Category: Uncategorized

If you’re disabled you know the drill: the flight attendant who finds your presence on his moist and toxic airplane to be an absolute inconvenience, the doctor’s office without wheelchair access, the university classroom with no assistive tech, the Uber driver who won’t pick you up. Disdain for cripples is everywhere and its a rare day when we don’t encounter it. As my late pal Bill Peace “the bad cripple” used to say, “sometimes it’s tempting to stay home.”

Of course you can’t stay home, presuming you’re sufficiently well to journey outside. Staying home is just what the ableists want you to do. It’s the best thing since the asylum and the special hospital. They want us to stay out of sight. During our ongoing COVID pandemic the appearance of a man or woman or child wearing a mask is viewed with suspicion or outrage depending on where you are. That mask is the sign of the cripple. “Go home,” says the MAGA crowd, which is of course entirely made up of people who disdain the disabled. Trump told them they could hate us.

So daily one fights. Sometimes the fight sneaks up on you. You’re having a nice time. Minding your own business. Then the cab driver screams that he’s not taking you in his thrillingly beautiful taxi—you’ve a wheelchair, a guide dog, you’ve got three heads.

Daily you fight. The ableists can’t imagine disability as a meaningful way of life not because paralysis or blindness or depression aren’t commonplace, but because the nature of their desire is made up of desire itself. In other words, ableists aren’t interested in communities or the rising expectations of neighborhoods or nation states. Their desire is about abstraction, a pure fetishism which calls for an antiseptic world.

The practical aspects of disability are, if not easy to master, achievable certainly. Yet films like “Me Before You” invite the public to imagine that a disabled life is a burdensome thing, and too difficult to enact. Enacted life is, to put it another way, artful life. “Me Before You” says there’s no art to disability. In turn it says there’s not art to difficulty. The only artful life is a perfect life, an unblemished one, one that’s ultimately fictional. You should lust for fictional lives ladies and gentlemen. They’re the only lives you can have.

I drag the old boat to the lakeshore
Skip a stone
Drift the slope of late summer
Talk peaceably
To my dead parents
About the half light
In the shallows

I build a fence and it comes down—
A life—look where it’s headed
Baseball today
For the boy still
Living inside
Tonight a book to read
About a man
Who never shows his face

Well I jumped in the river
That was OK
Fish blinked—
Even without eyelids
I knew
They were blinking
A blue light
Surrounded me
I was the god
Of carp
In a carp cathedral
Sharing the speed of the moon
If they could talk
They’d tell you
I was fucking something

**

You’re a fool, says my inner critic
Yes I say
Say something smart for once
Says my critic
Who looks faintly like William Powell
I tell him I agree with those
Who say David Hume
Was the complete modern pagan

**

You have to build yourself up
If you’re a poet
Carp, David Hume,
Whatever it takes

**

It makes me sad
When poets
Are so serious
Talking about
Their sex lives
Or fashion
When we should
Keep up the fight
Against superstition

**

My Ph.D. dissertation:

Immanuel Kant never left his home town
His favorite food was Koenigsberger Klops
Dumplings made of minced beef and pork
Cooked in a pale roux
In this way
He was always exhilarated
And bewildered—
The best state
While fighting unjustified beliefs

**

Dear K:
Why can’t we fight superstition
While talking about our sex lives?
What’s wrong with you?

K answers:
You talk without joy

**

Having sex and fighting superstition:
Up down, up down,
Beyond the window
The Devil rushes past like a commuter train

**

Meanwhile in the carp cathedral
No devils no Immanuel Kant
No dumplings
No bells
And if you laugh
You gotta keep your mouth closed

–Iowa City, 1978

I was the one reading Stendahl
With my Coke bottle spectacles
And Rasputin gloves
When I lay down
There was no ceiling

Other things occurred—
I went to the mineralogical institute
They let me finger the stones
Later the moon was full
I drew piano keys in the air

Start with alder leaves
The veins so green

They stay long into autumn
Call it from stems

Like leaves the wheels
Like rolling living wind

They used to argue about the origins of socialism in the old worker’s bar I loved when I was in my early twenties–nights, an accordionist, mist from the canal, and beer soaked legerdemain viz Babeuf and the Society of Equals. Now I live in a covert. Soon I’ll drink the potion of the very old. It’s terrible to have no one to talk to. As for the accordion, it was always a Marxist music box though they won’t tell you on National Public Radio.

Auden told a friend of mine that traveling was hard because he had no one to converse with. He was in Iowa when he said it. My pal was then a young poet who’d driven from Iowa City to Des Moines to hear the great man read. Afterwards, and for reasons difficult to explain—especially since it isn’t my story—Auden was all alone in the student union drinking tea. There was no one to talk to, Auden said, no one at all. The young poet was Marvin Bell. Marvin’s story tells of the loneliness of art, even when its creator is in public circulation.

Now I don’t really live in a covert, the current pandemic notwithstanding, and I’ve enough recognition to have the privilege of being invited to read from poetry in far flung places. I really don’t know why W.H. Auden was all alone in a Drake University cafeteria. Did the faculty who invited him to campus find him repellent and run away after the reading? Was there a melancholy whisper over the campus calling the locals to late Vespers? We’ll never know. Marvin Bell and I speculated that there simply wasn’t a culture of poetry talk at Drake University at the time. There were events. Even a poetry reading by the world’s most famous poet would have been nothing more than a lecture on entomology. Marvin was a student at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in that era. The workshop was a different order and back then one of the only places (in a university setting) where writers gathered to talk.

And yet there’s another kind of loneliness and Auden was right to suggest it. The Elizabethans called it “melancholy” and understood it’s inside us just as our blood and hearts. In this way the Elizabethans were more reliable than we are. Robert Burton, whose pen name was Democritus Junior was the first to assert everyone who can read has the blues. The Anatomy of Melancholy argues the reader has a choice as to how he shall be blue.

No one to talk with and we shall never know one another precisely nor will we ever know what ails us.

Crossing the street in hot traffic
The pills make a mariachi sound
As if we’re at a party
And not plunging blindly
Into the hop-scotch faith-game
Called being-alive-going-places
Shik shik go the pills
Which are made for those
Without faith
Shik shik
Under the shimmering sun
As if a countdown
Has started

And so one morning you’re visited by Elizabethan devils, each wearing the costume of his humor—bloody sage, Saturn rising…
“How did you get in?” you ask knowing the question is hopeless.
“We’re your birthright,” says the short one with the little box.

Dear reader: do you or don’t you ask what’s in the box?

**

The real dead…you know, the vast chorus of souls freed from superstitions…well, they don’t play no fucking Ouija…

**

Rain journeys road calls bird walks small child turns knob on radio…

**

So much fire out in space
Gives me hope

**

Thinking of Auden

They used to argue about the origins of socialism in the old worker’s bar I loved when I was in my early twenties–nights, an accordionist, mist from the canal, and beer soaked legerdemain viz Babeuf and the Society of Equals. Now I live on books, alone in a covert. Soon I’ll drink the potion of the old. Its terrible to have no one to talk to. As for the accordion, its a real Marxist music box though they won’t tell you on National Public Radio.

**

C’mon dogfish let’s find the catfish and get the hell out of here…

**

On a Train

Night crosses the desert of my understanding. I wonder if I can stick to one thought, like a small hunting dog?

The houses in my neighborhood
Move sideways at night
Reposition
Before dawn—
Sleepers with trumpets
And swords
Storm Ninevah…

The houses look normal at sunup
But between this window and that
From this chair to that
I’m not alone
See here Stephen
A white sky
Impossible to know
Who got here first…