Beauty Is a Verb

by Jennifer Bartlett

  •

  The more I learned signs, the more organic my poetry became; the lowercase “i” became an assertive “I.” It was as if the aspiration to become hearing through my mastery and understanding of the current Top 40 songs no longer mattered. I still listened to music, but I was now listening to the other music within.

  I wrote poems about the boy I loved, most of which I destroyed in fear of being found out.

  But not once did I write about being deaf. That did not happen until the fall of 1984 when I went to Gallaudet University. I discovered ASL, the deaf LGBT community and literature.

  There, the puzzling signposts on the road of my life made sense all at once. Yes, I was deaf. And gay. And a poet. I hadn’t been on the road to nowhere!

  Using ASL freed me at last. Being able to understand completely what was being said gave me invincible wings.

  It enabled me to have the courage to look different and not worry about what others thought of me. I wasn’t going to try speaking at the same time with my signs. I wasn’t going to try signing in the English word order. And I wasn’t going to hide the fact that I was deaf—and gay—in my own writing.

  My life has been a highway after I took that exit to Gallaudet.

  •

  Switching lights between English and ASL constantly fills the shadows of a phrase or an expression. The way to describe something in English would be described very differently in ASL. I write in English, but I dream in ASL, or at least, I don’t recall dreaming of myself speaking. ASL unleashes my emotion, and English tempers it. This tension between these two disparate languages informs all my rewrites because I borrow nonstop from each language without thinking about it. If I have trouble with a line, I sign it and rewrite. Sometimes I find I have to invent new ways of describing things in English because ASL is often superior to what’s possible in English.

  Writing a poem is never straightforward. Yes, there’s the setting down of lines, at first a ramble of images and words. Yes, there’s the constant pruning of words and stanzas to achieve a certain look, a mood. But I am always listening to the poem’s melody itself. What’s its time signature? Emotional pitch? Can it be shorter and yet dense like one of the memorable singles produced as a “Wall of Sound” by Phil Spector? Like a jazz musician long used to hours of on-the-spot improvisation, I rewrite as if onstage. My melody must sing, sing, sing!

  I do not hear as well as I used to in the days when I discovered the Bee Gees for the first time, but this doesn’t bother me. My heart still knows how to listen, and that’s the most important ear of all.

  Consonants

  1.

  Standing in the choir, I watch

  out of the corners of my eyes

  my classmates singing from their books.

  I try to hold my silent vowels

  as long as they do before

  I blink my eyes and miss

  the beginning of their next note.

  People in the audience who know me

  struggle to hide their smiles

  when they catch me in the last row.

  My mouth movements must be out of sync.

  I want to fall backwards,

  off the bleachers

  into the Montreal River,

  floating amidst its mist

  of dragonflies sewing the air

  and cattails knitting

  songs that I need not sing.

  Everywhere I see their voices

  never in tune. I exhale in relief.

  2.

  Mrs. Fraites, my speech therapist, peers

  over her bifocals into my eyes. “Do that again.”

  I try to reel in my tongue,

  lock up its sides rising up like the valley

  inside the cavern of my mouth.

  I hiss “st.”

  “Try again.”

  “St. St.”

  “The front of your tongue’s too close

  to your teeth.” She draws a map

  of my tongue encircled by a moat

  of teeth, pinpointing just how far back

  I should wait before I volley the sound.

  I try again. She smiles.

  3.

  Consonants are cannonballs I cannot hear.

  People hearing me for the first time search

  for the solid sounds spanning the bridge

  of vowels. Some of them give up.

  I am an unnecessary detour,

  a road construction annoyance.

  4.

  “Errrrr,” I stress. Today

  is another war between “r” and “w.”

  I am starting to realize how cursed

  I am with my first name.

  I have long spoken my name as “Waymond,”

  forgetting often to curl up the tip of my tongue

  for the preciously elusive jewel of all consonants.

  “W” requires no thought: “We,” “will,” “weak.”

  But the “R” demands focus: My tongue aims,

  a rifle pointing at the sky past my teeth,

  not to overshoot the eaves.

  The consonant “w” is an eagle soaring,

  its wings spanning all below.

  The consonant “r” is a hummingbird.

  One mustn’t blink lest you never catch its thumbnail wings.

  Instructions to Hearing Persons

  Desiring a Deaf Man

  His eyebrows cast shadows everywhere.

  You are a difficult language to speak.

  His long beard is thick with distrust.

  You are another curiosity seeker.

  His hands are not cheap trinkets.

  Entire lives have been wasted on you.

  His face is an inscrutable promise.

  You are nothing but paper and ink.

  His body is more than a secret language.

  Tourists are rarely fluent in it.

  His eyes will flicker with a bright fire when

  you purge your passport of sound.

  Let your hands be your new passport, for

  he will then stamp it with approval.

