Music Friday: Antony and the Johnsons

My newest music obsession is Antony and the Johnsons. Antony Hegarty is, as described by SignOnSan Diego, a "brawny-looking, transsexual Irish-American maverick with a wonderfully androgynous voice and a tremulous chamber-pop style all his own."

One song on the newest album, The Crying Light, is called "Epilepsy is Dancing." To fully appreciate it, read the poetry of the lyrics first:

Epilepsy is dancing
She's the Christ now departing
And I'm finding my rhythm
As I twist in the snow

All the metal burned in me
Down the brain of my river
That fire was searching
For a waterway home

I cry glitter is love!
My eyes pinned inside
With green jewels
Hanging like Christmas stars
From a golden vein

As I came to a screaming
Hold me while I'm dreaming
For my fingers are curling
And I cannot breathe

Then I cried in the kitchen
How I'd seen your ghost witching
As a soldering blue line
Between my eyes

I cry glitter is love!
My eyes
Pinned inside
Sea green jewels
Hanging like Christmas stars
From a golden vein

Cut me in quadrants
Leave me in the corner
Oh now its passing
Oh now I'm dancing

Then listen to the song. Many songs by Antony and the Johnsons have an operatic, cabaret feel, with Antony's soaring voice. This song is delicate, with piano, guitar and strings.

After just hearing it, if you're able, then watch the video from Pitchfork TV (NSFW):



Video description: From the record label: "Antony asked his friends the Wachowski Brothers to work with him on a video for his new single 'Epilepsy Is Dancing'. They in turn invited painters Tino Rodriguez and Virgo Paradiso to create costumes and a mystical environment and choreographer Sean Dorsey and his dancers to bring the dream sequence to life. Antony's artistic partner Johanna Constantine stars as herself in the role of 'Deer Monster'. The video was lit and shot by the up-and-coming directors of photography, Chris Blasingame and Banker White, and produced by Jim Jerome. The production team collectively named themselves AFAS. Please enjoy the fruits of their San Francisco art party."

The video begins and ends in an alley where a woman walks alone and sees a deer many yards ahead of her just as she has a seizure and falls to the ground. A colorful Midsummer's Night Dream-esque world of half-nude body-painted dancers awaken the woman, now painted silver and wearing a headdress of leaves and deer antlers, in a sensuous little orgy of dancing. Some wear carnivale type masks, as does Antony, whose head appears superimposed and flowers flow from his mouth as he sings. The dancers cradle her, carry and writhe with her, then set her down in a leaf-covered woodland with a male dancer very reminiscent of Shakespeare's Puck leaving her last, their outstretched fingers slipping from each other's grasp as the seizure causes spasms and the woman's hands curl. She wakes back in the urban alley with the real deer nuzzling her hand. Then she's all alone and rises and leaves, smiling.

Here's an alternate, touching live performance of "Epilepsy is Dancing," along with a brief interview and "Another World," a second song from the new album, from The Culture Show of the UK.

For another song about an epileptic seizure check out Joy Division's "She's Lost Control."

Poetry Monday: Anne Sexton

It was Anne Sexton's birthday last week. I don't know if Hugo Schwyzer was aware of that when he posted about her work, particularly the poem "Live," but both the poem and his comments on mental illness are well worth a read.

Poetry Monday: Wordgathering, Issue 2

The second issue of the online disability poetry journal Wordgathering is up with plenty to read.

Here's the start of an amazing poem by Onyinyechukwu Udegbe:

IT'S A LIE

It's a lie, I am not afraid to be seen.
Your gaze does not see me.
Your gaze cannot see me,
Your gaze has not seen me.
It is not I, that your gaze sees.

Your gaze is not welcome in this, my own, kitchen.

They too loved the hottentot, everyone loves the circus.

Go read the rest of the poem, and the other good stuff over there.

Poetry Monday: Eli Clare

Eli Clare has a book of poetry coming out through Homofactus Press. The Marrow's Telling: Words in Motion. Here's testimonials on the new book from some other talented people, plus info on ordering and an excerpt from a poem in the collection.

