On bodies

[kaberett]

THE CINNAMON PEELER

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbor to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
-- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

    this is how you touch other women 
the grasscutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume.

        and knew 

    what good is it 
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in an act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of scar.


You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.

  --Michael Ondaatje

In much of my own work this year (seek & ye shall find; [a scribble]; writing my wrongs) I play with the idea of the body as palimpsest: of our histories being written on our skins, metaphorically but also literally (laughter and frown lines, and of course scars, for those of us who have laid our bodies on altars of surgical steel). But it's not just that: it's about struggling with being queer, and genderqueer, and making that legible: the idea of "legible" identities, of being correctly "read". And it's the assumptions that other people make about my queer disabled body (and my queer disabled self) and my capabilities, and how oppressive that can be and can feel.

But more than that, for me it is about coming to terms and, yes, my word for the year, reclamation. Through the constraints of poetical forms I explore (at least in theory!) the constraints of my body: I've not yet written the sonnet about the pillars of my ribcage, but it is mulling, gently.

But it's not just about constraint, about strictures: my words have also been about body-as-poetry, poetry-as-body, encircling and enfolding and making safe. Among others, I think that I am here drawing on Ani DiFranco: your bones will be my bedframe and your flesh will be my pillow. And then, of course, there is Neruda, who is close to my heart because he makes bodies into the Earth into poems.

So: one of the things that poetry helps me with, helps me relate to, is my changing body and my changing relationship to it and why scent is so important to me; and poetry helps me better understand the bodies of others, and the embodiment of others.

And it all circles back, over and over, to my feeling that our histories are (being) written on our bodies, and simultaneously we write them in poetry, and both are cryptic and both are layered, and there is the tension between the action of the world on our selves and of our selves on the world; of the concept of the death of the author and how it applies to spinning our own lives into narratives, and weaving ourselves into the stories of others, and how we are seen by others. (And the shifts of perspective, of course: in Ovid's Heroides, in Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife, who take people whose value was in part determined by their bodies and give them voice, make them into something else.)

As you've probably gathered by now, one of my absolute favourite things about poetry is resonance - how we can communicate via the echoes of poems we love in poems that are new to us (and this is going to be the subject of my next post for you). It makes space for us to talk: and so. If you are comfortable, I would love for you to tell me about your experiences and your favourites, and -- in advance, I thank you, because I am keenly aware of how intimate a request this is.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

It's not a poem, but: Hiram Powers's "The Greek Slave" statue. I mention it because your last paragraph reminded me of a poem I read recently, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Hiram Powers' 'Greek Slave'":

They say Ideal beauty cannot enter
The house of anguish. On the threshold stands
An alien Image with enshackled hands,
Called the Greek Slave! as if the artist meant her
(That passionless perfection which he lent her,
Shadowed not darkened where the sill expands)
To so confront man's crimes in different lands
With man's ideal sense. Pierce to the centre,
Art's fiery finger! and break up ere long
The serfdom of this world. Appeal, fair stone,
From God's pure heights of beauty against man's wrong!
Catch up in thy divine face, not alone
East griefs but west, and strike and shame the strong,
By thunders of white silence, overthrown.

[kaberett]

Oh, wow -- thank you for sharing.

[calissa]

What an amazing poem! Thank you for sharing that.

[kaberett]

You're very welcome!

Most of the poems I'm sharing this week I first encountered in the Bloodaxe trilogy of anthologies Being Alive, Staying Alive and Being Human. They're 20th and 21st century poetry from around the world, and I adore them.

[calissa]

Ah, thank you! I shall add them to my wishlist and con some unsuspecting relative into buying them at some stage :)

[zirconium]

It may well be because I'm on the verge of that time of month, but the first poem that came to mind when I started thinking about poems about bodies was Lucille Clifton's Wishes for Sons.

And here's a recording of her reciting "Homage to My Hips."

And because death/aliveness is never far from my mind when I think about incarnation: Gwendolyn Brooks's The Rites for Cousin Vit.

The book currently by my bathtub is Fred Chappell's Midquest. I'm not digging it as a whole, but "My Grandmother Washes Her Feet" (which is mostly about her telling young Fred about the skankier branches of the family tree) gets off to a killer start:

I see her still, unsteadily riding to the edge
Of the clawfoot tub, mumbling to her feet,
Musing bloodrust water about her ankles.
Cotton skirt pulled up, displaying bony
Bruised patchy calves that would make you weep.

Rinds of her soles had darkened, crust-colored--
Not yellow now -- like the tough outer belly
Of an adder. In fourteen hours the most refreshment
She'd given herself was dabbling her feet in the water.

And later: "she giggled, a sound like stroking muslin."

(My maternal grandmother was also a tough old peasant, so some of the resonance comes from that connection.)

