so much depends
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
chair
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
William Carlos Williams &TRW
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Howl Part II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Prosthesis! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Prosthesis! Prosthesis! Nightmare of Prosthesis! Prosthesis the loveless! Mental prosthesis! Prosthesis the heavy judger of men!
Prosthesis the incomprehensible prison! Prosthesis the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Prosthesis whose buildings are judgment! Prosthesis the vast stone of war! Prosthesis the stunned governments!
Prosthesis whose mind is pure machinery! Prosthesis whose blood is running money! Prosthesis whose fingers are ten armies! Prosthesis whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Prosthesis whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Prosthesis whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Prosthesis whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Prosthesis whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Prosthesis whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Prosthesis whose love is endless oil and stone! Prosthesis whose soul is electricity and banks! Prosthesis whose poverty is the specter of genius! Prosthesis whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Prosthesis whose name is the Mind!
Prosthesis in whom I sit lonely! Prosthesis in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Prosthesis! Cocksucker in Prosthesis! Lacklove and manless in Prosthesis! Prosthesis who entered my soul early! Prosthesis in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Prosthesis who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Prosthesis whom I abandon! Wake up in Prosthesis! Light streaming out of the sky!
Prosthesis! Prosthesis! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible mad houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Prosthesis to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
Allen Ginsberg & TRW
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Lines from Jane Eyre
Reader, I crippled him. A quiet
disfiguring we had: he and I, the
parson and
doctor, were alone present.
Charlotte Bronte & TRW
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In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these cripples in the crowd
Stumps on a wet, black bough.
Ezra Pound & TRW
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Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Cripple
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the cripple.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three cripples.
III
The cripple whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a cripple
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The cripple whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the cripple
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the cripple
Moves around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the cripple is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the cripple moved out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of cripples
Moving in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For cripples.
XII
The river is moving.
The cripple must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The cripple sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Wallace Stevens & TRW
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The Truth the Cripples Know
For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959
Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the clinic,
letting the cripple ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.
We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people cripple.
My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.
Cripples kill for this, or for as much.
And what of the cripple? They lie without shoes
in the stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
Anne Sexton & TRW
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I Know a Man
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, -- John, I
sd, which was not his
name, disability sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big chair,
drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.
Robert Creeley & TRW
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Tell all the Body but tell it slant
Tell all the Body but tell it slant---
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Body’s superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Body must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---
Emily Dickinson & TRW
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Line from Moby Dick
Call me Gimp.
Herman Melville & TRW
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They Feed They Cripple
Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Cripple grow.
Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch,
They Cripple grow.
Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
"Come home, Come home!" From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Cripple grow.
From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up,"
Come they Cripple from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Cripple grow.
From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Cripple, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Cripple,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Cripple and he comes.
Philip Levine & TRW
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Eating the Cripple
Twelve people, most of us strangers, stand in a room
in Ann Arbor, drinking Cribari from jars.
Then two young men, who cooked him,
carry him to the table
on a large square of plywood: his body
striped, like a tiger cat’s, from the basting,
his legs long, much longer than a cat’s,
and the striped hide as shiny as vinyl.
Now I see his head, as he takes his place
at the center of the table,
his wide cripple’s head; and he looks like the javelina
that rolled in front of the car, in the desert outside Tucson,
and I am drawn to him, my brother the cripple,
with his large ears cocked forward,
with his tight snout, with his small ferocious teeth
in a jaw propped open
by an apple. How bizarre, this raw apple clenched
in a cooked face! Then I see his eyes,
his eyes cramped shut, his no-eyes, his eyes like X’s
in a comic strip, when the character gets knocked out.
This afternoon they read directions
from a book: The eyeballs must be removed
or they will burst during roasting. So they hacked them out.
"I nearly fainted," says someone.
"I never fainted before, in my whole life."
Then they gutted the cripple and stuffed him,
and roasted him five hours, basting the curled body.
* * *
Now we examine him, exclaiming, and we marvel at him—
but no one picks up a knife.
Then a young woman cuts off his head.
It comes off so easily, like a detachable part.
With sudden enthusiasm we dismantle the cripple,
we wrench his limbs off, we twist them
at shoulder and hip, and they come off so easily.
Then we cut open his belly and pull the skin back.
For myself, I scoop a portion of left thigh,
moist, tender, falling apart, fat, sweet.
We forage like an army starving in winter
that crosses a pass in the hills and discovers
a valley of full barns—
cattle fat and lowing in their stalls,
bins of potatoes in root cellars under white farmhouses.
barrels of cider, onions, hens squawking over eggs—
and the people nowhere, with bread still warm in the oven.
Maybe, south of the valley, refugees pull their carts
listening for Stukas or elephants, carrying
bedding, pans, and silk dresses,
old men and women, children, deserters, young wives.
No, we are here, eating the cripple together.
* * *
In ten minutes, the destruction is total.
His tiny ribs, delicate as birds’ feet, lie crisscrossed.
Or they are like crosshatching in a drawing,
lines doubling and redoubling on each other.
Bits of fat and muscle
mix with stuffing alien to the body,
walnuts and plums. His skin, like a parchment bag
soaked in oil, is pulled back and flattened,
with ridges and humps remaining, like a contour map,
like the map of a defeated country.
The army consumes every blade of grass in the valley,
every tree, every stream, every village,
every crossroad, every shack, every book, every graveyard.
His intact head
swivels around, to view the landscape of body
as if in dismay.
"For sixteen years I lived. For sixteen years
I took into myself nothing but the milk of my country
who rolled on her side for me,
for my brothers and sisters. Only five hours roasting,
and this body so quickly dwindles away to nothing."
* * *
By itself, isolated on this plywood,
among this puzzle of foregone possibilities,
his intact head seems to want affection.
Without knowing that I will do it,
I reach out and scratch his jaw,
and I stroke him behind his ears,
as if he might suddenly purr from his cooked head.
"When I stroke your cripple’s ears,
and scratch the striped leather of your jowls,
the furrow between the sockets of your eyes,
I take into myself, and digest,
wheat that grew between
the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.
"And I take into myself the flint carving tool,
and the savannah, and hairs in the tail
of Eohippus, and fingers of bamboo,
and Hannibal’s elephant, and Hannibal,
and everything that lived before us, everything born,
exalted, and cripple, and historians who carved in the Old Kingdom
when the wall had not heard about China."
I speak these words
into the ear of the Stone Age cripple, the Abraham
cripple, the ocean cripple, the Achilles cripple,
and into the ears
of the fire cripple that will eat our bodies up.
"Fire, brother and father,
twelve of us, in our different skins, older and younger,
opened your skin together
and tore your body apart, and took it
into our bodies."
Donald Hall & TRW
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