling of emotionally needy college students, a link that’s about as sensible as saying wolves often dress up as grandmothers and this is why union wages are declining.
Poor Yale students! Poor babies! They can’t take a racist carving! Look! They require campus counseling services because they have mental illnesses! What weaklings! How permissive college administrators are! Will offer us the usual suspects—permissive parents, dewy eyed faculty, and a general decline in our nation’s moral fiber. You’d never know that the sculpture in question is actually quite despicable.
Detestable or ignominious art always lacks scruple and nuance. It’s purpose is to cement common opinion. Both the left and the right can create repellent art. I’d like Will better if he simply said: “Ugly art ye will always have with ye, and get over it.” That might be a defensible position but of course we know who’s paying for Will’s lunch and it’s not the art historians. The basic conservative tenet is this: “racism’s in the past, get over it. They’re just statues, dude.”
Trouble is (as theologian John Lamb Lash puts it) “You can die from kitsch. And we’re close to it.” And you can certainly die on Native American reservations where healthcare is third rate and poverty is numbingly omnipresent. And images depicting old race wars are provably malign.
No. In Will’s stifling mental pup tent the problem is today’s students have permissive mommies.
Cotillions of empty, odd pairings of local wines
And a general absence of conversation.
Printed handbills announce silent auctions—
Half lives burn down in clay, sweetie,
Just how it is; rebarbative Barbies
For sale in a garage; children grown
They didn’t take them; some woke,
Left home; a crow with one wing
Ambles, looking pissed,
Gets another day; winter oft
Sharpens teeth, yes,
Those are infant coffins.
I took the family bible from its shelf
There was a whiff of sadness
Not of paper or leather
Not of lives lived
But of some bug eyed oath
From a small “G” god
Who didn’t sing
Who didn’t build homes
And never spared the drowning children
An odor they knew in my family
And evidently in yours
It will be twilight
As the horses are fed
When all I wish to say
Gleams out of reach.
My dog of course, now in a can, who saved my life. She’s on my mantle, and I would scatter her to the wind but sadness presses down the tin box, my sadness akin to faith-paranoia, like the superstitious passenger who thinks his mind holds the plane aloft. I must keep my dog’s ashes close just as I maintain books on shelves and worn shoes in the closet.
There was a year in my youth when I was terribly lonely in a strange city. I knew very few people and the ones I did know were the quotidian kind—magazine seller, doorman, a severe librarian at the local university, which is to say they knew me as a creature, and I knew them as living beings but without true culture—we had no shared songs. One may live this way for a season or two. This was that kind of time. I arranged knickknacks carefully on my desk.
Sometimes I went to the botanical garden. It dated from Tsarist times and there were winding paths that seemed to lead nowhere—bafflements for clandestine conversations—and I walked in expanding circles among lilies, ferns, and flowers whose names I’d never know for vandals had long ago stolen the signs. Yes, there were flowers taller than men and they had no names and I liked them a great deal. It’s foolish to say it, but plants are silent the way you wish your friends could be, and this was especially true that year, when I was far from friends back home. The great, drowsy, half shaggy plants of the Tsars…how kind they were. They simply “were” and this was all I needed most mornings.
I had books. Stendahl, Neruda, Harry Martinson. In those days I smoked cigarettes and I’d light up in my imperial bower with its anonymous shrubs and think about what I liked and didn’t like about words. I saw I didn’t like “faith” or “rage” but I could do with “ardor” and “pique”—not because they were literary words but because they had nuance and unless you’re genuinely seasick this is how you want your feelings to be—of or pertaining to intuitions, gut gasps, solitudes in gardens.
Of course I’d put the ashes in my pockets along with the cigarette butts. It was best not to leave a trace. And here I am, forty years later, holding on to my lovely dog’s ashes because I can’t bear to part with even the starkest reminder. What coat might I carry them in? What knowing garment?
Foolish again. The ashes in every instance.
Planet of the Blind 