Back in April, I linked to a speech Clare gave about disability rights and transgender issues. This is one of the amazing poems included in that speech to illustrate the points made:

HOW TO TALK TO A NEW LOVER ABOUT CEREBRAL PALSY
by Eli Clare

Tell her: Complete strangers
have patted my head, kissed
my cheek, called me courageous.

Tell this story more than once, ask
her to hold you, rock you
against her body, breast to back,

her arms curving round, only
you flinch unchosen, right arm trembles.
Don’t use the word spastic.

In Europe after centuries
of death by exposure
and drowning,
they banished us
to the streets.

Let her feel the tension burn down your arms,
tremors jump. Take it slow: when she asks
about the difference between CP and MS,

refrain from handing her an encyclopedia.
If you leave, know that you will ache.
Resist the urge to ignore your body. Tell her:

They taunted me retard, monkey,
defect. The words sank into my body.
The rocks and fists left bruises.

Gimps and crips, caps
in hand, we still
wander the streets but now
the options abound: telethons,
nursing homes, welfare lines.

Poetry: Robert Pinsky

Below is a poem by Robert Pinsky, who served as U.S. Poet Laureate in the late '90s. The new Journal of Literary Disability also has an essay, "Disability Haunting in American Poetics" by Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell that explores Pinsky's writings on disability in American poetry:

Pinsky’s essay about the thematics of haunting could be found culpable for its own repressions in the midst of formulating a theory of national identity that is based upon eradicating the conflicts of the past. In many of his examples, the haunting of the American poet is identified with the sudden eruption of ‘nightmarish figures’ that disturb the language of poetic revelation. Upon close reading, many of Pinsky’s haunting figures appear marked by cognitive and physical disabilities that upset the more abstract and utopian longings of American ideals. Because haunting operates as a barely discernible phenomenon (a ghostly presence often concretizes an otherwise repressed content), disability, as a metaphor for what Toni Morrison calls “unspeakable thoughts unspoken” (1989, 1), haunts Pinsky’s poetry of haunting. Better yet, the poets of which Pinsky writes may be fully aware that disability is their topic of contemplation, meaning that only Pinsky’s essay can be said to be haunted by the specter of disability.

So, in the above essay combined with Pinsky's poetry on psychiatrists some interesting ideas emerge. Here also, a psychiatrist comments on the poem below.

An excerpt from "Essay on Psychiatrists" by Robert Pinsky:

III. Proposition

These are the first citizens of contingency.
Far from the doctrinaire past of the old ones,
They think in their prudent meditations

Not about ecstasy (the soul leaving the body)
Nor enthusiasm (the god entering one’s person)
Nor even about sanity (which means

Health, an impossible perfection)
But ponder instead relative truth and the warm
Dusk of amelioration. The cautious

Young augurs with their family-life, good books
And records and foreign cars believe
In amelioration—in that, and in suffering.


IV. A Lakeside Identification

Yes, crazy to suppose one could describe them—
And yet, there was this incident: at the local beach
Clouds of professors and the husbands of professors

Swam, dabbled, or stood to talk with arms folded
Gazing at the lake ... and one of the few townsfolk there,
With no faculty status—a matter-of-fact, competent,

Catholic woman of twenty-seven with five children
And a first-rate body—pointed her finger
At the back of one certain man and asked me,

“Is that guy a psychiatrist?” and by god he was! “Yes,”
She said, “He looks like a psychiatrist.”
Grown quiet, I looked at his pink back, and thought.


Read the whole poem here.

