I would like Aunt Mary Ann and my Albuquerque cousins Alanna and Susanna to come up and light the third candle...,”
his voice rising steadily through the vinegary smell and brutal hush in the room,
may the Lord hear our listening, His word like matchlight cupped to a cigarette
the instant before the intake of breath, like the smoke clouds pooled in the lit tobacco
before flooding the lungs and bloodstream, filtering into pith and marrow,
may He see Himself again in the hemophiliac’s motorcycle
on a certain Sunday in 1975—Hidden Hills Raceway, Gallipolis, Ohio,
a first moto holeshot and wire-to-wire win, a miraculously benign sideswipe early on in the second moto
bending the handlebars and front brake lever before the possessed rocketing up through the pack
to finish third after passing Brian Kloser on his tricked-out Suzuki RM125
midair over the grandstand double jump—
may His absence arrive like that again here in this hygienic room,
not with the rush of a peaked power band and big air over the jumps
but with the strange intuitive calm of that race, a stillness somehow poised
in the body even as it pounded and blasted and held its line across the washboard track,
may His silence plague us like that again,
may He bless our listening and our homely tongues.
Jill Alexander Essbaum
SWIMMING ON CONCRETE:
THE POETRY OF VASSAR MILLER
I was introduced to Vassar Miller’s poetry in college. The first day of college, in fact. The professor, herself a poet, handed out photocopies of poems that had to do with whatever it was we were getting ready to read. Alas, I no longer recall the poems themselves nor the context in which they were presented, but I do remember one important detail of my initial encounter with Vassar Miller’s poetry: at some point during the discussion, my professor stood before the class and said, as an aside, You’ve never been drunk until you’ve been drunk with Vassar Miller. What a strange and wonderful fact! It was an earnest statement spoken honestly and (and this is important) in an absolutely reverent voice. I was eighteen and had never met a real poet before. I had also never been drunk, with or without a poet present (a deficit in my character that has since been amended). Still, my teacher’s words of candor served to confirm something that I had fervently hoped was true: That poets were purposed to drink life deeply and to share their intoxication with the world through their poems. It was the first thing I ever learned at the university.
Vassar Miller spent her life in a wheelchair and died in 1998 at the age of seventy-four. Cerebral palsy made her body frail and her speech both intermittent and difficult to understand. A deeply committed Christian, Vassar Miller wrote at once with the soul of a mystical saint and the doubt of a skeptic, and she was never afraid nor ashamed of taking God to poetic task when she felt it a necessary action. In the same bold manner with which she wrote her religious poetry, Vassar Miller never shied away from addressing her disability, either. Her voice on the page is unflinching in its proclamations and insistent—almost urgent, possibly angry—in its assertions. As she writes in the poem “Dramatic Monologue in the Speaker’s Own Voice”:
I’m either a monster
in search of a horror movie to be in,
or else I’m a brain floating within a body
whose sides I must gingerly touch while you glance
discreetly away
If poetry is anything at all it is the assimilation of experience into lines on the page. A Vassar Miller poem does not sentimentalize its own experience.
But what is the experience of a Vassar Miller poem? While her poems are often grave and dismal in their imagery, by their tone they are backlit with hope. It’s easy enough to assign the origin of this optimism to Vassar’s own Christian faith, but I think there’s more to it than that (including, perhaps, her preoccupation with traditional form and the literal mechanics of resolution that occur, say, in a sonnet, but that is just a pet theory). Her poems are very compassionate, extraordinarily empathetic. When she writes of another’s suffering, she speaks with the authority of one who knows full well what it means to live in physical agony. “Each man’s sorrow is an absolute / Each man’s pain is a norm,” are the lines that begin her poem “The Common Core.” There’s an open and munificent heart at work in those lines and sympathy for the whole of humanity’s broken condition.
Finally, though, what overwhelms me by her poems is their deep capacity for joy. You simply cannot read this woman’s work—even her darker pieces—without being swept into the cloud of her witness to the possibility of bliss. On this point, her poems are resolute, unwavering:
Spinning along the roadsides into dawn
Feeling the flesh of lovers whom I’d lay
I could make prayers or poems on and on.”
There’s nothing to do with those perfect lines but drink them in.
No, I never got drunk with Vassar Miller. But I’ve been drunk on her poems, many, many times. Go ye now and do likewise.
