Bodies & Compromise
Recently, a friend of mine (you don’t know him) wrote me an email about his experience with illness, and his feelings of anger and frustration with it. It’s a strange thing, to know that you exist inside something–are part of something–that is failing you. I don’t know exactly what he’s feeling. But when I read his email, I did think a lot about how I felt when I was pregnant with a very sick baby when I was 25. I felt betrayed by my body–I’d been pretty nice to it–good eating habits and no hard drugs, exercise–we’d had one good healthy baby together, but now it was failing me and I was pissed. If you can’t trust your body, who can you trust? Before that, I had been a pretty staunch and certain atheist (obnoxious even, in the way of any extremist). But then I started to have to think of my body as something not ME. And so I was having to let go of some of the certainty. I could not possibly be this failing thing, because my emotions were so acute. So then I had to, in some ways, detach from it and review my understanding of myself.
Our relationships with our bodies change. We realize we can’t count on them to just do as they are told. I think this changing landscape is sort of the crux of what living is about–learning to compromise with the world as it is, even if the part of the world you’re compromising with is your own body.
Read the poem below, and then write about your body from three perspectives:
- What you remember of it as a child (perhaps pull in a memory from a childhood scrape–a fall off a bicycle etc)
- Puberty/Adolescence–that first time you become aware of (and maybe even a little freaked out by) how it is does its own thing
- A recent time you noticed a change in your body–ability, illness, or maybe you’re training for something physical and seeing increases in strength or endurance.
Or write whatever you need to write. You know that’s always an option. Then send those poems to yours truly if you want. My inbox is hungry for poems.
Variation on a Line from Elizabeth Bishop’s “Five Flights Up”
BY STANLEY PLUMLY
Sometimes it’s the shoes, the tying and untying,
the bending of the heart to put them on,
take them off, the rush of blood
between the head and feet, my face,
sometimes, if I could see it, astonished.
Other times the stairs, three, four stages
at the most, “flights” we call them,
in honor of the wings we’ll never have,
the fifth floor the one that kills the breath,
where the bird in the building flies to first.
Love, too, a leveler, a dying all its own,
the parts left behind not to be replaced,
a loss ongoing, and every day increased,
like rising in the night, at 3:00 am,
to watch the snow or the dead leaf fall,
the rings around the streetlight in the rain,
and then the rain, the red fist in the heart
opening and closing almost without me.
“ — Yesterday brought to today so lightly!”
The morning, more and more, like evening.
When I bend to tie my shoes and the blood
fills the cup, it’s as if I see into the hidden earth,
see the sunburned path on which I pass
in shoes that look like sandals
and arrive at a house where my feet
are washed and wiped with my mother’s hair
and anointed with the autumn oils of wildflowers.
Source: Poetry (June 2015).
