Expanding universe

[GuiltyPleasure]

Years ago I saw a documentary about polio victim Mark O'Brien. How he attended Berkley ferrying himself about on a motorized gurney using mirrors to see were he was going until it was deemed by the university as too dangerous - not to O'Brien but the populous. I loved his determination to remain as independent as possible against all odds, his humour and resilience and now I love his poetry.

Breathing

By Mark O'Brien, 1988


Grasping for straws is easier;

You can see the straws.

“This most excellent canopy, the air, look you,”

Presses down upon me

At fifteen pounds per square inch,

A dense, heavy, blue-glowing ocean,

Supporting the weight of condors

That swim its churning currents.

All I get is a thin stream of it,

A finger’s width of the rope that ties me to life

As I labor like a stevedore to keep the connection.

Water wouldn’t be so circumspect;

Water would crash in like a drunken sailor,

But air is prissy and genteel,

Teasing me with its nearness and pervading immensity.

The vast, circumambient atmosphere

Allows me but ninety cubic centimeters

Of its billions of gallons and miles of sky.

I inhale it anyway,

Knowing that it will hurt

In the weary ends of my crumpled paper bag lungs.

Not wanting to die a virgin, he hired Cheryl Cohen Greene, a sex therapist, to help him. Although purely business it is as truer a love story as any. I wrote this having been moved by their story.

Mark O’Brien gets laid

At thirty-six my body is all empty clothing,
twisted, tortured, pointless. Turning
is not an option, eyes, ears, mind percolate
all too well. From the neck up I’m perfect.
Paddle-hands, useless as empty gloves,
lie open at my sides, a state of pleading
but pleading for what? Not death,
those days are over for I am loved
and have loved but sex eludes me.
I dream of it at night and wake sticky
with reality. My carer says nothing
as he bathes me but it hangs in the air
like an accusation. I hate my body.

She comes into my claustrophobic world
like one of those pure spring days,
initiates all kinds of possibilities
not just hands but tongue and cunt,
she won’t mince words, a spade’s a spade
in her world. With talk and mirror she
lets me see my eager body, that straining
thing I had not seen since I was six
and calls it lovely, not a common word for me.
At last she touches it, nothing explodes,
we wait as she lowers, guides and smiles.
“Breathe” and I do.
Afterwards she kissed my chest.

Mark O’ Brian contracted polio at the age of six. He had three functioning muscles, one in his right foot, one in his neck and one in his jaw. With these he managed to be a successful reporter, publisher, journalist, social critic and poet.

Do you have something that moved and inspired you? Expanded your horizon?

 

[greenmountaineer]

I think the mark of a good poem, GP, is when you think it's even better upon second reading. I remember saying to myself, "This is a really good poem. Even the 'c' word, which I personally don't like, is effective, given the line in which it's inserted and the one that follows."

Your question made me think that sometimes we expand our universe paradoxically by contracting it. My wife and I are, in effect, parents to my 61 year old sister-in-law who caught a bacterial infection at 2 years old and has remained a 2 year old intellectually ever since. Stripped of all social convention, Mary Kate lives in a small universe. Cats are "meow." Her favorite color is yellow, and she is happy because she has a bird bath in the front yard she fills with water each day before she checks the mailbox. Her vocabulary is limited to perhaps 200 words, and most of her sentences are fragments, barely understood because of a speech impediment. Nonetheless, she's a gentle and loving soul, which to me says something remarkable about the universe.

She inspired me to write this poem several years ago:

The Pope of Fools

She gave him drink; her touch was soft
when soft was all that he could bear,
he whose tongue could barely speak
their words and tasted only pottage
after he rang the bells.

Jean Pierre, his joyful cohort
on the Feast of Fools, had jeered at him
as did the throng in La Place de Grève
for the fool’s two hours of pain
displayed upon the pillory.

She would not be Claude Frollo’s whore
who broke his priestly vow to God,
and Phoebus who had won her heart
merely toyed with Esmeralda
whose naked feet once danced in the street
but sway now from the gallows.

The diggers found them in the pit
when they had to pile more dirt
because it smelled and needed lime.
They saw the mouth, the droopy eye,
the hunched back of the feral child
embracing what was left of her,
and all at once those grave men knew
why bells no longer rang in Paris.