Vassar Miller
If I Had Wheels or Love
Chiefly for Joanne Avinger
I could make prayers or poems on and on,
Relax or labor all the summer day,
If I had wheels or love, I would be gone.
Spinning along the roadsides into dawn,
Feeling the flesh of lovers whom I’d lay
I could make prayers or poems on and on.
Whistling the hours by me as they drone,
Kissed on my breast and belly where I’d play
If I had wheels or love, I would be gone.
Over the next horizon toward the sun,
Deep in the shadows where I found the way
I could make prayers or poems on and on.
Along the country backroads flower-strewn,
Fondling your flanks, my dear, make clouds from clay
If I had wheels or love, I’d be gone.
Cool as the evening is and soft as fawn,
Warm as my fiddling fingers when they say
I could make prayers or poems on and on.
If I had wheels or love, I would be gone.
Speaker’s Own Voice
I walk naked under my clothes like anyone else,
and I’m not a bomb to explode in your hands.
Of course, you are not (I would not accuse you of)
thinking of holding me down, but of holding me up.
Yet sometimes I’d love to be eased from the envelope of sleep,
stroked gently open (although it would take some doing—
on my part, that is). My lost virginity
would hurt me the way ghosts of their limbs
make amputees shriek, my womanhood
too seldom used. Have you ever viewed me this way?
No, none of you ever have. I’m either a monster
in search of a horror movie to be in,
or else I’m a brain floating within a body
whose sides I must gingerly touch while you glance
discreetly away. Sometimes when you hear it go—bump!
it gives you a nasty shock after which you insist I am glued
to my flesh like a fly in a paste pot. Maybe you think everyone is,
that, or a delicate lady in a dirty sty mincing on tiptoe.
I wish you’d learn better before we all totter
into our coffins where there’s no straight way to lie crooked.
The Common Core
Each man’s sorrow is an absolute
Each man’s pain is a norm
No one can prove and no one refute.
Which is the blacker, coal or soot?
Which blows fiercer, gale or storm?
Each man’s sorrow is an absolute.
No man’s sickness has a synonym,
No man’s disease has a
double.
You weep for your love, I for my limbs—
Who mourns with reason? who over whims?
For, self-defined as a pebble,
No man’s sickness has a synonym.
Gangrene is fire and cancer is burning.
Which one’s deadlier? Toss
A coin to decide; past your discerning
Touch the heart’s center, still and unturning,
That common core of the Cross;
You die of fire and I of burning.
Subterfuge
I remember my father, slight,
staggering in with his Underwood,
bearing it in his arms like an awkward bouquet
for his spastic child who sits down
on the floor, one knee on the frame
of the typewriter, and holding her wrist
with her right hand, in that precision known
to the crippled, peck at the keys
with a sparrow’s preoccupation.
Falling by chance on rhyme, novel and curious bubble
blown with magic pipe, she tries them over and over,
spellbound by life’s clashing in accord or against itself,
pretending pretense and playing at playing,
she does her childhood backward as children do,
her fun a delaying action against what she knows.
My father must lose her, his runaway on her treadmill
will lose the terrible favor that life has done him
as she toils at tomorrow, tensed at her makeshift toy.
Robert Fagan
Less
Less is more —Mies
Only when more is less —Wright
Which it always is —Diogenes
1.
Now that I’m deaf I’m listening to music. Until now I was too busy or too depressed and let the radio mumble on with cheery Vivaldi or soulful Tchaikovsky. Occasionally I would put on a CD, and sometimes a subtle little sound from Debussy would wake me up. Not any more. The high notes of Kiri Te Kanawa I mainly sense on her face on TV, as Strauss’s Marschallin smiles at me.
It’s all Cagean now. The truck that takes off on the street makes a great crescendo above Lulu’s final shriek. And Sun Ra sounds as melodious as Glenn Miller. Above all I listen, transfixed, to rasping violin, viola, cello, knowing I’m hearing more than Beethoven did, and infinitely less. Still, since the less makes me strain for more, I’m beginning, maybe, to hear more.
2.
Now that I’m crippled I take long walks in the country. Until now I needed to move fast for exercise, and what I saw, heard, and smelled in the country could have been Central Park or even Broadway at rush hour. Life was a rush. One didn’t stop to look at this tree, which is dying. I only noticed it because I fell over its dead branches and landed against its soft mossy trunk. It’s like me, branches spread out on the ground, as my legs, arms and crutches are.
