Poetry – Page 7 – Planet of the Blind

On Being the Only Cripple at the Arts Colony

Over a number of years I’ve had the fortune to be housed and fed at places that are devoted to promoting the arts and one should acknowledge fortune is a neutral word for anything that occurs is a matter of luck for good or ill. I’m not the bite the hand that feeds me type. My work has been assisted greatly by residencies at arts colonies both well known and up and coming places. This past summer I spent four and a half weeks at The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, a beautiful and legendary place for artists of all kinds. It was my fourth visit to the colony and I will never say a bad thing about the work of MacDowell or its extraordinary-staff.

 But something happened to me while I was housed at MacDowell that’s left me pondering what it means to be a disabled artist. Frankly I felt more and more alone. I was the blind guy with the lovely dog. The important conversations were about diversity and while these dinner dialogues were good, I found whenever I suggested the disabled are intersectional figures where issues of identity and human rights are concerned I was treated as a quaint and colorful tinker who makes quirky shoes.

Now being lonesome at an arts colony is an interesting thing. After all you’re not there to be a gadfly and getting your work done in a quiet and nurturing space is what the whole thing is about. I got work done. I wrote in my woodland cabin. I took thoughtful walks with my dog.

I felt like a curiosity rather than a figure of acceptance. I was the only disabled artist there. I’m often the only disabled person in a whole variety of settings. Why was this summer at MacDowell different?

The casual ableism of the other artists was part of the problem. Blindness and deafness and intellectual disability turned up frequently as pejorative terms in casual conversations. I lost my temper one evening explaining to a young writer that the “r” word isn’t acceptable when talking about people with intellectual disabilities.

What was different is my age. I’m too old for ableist nonsense and too tired to care that I’m the outlier.

But wouldn’t it be nice of the best arts colonies actually had disability months? Frankly I could use dome creative and progressive conversation about embodiment and imagination.

And yes, a few ripping good laughs.

If I Could Tell You….

If I could tell you I would let you know and the pear trees, home to wasps in October, they would tell you; a cormorant skull here on my desk, surely it would tell you–natural facts will recite poems, I swear its so. If I could tell you I would let you know; I’d stay up all night, not singing but whispering just a bit–talking to time under stars; if I could tell you; I have walked in circles this life; I think I remember the moment of my birth; I’m not afraid to die.

The Romantics still interest me. Not their big ideas but the small. Shelley’s love; Byron swimming and chanting about freedom. We say they were obsessed with themselves but I’m not so sure.

Up river and down. Lonesome wherever I sail. Last night I dreamt of my father who told me to play more guitar. I haven’t been playing these past few years. I used to be proficient.

Thanks dad. I will.

If I could tell you. If I could. I do like the way horses talk.

I went gathering grapes once, while visiting Crete. I now you’re supposed to say “picking” but there was a lot of singing going on. That’s one of the things singing does.

It is OK on balance to be lonely. Just do it the right way.

Good, Old Walter Pater

Oh Walter Pater for a Renaissance scholar you had charm. You’ve haunted me for years with your childhood portraits. Unlike Montaigne your utopia was less a matter of craft and more of memory. Once, to shock an academic questioner I said creative nonfiction was Pater’s invention. I’m still not certain I’m wrong. If its honesty you’re after Pater’s your man.

Who was it I was reading last week–who said he was a possibility-ist rather than an optimist. I read a lot and can’t remember. He was one of those data-utopians. The planet will sustain us; we won’t actually slaughter each other. That’s when Pater jumped up. “The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts.” Data is a clean sport and that’s all there is to it. If you want to know about the heart I’ll go with the Renaissance.

Blind

What is this desire to write but the chance to live?
Drink a glass of water at first light,
Open my hands. Whatever is me
Happens also without me
And footfall words can’t prove
Where I’m heading.
Funny then to be blind–
Its double fiction
Moving fast in the dark.

All these poems about loneliness…

As if I should have it better
The alders doing their best
Leaning. Planet’s vow:
You can’t have me.
Broken ice on the river.

