Up High

When mountains talk
Uncle History stops to listen
The Himalayas give up
Their secrets, dead climbers
Revealed, one corpse
With an axe…
You become an “it”
When you’re frozen
Uncle thinks
It gives him comfort
He likes stories
Where men fight to the last
Persepolis, Stalingrad
This morning he hears a mountain
Speaking of women
Argentina, Bolivia, Chile,
Italy, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal—
“Everywhere they protect us”
A pause—“what have men done?”

Admission

It’s not certain that when walking
Uncle History will find beauty
But sometimes a stranger
Resembles his father
A rare bird calls…
Once in London’s Hyde Park
Beside Prince Albert
He saw leaves
Bright as coins
Doubloons in dirt
He is, in general, a sad figure
And despises most people
Of god he knows nothing
But falling leaves can still surprise him
He moves a stone across the garden
A crow looks down
Uncle makes an invisible circle
With his toes

“You can’t get there from here,” or, the ADA and Higher Ed

“You can’t get there from here,” is the old tag line of a well known New England joke. As we celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act the line has been circling my head like a horse fly. In our nation’s higher education arena the disabled are blocked by colleges and universities that don’t take the ADA seriously and in turn do the least amount possible to provide accessibility to disabled students and faculty. And campus visitors. Your grandmother shows up for graduation and needs wheelchair access to the convocation. The doors are locked to the adjacent building where the only ramps and elevators are located. No one can find the key because it’s Sunday. No one is in charge. The maladapted ADA Coordinator is at home drinking a root beer. I know thousands of stories like this. A student requires note takers and the university fails to provide them for over half a semester. She flunks the class. When after months of wrangling the university admits it could have done better, they still take another year to expunge the failing grade. This prevents the student from joining a sorority. The ADA Coordinator is home drinking a root beer. The ADA Coordinator is not a bad guy. He simply has no power to fix anything. He’s the master of a Potemkin village. There are disability statements on the website. ‘If you need access click here” it says on the Information Tech page. Click it, and well, years go by. They’re not equipped to solve your problem with the new Blackboard learning software or the brand spanking new admissions website. Small wonder that only one in four students with disabilities who enter college actually graduates. Small wonder there are so few faculty with disabilities. I’ve railed about this situation on this blog and in meeting after meeting. What’s really interesting is that in the meetings where I talk about these problems no one ever, and I mean ever, says “how can I help?” Even though on the face of it the non-disabled faculty are progressive types, access isn’t important to them.

Morning Coffee

Uncle History has gotten his finger stuck—
Its hard to explain—
He’s like the Dutch boy
But instead of water
He’s holding back a tsunami
Of ghosts…Babi Yar, Palestine
And there’s Uncle’s finger in the air
Blocking the terrible dead
Phom Penh, Dachau
Spirits of ash
He’s holding his station, Uncle History
Guarding a port in pure nothingness
He thinks of how
The glances of faithful children
Are doomed
And move
From face to face

The Perilous State of the ADA

In disability circles there’s no future planned beyond this: your tomorrows are being erased in the halls of Congress. After health care and social security are gutted will they bring back the ugly laws? Will they lock up the disabled in ruined shopping malls?

This morning I found myself thinking of Aristophanes who I read assiduously in college. Here he is:

“Look at the orators in our republics; as long as they are poor, both state and people can only praise their uprightness; but once they are fattened on the public funds, they conceive a hatred for justice, plan intrigues against the people and attack the democracy.”

Meanwhile we’re being asked to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the ADA which, as we know, is about to be gutted. If you think I’m joking I’m not. Trump’s hot button dismantling of the Department of Education will destroy the capacity of the disabled to gain equal rights in education and even employment. So I’ll add to Aristophanes: when the normates are fattened on the public funds they conceive a hatred for equal rights.

Most of the ADA anniversary video celebrations I’ve seen are just treacle. As my late friend Bill Peace (known online as “The Bad Cripple”) used to say, “I’m not impressed.”

While We Were Making Other Plans, or Crippled Life in America

When I was fifty I believed it was still possible for the disabled to achieve equality in the United States. Twenty years later that belief has gone up in smoke. I feel like the polar bear in the social media meme who’s alone on an ice floe. This is a a feeing shared by thousands upon thousands of disabled folks. The helplessness is manufactured by fascism. I won’t feel helpless. I refuse. America is a biopolitical nightmare, one might call it a laboratory for the subjugation of human beings. This is why people in the United States can’t have diversity though they talk about it. Diversity without biopolitical awareness, without recognizing the role of the state in determining which bodies have or do not have value is just fluff. When will the Americas become a laboratory for freedom? I wish the wood cutter would wake up. Embodiment means many things but in neoliberal diversity fluff culture it means enjoying your body however you choose. If the body is difficult, heavy, gimpy, twisted, blind, then diversity movements aren’t inclined to welcome you. Diversity means convenience and ease and is therefore generally in cahoots with biopolitical determinism—some bodies have value, others don’t. As a university professor who’s disabled my body is problematic. If I require accommodations I’m difficult, sometimes a malcontent. Acceptable embodiment is policed. Policed bodies are inherently devalued bodies. Black Lives Matter. Disabled Lives Matter. Women’s Lives; Migrant Lives—but not so much in the breech. ICE raids are what happens while we were busy making other plans. Apology to John Lennon ’s ghost.

Planh

Have you ever seen those mummified beetles
From Egypt? Gods love every soul
Stop pretending they don’t
I saved a spider this morning
I don’t know much about the soul
The books about it are confusing
Meanwhile
The old tree has died—
I hold her last apple

Rain in Spring

So I’ve now broken a cheap thing,
A flimsy corkscrew
But I’m sorry for it, like Paracelsus

What is this? I want to cry
Like a child at the movies
I don’t know my neighbors
I haven’t visited my parents graves
For a decade
And like a boy
I wonder if they know

They must, if god flows
Through small things
Though I’m seventy
And suspect
I’ve grown simple

See my eyes welling up
At cracked plastic
As the windows darken

I ate some Wallace Stevens poems this morning…(from a notebook)

I ate some Wallace Stevens poems this morning
They tasted like pears and iodine
I could have had strawberries from Tu Fu

**
My notebook curls into itself like a small dog
In my dream last night I went about the house
And painted all the windows black

**
The old men are still knocking Sylvia Plath

**
If you dream like the blind…

You’ll see the Czar’s embroidered pillow
Gold and red by candlelight

The dreamer says: I can smother him
Just watch…and Boris Gudonov’s clock…

“C’mon,” says Carl Jung,
“You did it,”

“We gotta get back to the minotaur’s house…”

The despot growing cold, face up…

**

My country appears to be dying
And all the decent people are infantilized
We shake our rattles

**
Don’t trust grandma
She’s silent but vengeful
Held together by her cigarettes
And those little hard candies

**

Song is a cold corridor
Saying yes above the garden