Falling is helpful for seeing the world. One has paused, as that hawk above me is pausing in the sky. One hears rustling sounds: branches and leaves moving, small animals scurrying. One smells the perfumes of blossoms or decaying things. The wind caresses. Once you’ve paused you’ll never be the same again. You’re not so...perpendicular, so apart. Then you can push yourself up along the trunk and continue your walk, moving at your own pace over the enormous earth.
3.
Now that my memory’s gone I remember more. My mind wanders among so many scenes, so many more than actually happened. And they’re set loose to recombine with scenes from other times, other places. And I know more people than I ever knew. Some of them I read or dreamed or wrote down. Others may have been real once, but are certainly more interesting now, as only their oddities or epiphanies remain. While those who could never be interesting are long forgotten. It takes a lot of forgetting to remember.
This is fortunate since all my trivial activities and half-hearted endeavors and absent-minded betrayals would make a vast nineteenth-century novel that would put any reader to sleep, including myself. Instead I don’t doubt that everybody has been very nice and things turned out as they should have. So I have even forgotten what I have forgotten, and this is the greatest pleasure of all.
4.
Now that I’m impotent I make love a lot. It used to be that there were too many girls, women, wives, not exactly chasing after me, but beckoning or bending their little fingers around wine glasses or even around a button on my fly. Not that they weren’t comforting and made me think at times that I was human. Still, I can barely remember a few faces.
This is all to the good since I’m concentrating nowadays on one face. Not my own, which is a bit of a memento mori, but this other face. And more than the face. In whatever state we’re in of hurry or languor or unearthly awareness, there are simultaneous smiles at sudden absurdities, or quick nods of understanding, or just fingers absently touching, or murmured words lost in sleep, or even a lethargic cock gently flowing—so that one is constantly, never-endingly making love.
Proem
near the pond
I dance on four legs
without benefit of costume
hairy creature
horny bald head
one ear left
another sliced by surgeons
melanoma not madness
my unglassed eyes see
the pine forest as a steaming jungle
the sun melting
the pond overflowing
while I gape from toothless mouth
that coughs in rhythm with the wind
my breastbone is still unbroken
holding fast to clogged heart
while shoulders keep me up on crutches
but shudder in pain
so I fall onto the tall grass
and crawl to the water
accompanied by a small snake
like the snake
my body would unjacket me
leaving behind striped skin
labyrinth of white scars
ancient lines and crevices
like the landscape of the moon
it might mean something
if those in the house
bird-watching with binoculars
would only read my body
but enough of an exhibition
now crawl into the pond
where cold water and sharp rocks
make my miniscule penis disappear
and allow me to be harmless child
or high-note castrato
or happy hermaphrodite
though my ass humps above water like a whale
trailing useless fin legs
splashing in rich green scum
arousing tiny fish
and transparent insects
through luxuriant strands of frogs’ eggs
to touch pads and blossoms
and enticing reeds that reach out from the bottom
to embrace me
bonds that I may some day use
without Ophelia’s glazed mind
but now can break free
and round the pond
up to the red towel
cold wind forcing me
to hide in shirt and pants
and welcome
with shaved face
and big smile
guests who hover over maps
planning excursions
to see the wonders of nature
out there somewhere
Stiege
1.
Do not be afraid. Just listen to my instructions.
The main thing is to remember not to walk straight. Instead you must bend one leg and then point the toes of the other into the void. Let your body sink forward. Unless you are unlucky, you will discover stone or steel or wood under you. And when you shift the enormous weight of your body (remember gravity!) from the redundant tail-like excrescence of your limp back leg to the firm column of your front leg, you will experience the dreadful and exhilarating knowledge of the ve
rtiginous.
Perhaps you learned this as a child. First creeping up and down, as though each step was home, and the next step a strange land. Then, in an impetuous moment you began a lifelong habit of propelling yourself into space. As an adult you might be wise to reconsider this and take a more wary approach. I can give you some reasons why.
2.
it was the ruin of an abbey
every abbey
where every staircase
is sheared in the air
leading nowhere
doors walled up
nuns immured
knees bared
hell is here
huis clos
hold me
close
the steps
were too steep
twisting up the tower
and twisting me
away
from you
I said
adieu
and the steps stopped
one more
would have been air
was sky