Poetry Monday: Jhamak Kumari Ghimire

What is the Interpretation of the New Millenium?
by Jhamak Kumari Ghimire

A soft light glimmers
on the eve of people’s deaths
The fern unfurls out of season
without its stem
having matured

No mourning will be observed now
on the eves of people’s deaths
What is the interpretation of this age?
A separate live identity
thrives inside a scream

After a hollow ending
the raped
accused
abducted
orphaned skeletons
won’t exorcise their agitation
at the crossroads of expression
as one exorcises
witches and ghosts
by sacrificing chicks

The sari and blouse torn in
the poverty of a rag to wear
in the freezing winters
dam the snow rivers of the season
and yet there is no hint of bitterness
The yearned-for attacks
not just of one winter
but of thunder and lightning
spread no mutinous luminescence
A peaceful flame burns forever
at evening time in the homes of the dead
It is likely that
the cultured people who affect devotion
do not wish to offer to the fire
a single tear
for this millennium
Now, what is the interpretation of this age?
Each hurting moment
Each hurting tremor
kisses the arrival of the new millennium
without the slightest cry of pain

Not a stir of the new millennium came
to the frostbitten heels of the old grandmother
to the ragged tunic of the old grandfather
The water jugs filled by a young girl
near this courtyard of poverty
taunt the new millennium
the flowers she has plucked and arranged
unearth countless realities
and search in the grandmother’s torn sari and blouse
in the grandfather’s patched tunic
for the interpretation of the new millennium

------------------

Photo description: Ghimire is a Nepalese woman in her early twenties. It's a black-and-white photo showing her with a short haircut and her bare right foot resting atop her left knee. She reportedly types her work with her toes. She's wearing a printed button-down blouse and dark-colored pants. She's laughing, with such a large happy grin on her face, straight pretty teeth showing and eyes squinted shut with laughter.

Some Fred Small lyrics for Ruth

Talking Wheelchair Blues
by Fred Small

I went for a jog in the city air
I met a woman in a wheelchair
I said "I'm sorry to see you're handicapped."
She says "What makes you think a thing like that?"

And she looks at me real steady
And she says, "You want to drag?"

So she starts to roll and I start to run
And she beat the pants off my aching buns
You know going uphill I'd hit my stride
But coming down she'd sail on by!

When I finally caught up with her
She says "Not bad for somebody ablebodied.
You know, with adequate care and supervision
You could be taught simple tasks.
So how about something to eat?"

I said that'd suit me fine
"We're near a favorite place of mine."
So we mosied on over there
But the only way in was up a flight of stairs.

"Gee, I never noticed that," says I.
"No problem," the maitre d' replies.
"There's a service elevator around the back."

So we made it upstairs on the elevator
With the garbage, flies, and last week's potatoes
I said "I'd like a table for my friend and me."
He says "I'll try to find one out of the way."

Then he whispers, "Uh, is she gonna be sick,
I mean, pee on the floor or throw some kind of fit?"
I said "No, I don't think so,
I think she once had polio.

But that was twenty years ago.
You see, the fact of the matter is,
If the truth be told,
She can't walk.

So he points to a table, she wheels her chair
Some people look down and others stare
And a mother grabs her little girl
Says "Keep away, honey, that woman's ill."

We felt right welcome.

Then a fella walks up and starts to babble
About the devil and the holy bible
Says "Woman, though marked with flesh's sin,
Pray to Jesus, you'll walk again!"

Then the waiter says "What can I get for you?"
I said "I'll have your best imported brew."
And he says "What about her?"
I say "Who?" He says "Her."

"Oh, you mean my friend here."
He says "Yeah." I say "What about her?"
"Well, what does she want?"
"Well, why don't you ask her?"

Then he apologizes.
Says he never waited on a cripple before.
We immediately nominated him for Secretary of the Interior.

Well, she talked to the manager when we were through

She says "There're some things you could do
To make it easier for folks in wheelchairs."
He says "Oh, it's not necessary.

Handicapped never come here anyway."

Well, I said goodnight to my newfound friend
I said, "I'm beginning to understand
A little bit of how it feels
To roll through life on a set of wheels."

She says "Don't feel sorry, don't feel sad,
I take the good along with the bad
I was arrested once at a protest demo
And the police had to let me go.

See, we were protesting the fact
That public buildings weren't wheelchair accessible.
Turned out the jail was the same way.
Anyway, I look at it this way--
In fifty years you'll be in worse shape than I am now.
See, we're all the same, this human race.
Some of us are called disabled. And the rest--
Well, the rest of you are just temporarily able-bodied."

