Dreaming the World

It’s New Years Eve and I’m watching flurries come in off the lake, coat the trees, then give way to periods of sun and scattered cloud. Beautiful! Also cold; it’s in the teens Fahrenheit. Not real comfortable out, especially in the shade and breeze.

I’m thinking about the changing year, and the way some things seem to stay the same.  Yesterday, a poet acquaintance of mine sent along a poem that set me to thinking about stereotyping and fear, certainly themes this year in North America. Sadly, the poem was written in 1995, yet could have been penned yesterday. Reading the poem, it occurred to me that we may benefit from considering what makes us uncomfortable. I get the sense that the New Age sees The Medicine and those who work with it as all about comfort and optimism. Yet often The Medicine points us in the direction of that which is repressed and rejected, suggesting meaning and  joy may be found in that which is feared, rejected, or erased.

This morning I’ve heard from a friend and a relative about cancer. Scary stuff, eh? I’m aging so I encounter serious illness more often. Yet one of those who wrote this morning had cancer in her twenties. One of my college friends had cancer as a child. She was ashamed of her body as there were many scars where her lymph nodes were removed. She was a brilliant flutist who could not imagine much of a future, the cancer always a risk to return. We shared a deep, if largely unspoken, bond, as I also carried a sense of foreshortened life and the imminent return of Polio. That similarity also kept us apart; it was too painful to share so much anxiety about the future.

Since reading Erren’s poem I’ve been thinking a lot about anxiety and discomfort, and the way my Polio body affects some folks. (For a long, long, time I was terrified of other disabled people.)  I’ve often had the sense that folks are frightened of me; maybe they still think I’m contagious. Perhaps I remind them of their vulnerability. Then again, maybe we are just hard-wired to fear contagion and to avoid it. Or maybe we just struggle with difference. (We live, after all, in a culture that knows “race” does not exist as such, and can’t talk about it!)

Having a Polio body, a body marked by difference, carries more than a little shame for me, as for many Polios. I guess it is almost impossible not to internalize that normative gaze that defines us cripples as Other. Yet The Medicine insists that those whose lives are influenced by difference carry crucial information about the sacred. Maybe our Indian holy places do the same. I wonder whether the wholesale destruction of Native sacred sites is a hidden war against the discomfort that can come with paying attention to The Medicine, and the history of the Others who carry it.  It’s a conundrum.

So here is the poem. My gratitude to Erren Kelly for sharing it.

on the bus

a white woman

stands rather than
sits
she is a lost star
in a sea of black
faces

she clutches her groceries
never looking back
if she could
she’d grow eyes out
of the back of her
head

a black boy and his wannabe black
white friend walk by her yelling
” that lady scared to sit
with black people”

she then sits next
to a black boy
as if to prove she’s
not afraid

it is amazing how
fear selects  its
victims:

a white woman who is my
closest friend
edits my poetry books
and invites me to
eat in her home

another is my neighbor
she keeps her doors and
windows locked

and i always feel funny
when she and her hippie friends
invite me
over to have beer or party
with them

another white woman
send me her poetry
but won’t see me

what could i have
done
to cause her to
fear me
like the woman on the bus
who clutches
her purse
who watches her
groceries

like a lioness protecting
her cubs

erren geraud kelly/ 1995

Here’s another poem and a brief bio by way of Rays Road Review.