Tag Archives: rim of the vast silence

April 12 – a poem for Alexine

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Grace

Neither divine nor rare, perhaps unexpected,
rarely unearned, Grace

is our brightest courage shone back at us.

She learned to trust by trusting the horse
hurtling both of them over fences and walls.

And when Rosie died, she found, in her grief, she was
not alone. Rosie’s friends, people who came to the pasture,

people she had never suspected, stopped their cars to say
I’m sorry, she was so beautiful, we loved her.

Grace, too, is how the cumulative weight of these
awkward laundry baskets of bricks grief thrusts
into arms after arms is lighter

than gravity’s unbearable bulk each, separately,
knows could not be borne.

So light it can come to shine out
nearly as brightly as spring sunshine

on a chestnut mare’s back.

April 9th – a Beloit prose poem

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a revision, because the first ending was far too simple.

On the 4th day of Bio 101,
Elliott batTzedek

sitting in a hall with more students than my entire high school the professor read to us from a medical journal update about the first person to have died of tetanus in the U.S. in many years. “She was poor, rural,” he said, then read from an article about it, “she’d stepped on a fishing hook in her back yard and when her leg became infected and swollen she had not sought medical attention. Neighbors and friends reported that she felt that her foot was a long way from her heart and that Jesus would save her.”

Laughter from all around the hall.

4th day lesson object attained – the triumph of scientific, logical reason over ignorance and out dated belief systems.

Her name was Hazel Miner. She was 48. She left behind her husband Harold and her son Eugene who loved her. Her backyard had tools and fishing gear and hunting gear scattered everywhere, for they were a busy, self-sufficient family. Her house was small, but the kitchen door was always open for neighbors to sit and have Sanka. On the floor between the small living room and kitchen was a Charlie The Tuna rug which I had loved to play on when my mom brought me three houses down the block to visit.

She belonged to my Grandma Dorothy’s church.

I didn’t go to her funeral last week because I was here, in Chamberlin, in Bio 101, in my semi-elite private liberal arts college.

8th day lesson object attained—I was smart enough to get in, but I could only belong here if I became ashamed of who I’d been. Which was easy—I hated that church with all its bigotry and hatred of others, I hated the racism, the fear of anyone or anything different that defined that little town, I hated that no one there seemed to care about Bigger Things, I was learning that I ought to hate the food, the music, and those short nasal vowels that hang there for second and second in the middle of a word.

I needed to belong here. I did not yet get that my being ashamed of them did not mean these new peers would ever see me as one of us.

April 5th – found poem, New York Times

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Long Island barrier beach, Monday,
Found poem from New York Times 4/5/2011

remains of three more people
bringing number to eight
[not people but]
missing prostitutes.

Grim December, bodies of four
female prostitutes, a fifth
last Tuesday.

Authorities would not speculate
about the identities;
four, in their 20s, advertised
on Craigslist.

Eyewitnesses, phone records, budget hotels.

Police began last year the search for
Shannan Gilbert, 24, prostitute
who went missing last May.

None of the bodies were hers.

Melanie Englert, 34, driving from work, saw investigators
unloading big cardboard boxes, said “Oh boy, it’s
super shocking.

Brendan Byrne, 36, who lives near, texted
“They’re in our backyard. Literally.”

April 2nd “I heard ‘pulse ox’ and then ‘coding’ and then

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I heard “pulse ox” and then “coding” and then
Elliott batTzedek

timelessness
no
a lack of time and then
all tubed-up in a bed with a view
of Santa Catalina a place where no one
loved me so I lay alone down to
117 pounds so close to my goal
of not being
trays of hospital fare untouched, hunger
just another part of a body
I no longer felt.

As I had not felt myself not breathing, steroids
for the asthma in the distant past
of September’s fat jeans.

On the overnight shift, the one reserved
for gay nurses, fat nurses, old nurses, he
found me awake and shaking, refused to measure
vital signs on someone clearly not vital but asked
if I would like my back rubbed, skin
no one had touched in all the months Orange County
had been digesting me.

Lotion warmed in his palms spread as wide and
venturesome as God’s hands shaping clay, pushing
flesh while seeking life spark, he hummed only
soft syllables until I fell asleep enough to wake
to the morning on which I ate.

I could find him, say what you did, the gay gossip network
that would be more powerful than the 26 years
slipped past if not for this
hard fact:

it was 1985 in Southern California—
all my sources are on the AIDs quilt
which is itself out of style
and packed away.