-- posted for Ruth at A Different Light

Poetry Monday: Mark Doty

An excerpt from "Atlantis" by Mark Doty:

4. ATLANTIS

I thought your illness a kind of solvent
dissolving the future a little at a time;

I didn’t understand what’s to come
was always just a glimmer

up ahead, veiled like the marsh
gone under its tidal sheet

of mildly rippling aluminum.
What these salt distances were

is also where they’re going:
from blankly silvered span

toward specificity: the curve
of certain brave islands of grass,

temporary shoulder-wide rivers
where herons ply their twin trades

of study and desire. I’ve seen
two white emissaries unfold

like heaven’s linen, untouched,
enormous, a fluid exhalation. Early spring,

too cold yet for green, too early
for the tumble and wrack of last season

to be anything but promise,
but there in the air was white tulip,

marvel, triumph of all flowering, the soul
lifted up, if we could still believe

in the soul, after so much diminishment ...
Breath, from the unpromising waters,

up, across the pond and the two-lane highway,
pure purpose, over the dune,

gone. Tomorrow’s unreadable
as this shining acreage;

the future’s nothing
but this moment’s gleaming rim.

Now the tide’s begun
its clockwork turn, pouring,

in the day’s hourglass,
toward the other side of the world,

and our dependable marsh reappears
—emptied of that starched and angular grace

that spirited the ether, lessened,
but here. And our ongoingness,

what there’ll be of us? Look,
love, the lost world

rising from the waters again:
our continent, where it always was,

emerging from the half-light, unforgettable,
drenched, unchanged.

Friday Poetry

Goodbye to Tolerance
by Denise Levertov

Genial poets, pink-faced
earnest wits—
you have given the world
some choice morsels,
gobbets of language presented
as one presents T-bone steak
and Cherries Jubilee.
Goodbye, goodbye,
I don’t care
if I never taste your fine food again,
neutral fellows, seers of every side.
Tolerance, what crimes
are committed in your name.

And you, good women, bakers of nicest bread,
blood donors. Your crumbs
choke me, I would not want
a drop of your blood in me, it is pumped
by weak hearts, perfect pulses that never
falter: irresponsive
to nightmare reality.

It is my brothers, my sisters,
whose blood spurts out and stops
forever
because you choose to believe it is not your business.

Goodbye, goodbye,
your poems
shut their little mouths,
your loaves grow moldy,
a gulf has split
the ground between us,
and you won’t wave, you’re looking
another way.
We shan’t meet again—
unless you leap it, leaving
behind you the cherished
worms of your dispassion,
your pallid ironies,
your jovial, murderous,
wry-humored balanced judgment,
leap over, un-
balanced? ... then
how our fanatic tears
would flow and mingle
for joy ...

----------------------------------

Who Said It Was Simple
by Audre Lorde

There are so many roots to the tree of anger
that sometimes the branches shatter
before they bear.

Sitting in Nedicks
the women rally before they march
discussing the problematic girls
they hire to make them free.
An almost white counterman passes
a waiting brother to serve them first
and the ladies neither notice nor reject
the slighter pleasures of their slavery.
But I who am bound by my mirror
as well as my bed
see causes in colour
as well as sex

and sit here wondering
which me will survive
all these liberations.

Poetry: Cheryl Marie Wade

I Am Not One Of The
by Cheryl Marie Wade

I am not one of the physically challenged-
I'm a sock in the eye with gnarled fist
I'm a French kiss with cleft tongue
I'm orthopedic shoes sewn on a last of your fears
I am not one of the differently abled-
I'm an epitaph for a million imperfect babies left untreated
I'm an ikon carved from bones in a mass grave at Tiergarten, Germany
I'm withered legs hidden with a blanket
I am not one of the able disabled-
I'm a black panther with green eyes and scars like a picket fence
I'm pink lace panties teasing a stub of milk white thigh
I'm the Evil Eye
I'm the first cell divided
I'm mud that talks
I'm Eve I'm Kali
I'm The Mountain That Never Moves
I've been forever I'll be here forever
I'm the Gimp
I'm the Cripple
I'm the Crazy Lady
I'm The Woman With Juice

Poetry: Lynn Emanuel

Tourists
by Lynn Emanuel

In Tunis we try to discuss divorce
And dying but give up to lounge

With rug merchants under a plum tree.
From its corner the lamb’s severed head

Watches the flies drink from its eyes
And its fat disappear into the fire.

