Folio
Endless
1.
Endless
She tried to convince me—
Warm Springs was like
a private Georgian resort
really, nothing like
a rehabilitation hospital
I watched her pin-pointed pupils pulse
Often, she reminded me—
Roosevelt’s lover lived
in the little white house beneath
the shady pines
I noticed how she lifted her chin, faintly flared her nostrils
But it was when she insisted
my grandmother took perfect care
of my older brother, her newborn, who she abandoned
in Detroit, that my mother’s weak smile sunk my heart—
Daughter-love blossomed in my chest
as I studied the tips of my fingers
It wasn’t stories of polio
that paralyzed the beating of my heart
Not her fancy images, but my own disturbances that swelled.
As if she believed words contained her stories.
As if the mark at the end of this line halts your thoughts.
2.
Songbirds, 1969
Fifteen years old when my mother announced
I’d like to take you to Warm Springs
Rusty oranged dirt, screen doors sprung open with a tap
I studied silent songbirds in the courtyard
Magnolia blooms guarded crisscrossed sidewalks
rolling paths really, crossroads
Gliding through waxed linoleum hallways
to the corset shop and brace shop and physiotherapist office
We squared our shoulders in unison
No buildings with stairs, no doctors with answers
My mother’s wedding band clicked
against her wheelchair’s rim
And my walking legs stumbled—
Not my polio, hers
But my thighs still twitch, torque
when I remember the rust-colored soil
Perhaps the sidewalks never crossed
Maybe the songbirds cried
3.
Echocardiogram, 1999
rare beauty descends
blends with pulsing neon spheres
of open-flutter orange-yellow-red swells
a cool jelly-tipped probe tickles
my bare flesh exposed—who knows
sources of my congenital click?
swishes and gushes,
blood rushes back towards open-valves, flapping gaps
and skipping beats
mystery peeks, swoops deep, dervishly whirls
stretched too far—a loose chord’s sweet grief bursts now
with dangerous daughter-love
4.
Seder, 2020
we parsley together
internet-cross-stitched tablecloth
hard-boiled, shank-boned
chanting questions
this night of difference
Why? How long? Where
is our leader? In this wildness
afflicted us then, consumes us now
matza cracks, wine dribbles the rim
of this plague—our shoulders curl,
longing for the cucumbers of egypt, we sing:
enough! terrified! no structure! abandoned!
ritual, small changes, learn bridge,
vulnerable- raw- huddled alone-
useful/useless humbled/dissolved
(reframe) (draw circles) (let go)
accelerate— on hold— on-the-cusp-of-something-rare—
5.
Morning Love Poem
Before rice cakes and sunflower butter,
Before espresso and news of the day,
I slide open the door to our terrace, and
I stand and I breathe and I gaze. Tangerine glow or
Milky-thick fog. Grey whips of cirrus or drizzle.
Those lights to the east (Mesquite or Balch Springs?)
Revealed or obscured today? No river overrunning
Its rim. No ah-ha revelations to bare. But I welcome the
Rhythm of the morning. Beating, exquisite and rare.
Rare air. Rare blossom bursts of sky. Rare circling centers of darkness
to light. Rare deepest pockets of heliotrope horizon. Rare elusive
dew on this metal rail. Rare fractured sparks of sun. Rare this
glorious daybreak. So rare, that heavens calls. Rarer, I think, that
I answer. Rare, just the inhale. Rare knowing we are safe, we are
safe. Rare lavender scent, like the lather of our soap. Rare the
muscles in my face, so slack. Rare notice of that crane’s distant
call. Such rare openness. A rare pattern to that flashing red light;
does it blink to the beating of my heart? Rare question, I believe.
Rare, repetition, repeating. Rare silkiest kiss of this morning.
Rare, you teasing wind. Rare, us, under our quilt, just moments
ago. Rare, vivid, so vivid and rare. Rare wonder when I fill my
lungs. Rare, the ecstatic exhale. Rare your delicious joy. As
rare as my rare zeal.
Not an answer for the pangs of our aching moments.
Mysterious, the puzzlements we share. And then we return
to the rhythm of our morning. Our container, crafted, with immaculate care.
These five poems tell the story of a life. Written between January and April of 2020, they explore my desire to understand the reverberations of physical trauma on me and those I love. Where are the boundaries? Where do I end and where do the ones I love begin? In the course of the four months, the Covid-19 pandemic struck.
Suddenly, these questions took on fresh and urgent meaning as physical trauma and fear spread ubiquitously. The poems are timely in that the genesis of my grappling stems from the impact of an earlier viral pandemic—the persistent polio epidemics of the 1940’s that reached my mother and paralyzed her, years before I was born. I learned at an early age that viruses appear, they terrorize, and that the impact they have continue long after the virus itself resolves. The physical harm on those directly infected are apparent, while the ones they love struggle with the consequences of the virus in less obvious ways. With these poems, we gain insight into the effect of polio on one mother-daughter relationship. We wake up to the realization that the force of this medical trauma is not easily contained and, by extension, we are compelled to consider: How will the Covid-19 pandemic reverberate in our lives going forward?
The philosophical inquiry at the center of this collection concerns the limits of empathy. When do bonds bind too tightly? How does one protect oneself from too closely identifying with the imagined pain of another? Or from remaining too distant? Where is the balance, if such balance is possible? These are questions I confronted growing up with a mother wheelchair-bound from polio. I never saw her walk. I pushed her wheelchair and looked after her wellbeing long before I was tall enough to glance over her shoulders. My mother’s long-shot victory over poliomyelitis, and her mighty rehabilitation at Warm Springs, Georgia, formed the basis of the heroic tales of my childhood. Yet, I always understood that there was more to the story. I wondered how she endured the pain of her paralysis. I worried over the content of secrets she never shared, and that I was afraid to ask about. I wonder and I worry still.