  A deaf man is always a foreign country.

  He remains forever a language to learn.

  Ablutions of the Tongue

  Forgive me, Father, for I’ve committed a venial sin

  while an altar boy at St. Michael’s. I dreamed

  entire congregations struck dumb, their eyes wild

  with fear and helplessness. I would step down from my cross

  and free birds of paradise from my hands,

  their plumage catching glints of pure prism,

  wordlessness an art to behold. Utterances, now noise

  pollution, would catch wind and swirl high above their heads

  while they tear at their own throats, commanding

  a single sound of importance. I would stand still,

  waiting for the blood on their fingernails to cake.

  Their sobs would slow into hiccups of what next.

  The only one smiling, I would take off my surplice

  and unzip my black cassock like a butterfly

  casting aside its childhood of drabness.

  Down the aisle I would walk out the back

  of St. Michael’s and see people in great shock

  of finding their own voices gone to the heavens.

  For days afterwards I could pick out my new friends

  on the street. They were the only ones smiling.

  Hummingbirds

  Our new Sheet Metal teacher left

  us boys alone in the cafeteria.

  My notebook was filled with

  sugarcubes of want.

  One of them said,“Hey you!

  What you doin’ over there?”

  My fingers were only

  hummingbirds in a small cage.

  I sat up and freed

  my deaf voice, my hearing hands.

  They fluttered under my chin, in

  front of my chest, everywhere.r />
  The boys’ eyes narrowed like a cat’s

  for a minute. Then they stood up.

  My voice faltered as I felt

  their fierce wings beating.

  “Fairy! Look at his hands

  swishing in the air!”

  Lilacs’ fragrances melted

  under globs of solder.

  The boys flaunted limp wrists. I shot

  all my birds in mid-flight.

  Anne Kaier

  RIVER CREATURE

  One October afternoon about ten years ago, I sat fingering the bark of the yew tree that dominates my small Philadelphia garden. As an evergreen, my yew is prized in the city, and it’s been allowed to grow freely, reaching nearly thirty feet. Its bark bunches in rough clumps where the branches fork. On the trunk, it peels in copper-gray strips. The tree’s skin is rather like my skin. Only the tree’s is normal and mine is not. Mine also flakes and mottles because I have a rare skin condition called ichthyosis in which the skin does not shed normally, but clots and peels perpetually. It’s genetic, chronic and inelegant.

  That afternoon, once again, I had been looking for a way to talk about my skin in the poetry I’d recently begun to write. How, I wondered, should I handle my flawed body? What attitude do I take? What language do I use? The answers did not come easily. All my life I had been taught to ignore my skin condition, to pretend—against manifest evidence—that the problem didn’t exist. Schooled in silence on the subject, I had to develop a stance about my ichthyosis and then find the voice for my first poems that reflected the fact of my condition. The poems didn’t simply pour out. I set out very consciously to choose certain seams of metaphor. How was I going to talk about this body which flushes with an unnatural redness and cracks in patterns like a desert pool drying in the sun?

  I knew what attitude I did not want to profess. There was no way I’d let myself be sentimental. No nonsense about how God or some wise power gave me this disease for some greater benefit. I remember once going to the confirmation of a friend’s daughter. One of the confirmands was a child with muscular dystrophy. The bishop looked out over the rows of preteens in their thin dresses and dark suits and told us that the child with muscular dystrophy was actually lucky that God had given him this burden, luckier than the kids who could easily run. In the back of the church, I seethed and swore to fight such attitudes, which were implicitly patronizing, glossing over the difficulties of being different—much as my own trained silence on the subject of my illness did.

  Of course, I certainly wasn’t about to treat myself as a freak either. I flinched when I read that, as late as the 1950s, someone with ichthyosis allowed himself to be called Alligator Man and made a living as a sideshow attraction in the Ringling Brothers Circus. Even today the TLC channel regularly features people such as conjoined twins who have unusual bodies, and encourages the audience to treat such people as freak-show performers.

  It has been easier for me to know how I wouldn’t present myself than to know how I would. In searching for an answer, I wondered what other writers and artists did. I’d been taken with the story of how the nineteenth-century French painter, Jacques-Louis David, portrayed the fanatical revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat, who was murdered in his bath during the French Revolution. Marat suffered from a debilitating skin disease called dermatitis herpetiformis, or Duhring’s Disease. For relief, Marat spent as much time as possible in a medicinal bath, plotting the deaths of his enemies. On July 13, 1793, a young woman in a rival faction gained entry to his bathroom and stabbed him. David, who admired Marat, immortalized this scene in a famous painting. Simon Schama calls this painting a lie because David has transformed Marat into a hero. His skin looks clean—his arms muscular and firm. If David had wanted to portray Marat as evil, implies Schama, he would have shown the man’s skin as red, blistering, scaly. The sins of the soul would have shown themselves in the flaws of the body. I hope I am not alone in finding this a positively medieval equation.