[kaberett]

Oh, goodness, yes - thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

[calissa]

The book currently by my bathtub Oh, I like this :)

[cadenzamuse]

*has thought bubble* My history is not written on my body in any obvious way--all my disabilities are invisible ones except for the TMJ splint in my mouth that has prompted a cashier to tell me that "my retainer is falling out." Nasty shock, that.

Anyway, I have very little history that I can see on my body, and all of it is incidental and doesn't reflect the important things--which is probably why I have such a strong need to punch a hole in my ear for every important thing that happens to me. To shape my body to say "Yes, this did happen, it's real, feel it, it's written here."

Also, this post (like all your posts!) and poem are badass and full of food for thought (pun!), and I'm enjoying the discussion, too.

[kaberett]

Oh dear goodness I have so many feelings about body modification as it relates to the subject matter of this post. One of the things I want as ink is the closing couplet of the first poem in today's post, in fact - because I think that the active choice of making our selves visible, of wearing our hearts or our whatever elses on our sleeve, is at least as much a thing as what the world plonks onto us.

[raze]

Oh, wow. This was a lovely poem, thank you for sharing. I have definite thoughts on the body and the relationship thereto, but need some time to organize it.

[kaberett]

I would be absolutely delighted to read them, as and when they bubble over into text.

TW: self harm, eating disorders, body/gender dysphoria

[raze]

Okay, let's try this.

I often do not perceive my body as part of the same machine as my mind. My body is more or less an old clunker that gets its passenger, my mind, from point A to point B, with the sort of love-hate relationship a person has with an unreliable vehicle they've owned for years and would take to the junkyard in a heartbeat if they could afford better.

My body isn't "right," and it never has been. For as long as I can remember, I have had a very poor sense of my size, my relation to my surroundings when moving through space, my weight, and even my appearance. There are times when basic tasks like walking are compromised by the disparity between the body I have and the body I feel. I have a difficult time assessing myself relative to other people and things; my mind believes that I am bigger than I am despite being 5'1" and very petite with very little change in my size since high school.

The fact that the my body does not feel right results in a dysphoria that is compounded by my physical and mental health, as well as my gender identity. I am genderqueer in a manner strongly masculine-leaning, but any attempts to express my gender physically are thwarted by an inherently feminine body. I can work out until the cows come home; it only makes me spindly and wiry, never bulky. I can wear mens' clothing, but the closest I'll come to being gendered correctly is the occasional child mistaking me for a teenaged boy. But I do no consider myself a boy because I am not a child, which is almost as upsetting as being identified as female. I find it as belittling as people who refer to me as "cute" or who call me "sweetie" due to my small and youthful appearance.

It doesn't stop there. I can not look in the mirror and accurately assess my body. I associate curves with femininity and think I have more than I do despite an adult weight that is well below average for my size; for many years, in a combination of skewed body image and intention to harm myself, I starved and exercised myself relentlessly in an attempt to whittle away anything that might give me the look of a woman: breasts, hips. The irony was that it only made me look smaller and more frail, creating a sort of tail-chasing body hate spiral.

Anxiety and obsession also made me a self-mutilator to the effect of significant, widespread scarring on my thighs, breasts, genitals, and arms. I don't have the option of pretending I am mentally well; if I wear anything but long sleeves and long pants, my past (and occasional present) is extremely plain. I can not have a lover without them seeing and acknowledging the damage to my body.

Finally, my physical health is declining, and I am needing to adjust to a body that I loathe both the appearance and functionality of. I am an active person; I need to be an active person, but neurological dysfunction, chronic pain, and other complications sometimes make a body I already deem weak for its tiny stature a further hindrance to me. My response is to put it through the ringer while I still can; many people refuse to believe that I am as sick as I am because I still do so much. They can't comprehend that it is at the cost of going to sleep every night with no possible position to be comfortable in, being persistently exhausted and run ragged.

So, on this one level, I afford my body one tiny inkling of respect: I'm impressed that it has survived me so far. I am torn between marveling at its ability to be inhabited by something so hostile to it, and wanting to frantically pound the "eject" button. Because of this, reading about other people and how they do and don't respect their bodies, how they relate to their bodies, always fascinates me.

Re: TW: self harm, eating disorders, body/gender dysphoria

[kaberett]

This is amazing and raw and honest and... close to a lot of the ways I feel about my own body, on the days when I am less at peace with it. So -- thank you.

[fyreharper]

struggling with being queer ... and making that legible

My current relationship gets me read as straight, and the invisibility of that actually bothers me rather a lot.

There is not much history written on my body, unless you count the continued stubbornness of 'you can't make me' regarding the slightly-bodymod things (makeup etc) that are just expected in terms of performative femininity. If you add in neurochemistry and what-I-expect (from other people reacting to me, or from myself), though, that's like holding invisible ink against the light and oh there it is. All these shapes and threads I can trace back in patterns and echoes. (Hm, I wonder how those would interact with more-physical reclamation-marking. I do really wish I thought I could get away with dyeing weird colors into some of my hair, but I don't think my boss would appreciate it much.)