On the face of the page, linguistic and thematic elements bind these poems together in narrative. The repetition of words—rare, daughter-love, swells, heart, click—refers the reader back-and-forth between the selections. For example, “rare” echoes throughout as a reference to the sense of awe, beaty, wonder, and singularity addressed in these poems. The word first appears in the description of a color-filled screen in “Echocardiogram, 1999,” becomes the hope of a new reality in “Seder, 2020,” and finally refers to the mystery of the moment in “Morning Long Song.” Similarly, the recurrence of daughter-love works to elicit the specificity of the mother-daughter pair in which the daughter’s empathetic connection to her mother is the relationship’s central characteristic. Heart, swells, and click are sprinkled throughout and underscore the physicality central to that relationship. Other words—song, orange, rim, shoulders, polio—pop up here and there to remind the reader’s ear of the interrelated images that tie the poems, and the two lives, together.
The philosophical inquiry at the center of this collection concerns the limits of empathy.
Thematic repetition further unites the poems into a coherent whole. The poems illuminate the speaker’s longing to understand her mother’s painful experiences and the consequences that attach to that longing. “Endless” and “Songbirds, 1969” explore the speaker’s struggle to confront her mother’s encounter with polio paralysis. In “Songbird, 1969” the teen-age daughter endeavors to distance herself from her mother’s suffering: “Not my polio, hers.” And while “Seder, 2020” may initially seem a far cry from the travails presented by polio, the poem underscores a similar conundrum as the one raised by the polio poems: How does a trauma of the past impact our understanding of the present? In “Seder, 2020,” the speaker draws meaning from the biblical story of the exodus from Egypt to help make sense of the Covid-19 pandemic. “This wildness/ afflicted us then, consumes us now” links the past to the present, just as “my mother’s weak smile sunk my heart” links the mother’s past with the speaker’s present in “Endless.” The continuous play between the past and the present begins to resolve itself in “Morning Love Song,” when the speaker, at long last, finds solace in the present moment.
The chronological sequencing of the poems captures the emotional trajectory of the pieces, setting forth a life story that unfolds in time. The collection begins with “Endless,” a poem that recognizes the embedded fact of timelessness, even in a chronological collection. In “Endless,” the reader is introduced to polio and Warm Springs and to the daughter’s conflict as she internalizes her mother’s experience: “I studied the tips of my fingers, / as daughter-love blossomed in my chest.” Then, in “Songbirds, 1969,” the reader learns that the speaker was fifteen years old in 1969 when she visited Warm Springs with her mother. It was there that she confronted the helpless doctors and unanswerable questions that presented themselves with polio. Thematically tied, these first two poems begin the unfolding chronology.
“Echocardiogram, 1999” follows “Songbirds, 1969” by thirty years. The speaker is now a forty-five-year-old woman and we learn that she has a heart murmur: her “loose chord’s sweet grief / bursts now with dangerous daughter-love.” This is the daughter-love first identified in “Endless.” The reader is urged to associate the daughter’s empathy explored in the first two poems with the physical malfunction taking root in her body—“daughter-love” migrates from a state of emotional intensity to a physically-exploding heart. When the reader leaps forward another twenty-one years to “Seder, 2020,” an appreciation of this speaker’s persona is already established in the reader’s imagination. Now the daughter is sixty-five and a pandemic has encroached, separating people from each other, spreading fear and confusion. Not surprisingly, the speaker probes the past to illuminate her current bewilderment. The Passover seder—retelling the exodus from Egypt—provides context for the speaker’s longing for pre-pandemic comfort and security: “our shoulders curl, /longing for the cucumbers of egypt.”
We are bound together, and our experiences impact the lives of those we love.
With “Morning Love Song,” we are returned to where we began: a sense of time without end. But now the mood is tranquil and there is a feeling of rhythmic composure. It is daybreak, and the speaker is at peace—alive in the moment, on her terrace: “and / I stand and I breathe and I gaze.” No reference is made to past trauma, no nagging angst or burden of sad-heartedness. Awe overcomes the speaker as she recites the word “rare” with billowing repetition. It is almost a prayer: “So rare, that heavens calls. Even rarer, I think, my answer.” With this closing poem, the emotional trajectory of the collection has circled back to time without end, but has advanced as well, towards wholeness.
With these five poems, we observe the speaker maturing into herself. I selected “Endless” as the title because I am convinced that a life story is never fully finished. We are interconnected in innumerable ways, as we shape the lives of others by means we may never fully understand. And the reverberations flow in countless directions. Here, the focus is the enduring influence of a physical trauma. Other organizing considerations may predominate in a different set of lives, but the dynamic is inevitably the same—we are bound together, and our experiences impact the lives of those we love.
On this flat screen these poems tell the story of a life, but on a wider plane they serve as a template for further contemplation: What imprint do we leave on the people in our lives? The Covid-19 pandemic relentlessly teaches how our choices impact the physical well-being of others. We mask up, not only to protect ourselves, but to safeguard those around us. We separate physically because we understand how deeply connected we are to each another. As we continue to ponder our physical interconnectedness, we need also pay attention to our interactions that transcend materiality. What else do we spread? Beyond the spray of droplets, what do we transmit emotionally and spiritually? How do our life experiences shape the people around us? Our moods? Our silences? What stories do we tell? How might we transfer lessons of significance without ever knowing it? When we emerge into a new and rare world—released from isolation, transformed by the Covid-19 pandemic—I hope we remain attentive to the importance of our interconnectedness. Where do you end and the people you love the most begin? What do you share and reproduce in the world? The influences we have on one another are, indeed, endless.