Let The Translating Begin!

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So, having finished my MFA in poetry, and taken a semester to rest, I’ll be going back to school in late June to work on the poetry in translation track of Drew’s MFA program. Yes, me, translating, even though I’ve pretty much utterly failed to succeed in learning any other language, ever, and the thought of coming up against things I can’t read makes me feel more than a little shaky. So why do it? Because the translators I’ve met through Drew are some of the smartest people I’ve ever met, because what they have to say about poetry pushes my thinking to the limit, because what I’ll learn about language will increase exponentially in the process. Because I’m a slut for being in over my head.

I’m searching for a poet or project, and on the recommendation of a friend found the Israeli Jewish poet Jean Shez, who describes herself as a lesbian writing about lesbian love and child abuse from a feminist perspective. Instantly intriguing me, of course. I’ve found a few of her poems on the web, and am trying to slog through a couple to get a sense of her as a writer. Here’s my first attempt, still missing a couple key words that my usual go-to folks for Hebrew questions couldn’t answer. First in Hebrew, then my working translation. Stay tuned, as I’ll be posting updates every time I manage to make a little more sense of her poem.

בַּלֵּילוֹת הָאַיָּלָה חוֹלֶמֶת עַל
נִמְרֹד גִּבּוֹר צַיִד
שֶׁתָּבוֹא כְּבָר לִתְקֹעַ חֵץ
בִּקְרָבַי
שֶׁתַּעֲמֹד פְּשׂוּק רַגְלַיִם מֵעַל
גּוּפָתִי הַדּוֹמֶמֶת
שֶׁתַּעֲרִיץ אֶת הַבָּשָׂר הַזֶה

In the evenings the fawn dreams
of Nimrad, the mighty hunter,
who will come to press an arrow
inside me
to straddle my unmoving body,
to lord over this meat

Gaia, Dreaming by Philip Metres

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From the amazing contemporary poet Philip Metres, whom I first heard at Split This Rock. Philip’s own poetry blog is:Behind The Lines. This poem is from the chapbook Ode to Oil, which you can buy from Kattywompus Press here

Gaia, Dreaming
Philip Metres

She dreams she is body again.
In the open field, sound of sky and wind
through grasses.

And the water is a burnished mirror, mind for the wander.

The body beneath the klieg lights is ethered
but breathing. Her breast is rising and falling
not seen by human eyes.

And the wander is drilling under.

In the dream of the body, men
in white masks. The gleaming
instruments upon a table.

And the drilling is a kneading, a rising of what is under.

The sound of them like mandibles of ants,
a clicking like watches thousands of times
magnified, the machinery of mind.

And what is under once was over, flowing like rain.

The body is restless but tethered.
In the dream she sees herself as nothing
but table and harvest.

And the water is a river, coursing beneath our feet.

The men—now feathered—have lost their arms
to black wings. They lower their naked faces,
beak out the viscera of her dream

and the blood. She sees it all now
as if through a hole in the sky, beyond the blue ether—

And the blood is a burning river, mined from the vein

more on the Plural I from guest poet Carol Burbank

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inside I contain multitudes
Carol Burbank

why don’t we believe
Walt Whitman
when he proclaims
his multitude?

we think, he sings himself,
all that he assumes I dive in
assume, assuming
he only sings in one voice

but what if
he really did (contain multitudes)?
what if his collective consciousness
wasn’t America, but Walt?

what if, over coffee,
(when he could afford it)
he talked to his selves
negotiating the day’s wash

what if, his ink splotching,
he argued revisions
with a buxom washer woman
who hated adjectives, craved strong verbs

and lived inside his head
with a petulant schoolboy
who resented grammar entirely,
nursing mother more worried about food,
bird dog, longshoreman, and of course the poet

we call Walt,
one man if we take his skin
as sign, and the writer who burned
his hidden papers

as if to say, it’s me,
I am the only one,
and that chanting Indian,
that weeping priest,

let them be

Asking the Unasked Question About Gay Teen Suicide

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Asking the Unasked Question About Gay Teen Suicide

Elliott batTzedek

On Coming Out Day, October 11, 1987, I was supposed to be in DC. Instead, I’d stayed in Madison, WI, and agreed to have my parents come for an awkward, difficult visit, spilling over with things not said.