So I’m lonely–
Dead leaves follow me in the streets.

It’s not too much to bear,
Voice of my dead father.

The Planet That Would Have Me

It was Auden broke my heart then put it back together. Caruso followed with a love song from Naples. By the age of 8 I could read poems and listen alone to gramophone records. Blind I’d little street life though I pretended I belonged well enough in open air. Like most people who come from provinces I was happiest in my privacies, my attic with scratchy records and grey books. Though I could scarcely read that’s the world that would have me.

The ugliness of school was both a matter of being bullied for my disability and a curricular austerity. School never let me share what I was learning while alone. As a university professor these past thirty years I think of this. What do the students before me bring to the room? What can provinces teach us?

Provincial culture means the one we must create. Yeats couldn’t be Tennyson and though there were Irish poets before him, he had to be both cognizant of his inner life and the outward world. If he was going to be Irish-provincial he’d have to do it in a dual way. Its a matter of accomplishment that Yeats doesn’t quite fit anywhere. His planet doesn’t exist. Yet its apparent.

Is it a bit silly to invoke Yeats next to a kid with a large print book and a Victrola? I don’t think so. The inner life is Romanticism and strength of mind and each must find it in her or his way. You don’t have to be a poet to need your planet. More and more contemporary fiction and memoirs seek to find planets that will have us. Everyone hails from some version of my childhood attic.

I’m guilty of reductionism here. What I’m after is emergence not life alone with some arias. The planet that will have us is a made place and not granted. What is it made of? Yeats wrote:

By the help of an image
I call to my own opposite, summon all
That I have handled least, least looked upon.

The planet that will have you won’t look like you. Yeats knew and if we’re lucky we also learn it.

Yes when I go walking the world does not resemble my stride, my frame, nor, despite my yearnings for mysticism does the world answer my longings. The world simply is and not what I say of it.

From a notebook, 1982, Helsinki

After so much is said and the candles are low…

I’m no match for the godless nights
And if there are gods I’m no match for them either
I build a fence badly, tear it down after dark

I used to love Wallace Stevens
I was young

Thus the dog bursts into my poem
Follows me home

A mild wind follows the dog

Up river where a stand of birches leans
Walking with a spent candle in my coat

Planh

Dream with dead father how did you find me?
Morning now a Mozart violin concerto on the radio
Sadness built in. As a boy: “you know that’s me
in the radio–that’s how I feel!” Father of dream
Last night you told me to play more guitar.

I’m lonely in this city.
If solitude is my lot the music helps
But foolish to say it–”That’s me, dad
Right there in the Philco….”

The Conditions

In the years to come they will say
Horses lay in the fields
Crows resisted flight
We bartered air
A Senator on TV
Asks: what will we tell our grandchildren?
I shout in my living room
Will there be any years for them
I say we are the gods of years
And the dogs look up at me
I am blind
I put one foot in front of the other
In the dark I move quickly
Faith is simply faith
I’ve an old hymn in mind
Only a moment in time
Footfalls

From a notebook….or, “the warlock hair”….

This morning I’ve too many thoughts to hold in place. No meditation “app” will help. Mozart on the stereo is doing his best. Good old processed Mozart.

Late stage Capitalism is eating my wiring like a wild mouse. Good old processed Kuusisto.
I’ve got the algorithm blues.

I type too much. My neck is a mess.

There’s a single black hair growing on my nose. I’m a warlock.

Because I was beaten as a child I’ve a warlock hair on my nose. Nothing stays hidden.

Of course I’m imprisoned in myself. Of course that self is something else. Of course these words are something else.

There are stones inside my fingers.

I’m trying to not age out of hope.

Blind I cannot track the flight of birds but I know they happen all around me.

The history of the mind is not the history of ideas.

Miniver Cheevy! I bet he had a warlock hair.

I remember a thing or two. Just like my tongue does.

Of course I found a spoon in snow
While missing you,