  Although I don’t think my skin has ever quite prompted anyone to think of me as morally corrupt, I’ve often encountered fear. Like many people with ichthyosis, I was stared at continually as a child. Other kids were frightened by my scaly skin and scarlet face. In summer, because ichthyosis plugs up my sweat glands, I lack the cooling, if cloying, moisture of ordinary sweat. Warmth builds up in my body, and my face can turn a dark purple-red.

  One August afternoon, when I was about eight, my mother and I walked along a hot sidewalk toward the local supermarket. On that treeless concrete path, the heat caught up with me and my pounding heart turned my cheeks a deep scarlet. Two boys on bikes pedaled by, then slowed, swerved and circled back. One leaned forward yelling, “Look at that girl,” to his pal, “her face, man—that’s a sin!” I could feel him circling nearer, his bike wheeling up onto the pavement. I ducked my face away. The supermarket door stood three yards ahead. As I pushed through the heat, willing myself to keep moving as he taunted me, my mother spun around on her strong legs.

  “Look at that boy!” she spat out. “Who does he think he is?” I heard the bikers brake, wheel off and rattle down the street. She followed me through the glass door into the cool store. With her hand on my shoulder, she leaned down and practically hissed in my ear: “Did that boy wound you?”

  I didn’t know how to answer her. The intensity of her love was almost as difficult to bear as the boy’s jibes—and more familiar. I wanted to shake them both off. So I mumbled “not really,” and ducked beneath the family code of not talking about my skin—a code which she had just broken.

  Years later, as I began to write poetry, I thought back to that scene and wondered what kind of primitive fear lay behind the boy’s pointing finger. Was he worried about catching the disease? Was he disturbed by the sight of a child who looked so rivetingly different—or was he reacting to some itchiness in his own boyish body? All the above, perhaps. I also asked myself how I could handle that kind of fear—not on the street—but in my readers.

  If the people who read my work were afraid of skin disease, if they even thought that my condition was the reflection of a polluted soul, how, I wondered, could I ever neutralize their fear? How could I make them see me clearly? I knew that the way in which I characterized my body would affect the way I invited others to look at me, know me, accept me. I didn’t want to be feared. I didn’t want to inspire only pity or horror. I wanted to write about my skin in a way that would assuage terror, tame it. But first I had to tangle with my own feelings about my body.

  In the end, like poets from forever, I turned to the natural world. Here were pools of metaphor and a way of looking that I could use. The yew tree, I thought, peels and is beautiful. Its bark whorls like the clumps of skin between my toes. Sitting next to it, I stretched my hand out to its trunk and the scales on my palms met its rough bark.

  I think that afternoon with the yew tree gave me a beginning, a sort of permission to write poetry about my body. Using language drawn from nature, which, of course, can be intensely cruel, gave me one way to show myself—to myself and to others—as part of a larger current of life. It also gave me a way to depict myself without false sentimentality, with a kind of clinical accuracy. In a poem “Cossetted” that I wrote a few months later, I pictured myself as a baby in the rushes like baby Moses, but also as a river creature—scaly, strange and beautiful.

  The river creature image, with its suggestion of strangeness, of alligators, and above all, of water—which is life to my dry skin—gave me a way to talk about my body as a living, natural creation. The link to the baby Moses—hubris by any standard, I suppose—gave balm to my ego and refuted those who would associate flawed skin with moral evil. Once I had the river creature image, I could go further, could describe my own face very precisely, sparing neither the reader nor myself. To write like this was a great relief. I could finally confront the realities of my condition, yet see myself as a part of the eternal natural world. No longer an anomaly, I too was part of all creati
on—and I had the language to prove it.

  Cosseted

  1.

  In my fantasy, the organdie dress

  bought to cup flawless cheeks

  fills with a baby whose skin mottles

  with scale, clumps in ridges on her back.

  She’s a river creature,

  washed like the infant Moses

  from some muddy mutation,

  a gene gone awry in the womb.

  I coo and tell her she’s pretty in her eyes

  and in my eyes, in her dress she’s pretty;

  she smiles and her smile breaks into fissures

  at the corners of her lips.

  I wipe blood from the cracks and never mind

  that her dress is stained.

  I pick her up as tenderly as any mother, as any father.

  I tell her she’s pretty and she smiles.

  2.

  In our seashore town,

  anger hit me like a hot dry wind.

  It’s a cruel place for anyone over thirty,

  for anyone with a skin disease.

  Shoals of girls in bikinis

  swim along the beach.

  As a child, playing in the sand,

  squinting at my chest,

  jumping around the truth of my legs,

  words screened my eyes:

  no, no, no, that’s not me

  there’s nothing wrong.