The light rinses the edge of your sandal,
The two wasps that ornament the blur

Of screened window. My grandmother
Would have loved a night like this.

In the wind chimes I can hear her tea cart
With its china rolling through Cook Street’s

Stony yard one summer when I was always
Thirsty, and she moved like a figure

On a clock from my lawn chair to the cart,
Or swabbed me with alcohol, or cut

My hair with the straight razor.
I was a week out of the hospital.

Beneath my breasts an incision was crossed
With stitches of surgical thread.

The scalpel came so close it gave
My heart a quick kiss. I nearly died.

Years later I can still see the skin
Flutter on the inside of my left breast

And my heart limps like a great uncle
Who, because he was a Jew and lame,

Was dragged by cossacks across the steppes.
He became a friend asking a favor

Of a horse who ran so hard, so perfectly
Hard, that the green grass rose to meet him.

Poetry: Michael Ryan

April is National Poetry Month, you know. I'm not feeling very introspective myself, and so I surf, finding interesting verse:

Letters from an Institution
by Michael Ryan

The ward beds float like ghost ships
in the darkness, the nightlight
above my bed I pretend is a lighthouse
with a little man inside who wears
a sailor cap and tells good old stories
of the sea. The little man is me.
Perhaps I have a dog called Old Salt
who laps my hand and runs endlessly
down the circular stairs.
Perhaps he bites like sin.
I dream of ships smashing the reefs,
their bottoms gutting out,
the crews’ disembodied voices screaming
Help us help us help somebody please
and there is no one there at all
not even me. I wake up nervous,
Old Salt gnawing my flesh. I wake up nervous,
canvas bedstraps cutting my groin.
The night nurse, making the rounds,
says I bellow in sleep like a foghorn.

*

Nothing moves at night
except small animals
kept caged downstairs
for experiments, going
bullshit, and the Creole
janitor’s broom whisking
closer by inches.
In the ward, we all
have room for errors and elbows
to flail at excitement.
We’re right above the morgue;
the iceboxes make our floor
cold. The animals seem to know
when someone, bored with holding
on, gives out: they beat
their heads and teeth
against the chicken wire
doors, scream and claw
The janitor also knows.
He props his heavy broom
against his belt, makes
a sign over himself
learned from a Cajun,
leaves us shaking
in our bedstraps
to drag the still
warm and nervous body
down from Isolation.

*

I have a garden in my brain
shaped like a maze
I lose myself
in, it seems. They only look for me
sometimes. I don’t like my dreams.

The nurses quarrel over where I am
hiding. I hear from inside
a bush. One is crisp
and cuts; one pinches. I’d like to push
them each somewhere.

They both think it’s funny
here. The laughter sounds like diesels.
I won’t come out because I’m lazy.
You start to like the needles.
You start to want to crazy.

Poetry Monday: Kenny Fries

To The Poet Whose Lover Has Died Of AIDS
by Kenny Fries

. . . then the wasting begins and the disappearance a day at a time. -- Mark Doty

The night of your reading I notice he has carved
a place for his wheelchair. But after the first
poem, through the applause, the noise of moving
out of his way. Then, only the space remains
and nobody, not even those standing, eyeing
what was his position, will take his place.
The next day, when you tell me he wet himself
and could not stay, I think how leaving causes so much
commotion, how in school during rollcall the teacher
never knew how long to wait for the voice, present,
before moving on to the next name in the order.
The tittering, the shifting in chairs, when it went on
too long. When you first told me he was sick,
I could not ask if you, too, were infected --
I searched your poems for clues. Now he has died
and I have gone back to read your poems, needing
your words to prove love does not disappear
a day at a time. All those years together,
over a decade of loss, and I don't know
what's left to say. If we are given love
only to have it taken away, what solace
can anyone offer but your voice be present
among the shifting chairs, the embarrassed noises
of absence. The wait is always too long.

