Category: Uncategorized

Top Ten Reasons “Normal People” Wish They Were Disabled…

10. We have that “cute little logo”.
11. We don’t have to stand up for the national
    anthem.
12. We have psychic powers: All disabled people know all other disabled
    people.
13. They’re jealous of our specialty clothing.
14. Disabled people are “more musical”.
15. We have sign language and Braille and other
    “sneaky stuff”.
16. We can park anywhere, just like the Pope.
17. We have really cool pets and we can take them
    anywhere.
18. We have our own stalls in public restrooms,
    some with “high-tech” devices.

 And the number
one reason normal people wish they could be disabled:

1. Airline employees are actually forced to help us.

 

Each morning I carry to my garden

—I do not have a garden

 

I carry my father’s old rake

—Father 

 

And rake

Long gone

 

I dig in loam

—Earth, it is true

 

Hearing

In skull

 

—Head is clear 

A Schubert

 

Quartet

Quarter notes

 

Derived

From dance

 

Knowing

How

 

Dance

Returns to us

 

—Father and rake.

There will be a day soon when old translations, flawed though they may be, will defy the odds and return to meaning—pages falling at the feet of reckless students, word-scraps carried on the wind like newsprint. Cicero will get tangled in your hair: a room without books is like a body without a soul… Montaigne catches on your wrist: My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened… I wish I could tell you more but there’s little enough to say, the dead stick around for better or worse, words poorly understood always plot their homecoming. I say they come back before sunrise. The Finnish poet Saarikoski, a great translator wrote: “everything behind me, I see, is just death, but when I sleep, I sleep…”

 

Say “the world” but not canker

Never rags, nor blood—

In the library

You’ll be safe.

You meant blue planet

Coleridge

Reveries…

 

I know.

I’m no better.

I still want some gods

Inside the wind.

 

Once I went all the way to Karstula,

My grandmother’s town

In Finland,

Walked into empty woods

Saw two sets of initials

Carved on a fallen birch.

 

 

I have broken my small faith

So many times

And the hours, lame crows

Repair the rent mind,

 

Walk sidelong

Overfed

On plain

Beliefs—

 

So little to say,

Afternoon,

The neighborhood

Children

 

In yellow rain jackets

Trooping home

On a wet road

From school.

 

Big poem mates with little poem:

They produce a lyric essay

A child

Hidden

Subsequently

In an Irish laundry.

The academy

Fears

Deformed children.

 

 

Sadness has me like a gavotte—

Music slowing

Not without intention

Which is God

In blood.

I understand.

Maybe

I’ve another

Few years

With this

Living face.

This morning

My neighbor

Lonely

Returned books

He’d borrowed

Deep last winter.

 

I am walking in circles. I erase this sentence. It’s better to be clever. Perhaps I should bring a talking animal into this? You see I didn’t erase it. You see how convoluted narration—any—really is? My mother died today, or was it yesterday? It doesn’t matter, the old country is dead.

Bring on the talking crow. Or the hundred year old monk I met in the sauna whose sweat smelled of strawberries. The sighs of a centenary holy man—who was celebrating his birthday in a steam bath, they are ‘of or pertaining to’ the talking animal. I left that sauna wiser.

I’d no language for the matter. Time wasn’t reliable. My Merleau-Ponty wristwatch had stopped. One wished to be shrewd, but it didn’t matter because there, mid-summer, beside a monastery, time had stopped.

I write poetry, a foolishness

Much like thinking

The heart

Has an Edenic flavor—

Continue my mistake

In these times.

I’m an old, mad, blind, despised,

And dying king alright.

Fine saying so.

When I was very small

My father bought me

A kite and you can imagine

That sightless child

Holding a string.

 

It is cold in the churches of my childhood. Mythology works this way. It will always be cold there, which is of course “here” insofar as my life is a place, insofar as any place will forever be a co-efficient of my consciousness. But then you see, it’s possible to walk over a patch of ground, your feet like dowsing sticks, and feel the chill of long buried churches—the spot, customary, nothing remarkable, maybe the tarmac of a gasoline station.

I’ve this blog about disability, about poetry, politics, really an exophthalmic notebook, and lately I haven’t been writing much. I’m chilled. I’m walking around and absolutely chilled. You see, the church of my childhood asks “what does God demand of you now?” As a boy, a blind kid, the question terrified me. Sometimes I hid in the closet where my parents hung the winter coats in portmanteaus. I pushed into the back. The world wasn’t friendly. God was impatient. And yes it was cold in that closet. That house still stands. I haven’t been there in years. But you see where I’m going—every locale is again that place, potentially, maybe because of an ideomotor effect, a trance in my backbone, a tip of the head. It doesn’t matter. William James would tell us it’s always cold in there—in vertebrae, among the moth balls.

I should say no one taught me to fear God. In fact, by the time I was eight years old my parents had largely given up on religion. I suspect church going interfered with their crapacious Sunday mornings. It doesn’t matter. The chill was perfectly inside.

Disability is lyrical, plastic, it expands and contracts in consciousness and unconsciousness. But in my life—the only one I can reliably plumb and explain with honesty, behind the blindness is a chill and it’s my job, insofar as I understand it, to take the top off that chill, to make the cabin marginally inhabitable. I must accomplish this despite the small town church in memory, in situ in bones; despite Medieval Christians who see graphic testimonies of divine punishment in my sightless frame; oh yes, and despite the topsy turvy ratiocinations of able bodied neoliberals.

I spend my days and nights warming up my God. I ask him for very little. I’m not sure what he gets from it. But it’s a thermal gas universe and plenty of transfers are going on.