That Sunday morning, after they’d left on Saturday night, I stood in my kitchen, my three-theophyllines-a-day in one hand, the whole bottle in the other. I took the bottle. I didn’t plan to, I hadn’t been contemplating suicide, I didn’t want to die. I got to the hospital, went through the horrible charcoal-swallowing, stomach pumping procedure, was put on suicide watch for 36 hours, and sent home.

No, I hadn’t been able to tell my parents I was a dyke, and yes, that was because of the intense homophobia I had always witnessed in my small home town. But I wasn’t a mess because I was lesbian. I loved being lesbian, loved everything about it, had no qualms, poured my whole self into the lesbian community. Seeing my parents made me fall apart because I’d been falling apart for months under the pressure of constant flashbacks of childhood sexual abuse. My mind was remembering images, my body remembering blows, my nose the smell of him. All of this was painful beyond my capacity to process, and I was desperate to just make it stop. Spending two days with my family increased that pain exponentially, and that morning I snapped.

Watching the coverage of gay teen suicide this fall, I am pushed back to that day. If I had died, would it have been spun as a “gay youth” suicide? If it were covered at all, I think it probably would have. And that would have been a lie about my life.

And because I know that would have been a lie, I wonder constantly about these teens. While I am generally dubious about any sort of statistical statement about what is suppressed, for the sake of argument I’m going with the stats as they stand – 1 in 10 kids is gay/queer/lesbian/gender queer/etc, but 6-8 out of 10 kids are victims of sexual abuse before the age of 18.

Who is counting the suicides among these 60-80% of children?

And of the gay kids who kill themselves, how many are also survivors of sexual abuse? Is bullying really THE issue here?

By which I mean this – I don’t doubt for a second that physical and psychological assault cause depression and can lead to suicidality. But what other assaults are we pretending not to see? How much easier is it to blame “bullies at school” than to really know what that child’s life was at home? Are we, yet again, looking for an easy exterior identified problem so we can as a culture go on lying about sexual abuse?

That is – is the current focus on “bullies” another form of Megan’s Law? Megan’s Law, and all similar laws, which unload the entire, vast, damage of sexual abuse of children onto the very small percentage of sexual predators who are unknown to their victims and “snatch them away from loving families.” Of course this happens, and of course it is horrible, but 90+% of sexual abuse of children is by an adult the child knows, usually is related to, and has been taught to trust. That’s a whole lot of social resources and fear-mongering for a “solution” which avoids completely the real problem.

The focus on “school bullies” is starting to feel the same to me in the way it is the evening news feed, the only explanation, the “we can fix this with laws and enforcement of laws” false surety. The single most dangerous place for a child is home; the most dangerous people are the adults given access to the child. When I count through everyone I know who has managed to kill themselves, or come damn close to it, every single one of them was sexually assaulted as a child, sometimes for years and years. No anti-bullying initiative in the world could have protected them.

And yes, some of them were also bullied, including me, my life in high school made miserable by my peers; bullies, after all, tend to repeatedly assault kids who are timid, who collapse in on themselves, who, in fact, act like prey. But what do you think would make a child, born whole, be acting like prey by high school, or middle school, or elementary school? Going after only the bullies who target vulnerable children is like blaming the vultures for eating the carcass of a deer killed by a hunter.

But it is so much easier to blame the vultures, who live out there somewhere, than to blame the hunters who live in our homes. And as long as we’re looking out there somewhere, and not inside the home, the sexual abuse of the majority of our children will continue to be accepted and acceptable, and children and teens will go on killing themselves or acting out their abuse on themselves and other children.

So, do we go for the feel-good media blitz of the 10% (if that) solution, or do we really, finally, try to save all our children?

September nowhere near poem a day

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If

if one woman told the truth about her life, the world

if I told the truth, the world would

but I is world’s restraint

or rather the illusion of I
or rather the necessity of the illusion of I

if we told about our life
I would split open

if one woman told the truth

the world, open

ecstasy remains as much a birthright

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from Larry Levis The Gazer Within:

Gazing within, and trying to assess what all this represents, I find I’ve been speaking, all along, about nature, about the attempt of the imagination to inhabit nature and by that act preserve itself for as long as it possibly can against “the pressure of reality.” And by “nature” I mean any wilderness, inner or outer. The moment of writing is not an escape, however: it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it.