---------------------------------------------------

Here's another poem by Fries.

Here's some news about Fries' Fulbright studies in Japan last year. And here's his brand spanking new book, called The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory.

And lastly, a poem by Mark Doty, the poet Fries writes to in the poem above.

Poetry Monday: Every Man's Burden

The Magic Wand
by Lynn Manning

Quick-change artist extraordinaire,
I whip out my folded cane
and change from black man to blind man
with a flick of my wrist.

It is a profound metamorphosis—
From God gifted wizard of roundball
dominating backboards across America,
To God-gifted idiot savant composer
pounding out chart-busters on a cockeyed whim;
From sociopathic gangbanger with death for eyes
to all-seeing soul with saintly spirit;
From rape deranged misogynist
to poor motherless child;
From welfare-rich pimp
to disability-rich gimp;
And from ‘white man’s burden’
to every man’s burden.

It is always a profound metamorphosis.
Whether from cursed by man to cursed by God;
or from scriptures condemned to God ordained,
My final form is never of my choosing;
I only wield the wand;
You are the magicians.

A musical interlude

"Girl Anachronism" by The Dresden Dolls

the lyrics by Amanda Palmer:

you can tell
from the scars on my arms
and cracks in my hips
and the dents in my car
and the blisters on my lips
that i'm not the carefullest of girls

you can tell
from the glass on the floor
and the strings that're breaking
and i keep on breaking more
and it looks like i am shaking
but it's just the temperature
and then again
if it were any colder i could disengage
if i were any older i could act my age
but i dont think that youd believe me
it's
not
the
way
i'm
meant
to
be
it's just the way the operation made me

and you can tell
from the state of my room
that they let me out too soon
and the pills that i ate
came a couple years too late
and ive got some issues to work through
there i go again
pretending to be you
make-believing
that i have a soul beneath the surface
trying to convince you
it was accidentally on purpose

i am not so serious
this passion is a plagiarism
i might join your century
but only on a rare occasion
i was taken out
before the labor pains set in and now
behold the world's worst accident
i am the girl anachronism

and you can tell
by the red in my eyes
and the bruises on my thighs
and the knots in my hair
and the bathtub full of flies
that i'm not right now at all
there i go again
pretending that i'll fall
don't call the doctors
cause they've seen it all before
they'll say just
let
her
crash
and
burn
she'll learn
the attention just encourages her

and you can tell
from the full-body cast
that i'm sorry that i asked
though you did everything you could
(like any decent person would)
but i might be catching so don't touch
you'll start believeing youre immune to gravity and stuff
don't get me wet
because the bandages will all come off

and you can tell
from the smoke at the stake
that the current state is critical
well it is the little things, for instance:
in the time it takes to break it she can make up ten excuses:
please excuse her for the day, its just the way the medication makes her...

i dont necessarily believe there is a cure for this
so i might join your century but only as a doubtful guest
i was too precarious removed as a caesarian
behold the worlds worst accident
I AM THE GIRL ANACHRONISM

Poetry Monday: The Knife of Language

Helen Takes the Stage
by Kathi Wolfe

(Helen Keller starred in a vaudeville show The Bluebird of Happiness in 1924.)

Here I am,
playing,
like a well-trained
seal, for you,
between the clowns
and singing dogs.
Your surprise
at seeing me in the flesh
in a room smelling like cigars,
makes my skin prickle with heat
more than the stage lights.
Did you know
that Mark Twain taught
me to play pool and spit tobacco?
Annie, my teacher, hates
my being here.
"It's so undignified
to tell jokes to drunks
and traveling salesmen," she says.
I crave applause
more than scotch, cigarettes
or hot dogs swimming in mustard.
With the knife of language,
I've carved out the best life
an icon can.
But, being a saint
is as difficult
as getting a drink during Prohibition.
Yet, until the curtain falls,
I am tethered, like you,
to the laughing
muck and mire of the earth.


And from The Washington Post in July of 2001, an article by the above poet on heroes and inspiration: "He's Your Inspiration, Not Mine":

Don't get me wrong -- I like to readnews reports on disabled people, at least when they're about issues -- health insurance, discrimination, education -- that concern me and my peers.

Just keep us in some kind of real context. Occasionally, show us not as main characters but as background characters -- like a story about a Metro delay or the Smithsonian Folklife Festival that includes, but doesn't necessarily feature, the folks with white canes and wheelchairs stuck on the subway or sitting in the audience. And on TV and in movies, give us some roles as regular characters -- like Marlee Matlin's deaf political consultant on "The West Wing." There's been progress on this front in the last few years; I'd like to see more.

And I'd like to see stories about some of the peoplewho really are heroes to those of us with disabilities. Like those who found a sudden demand for their previously unwanted services during World War II, and rose to the challenge. While able-bodied men were away fighting, disabled people worked in factories and offices and served as volunteers. Reporting for a 1995 article, I talked to Norma Krajczar of Morehead City, N.C. As a visually impaired teenager in Massachusetts, Norma was a volunteer aircraft warden; the thought was that her sensitive hearing would give her an advantage over sighted wardens in listening for enemy planes. And I learned that Akron, Ohio, became known as the "crossroads of the deaf" because of all the deaf people who came to work in tire factories converted to defense plants -- making more money than they had ever been able to before. Yet, even with all the reporting that's been done recently about the Greatest Generation, you don't hear much about those folks.

Poetry Monday: Their Sudden Tongues

Tulips
by Sylvia Plath

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage ——
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free ——
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salty, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.

Gas lamps as angels

Lisel Mueller's poem on Monet is part of her Pulitzer prize-winning collection, Alive Together. Years ago I saw a great presentation of Claude Monet's work at the Art Institute of Chicago, and in walking through the exhibit with the headphones and listening to the narration about the progression of his life's work, I was able to see how cataracts altered his vision and changed the images he painted. Monet's Impressionism was dedicated to capturing light and color as he saw it, and by looking at his early and late works you can see the startling and honest differences in his vision. His later paintings are not as pretty, with muddier, yellower color tones. And yet, they do continue to show what the eye sees -- his impaired vision still provided a valid study of sight, color and light.

From the link just above, a description of how Monet's vision impairment affected his art:

Monet was both troubled and intrigued by the effects of his declining vision, as he reacted to the the foggy, impressionistic personal world that he was famous for painting. In a letter to his friend G. or J. Bernheim-Jeune he wrote, “To think I was getting on so well, more absorbed than I’ve ever been and expecting to achieve something, but I was forced to change my tune and give up a lot of promising beginnings and abandon the rest; and on top of that, my poor eyesight makes me see everything in a complete fog. It’s very beautiful all the same and it’s this which I’d love to have been able to convey. All in all, I am very unhappy.” – August 11, 1922, Giverny.

From another analysis:

Many of these later paintings verge on the abstract, with colors bleeding into each other and a lack of rational shape and perspective. For example, "The House Seen from the Rose Garden, 1922-1924," is an explosion of orange, yellow and red hues, but leaves the reader barely able to discern the vague shape of the house in the background.Monet's diminished sight opened up a new vista for his art, one in which memory and the unseen play a more important role than the perceptions of direct experience.

In a certain sense, we must learn to see these last pictures of his garden at Giverny not as increasingly confused by his inability to see clearly, but as pictures in which Monet's memory traces of the site he had planted and tended and lived with so long - the paths, the plants and the waterways of his garden - came to replace the ever more fragile images of his failing eye.

In Mueller's poem, Monet is represented as resisting the idea that his vision must be treated medically. If not embracing vision impairment, he is at least exploring it for what it offers that is new and different.

Monet Refuses the Operation
by Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no halos
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one gray continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how Heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.


Actually, my favorite poem from this collection of Mueller's is "What the dog perhaps hears," which muses about the keen canine ability to hear what we can only imagine. Both poems seem similar to me in the way they explore ability, inability, and what differences can reveal.