Dear Ms. Miller,
Meeting like this, where you speak and I don’t respond, then I speak and you don’t respond… we become well acquainted—simply through word, simply through silence.
It’s strange still; I’d prefer to just have met you in person. Though, whatever this is brings me joy, so who’s to say?
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Yesterday, I was lying on my back, on my mattress, in the middle of the living room, my stomach like a blank face staring up at the fan.
Yesterday, I was lying on my stomach holding your poetry open with my right hand, holding my right hand down with my left hand, two pillows stuffed under my chest—a strange sort of swimming.
You write in one poem, “Turning to me forever / familiar faces of strangers.”
Though it is a strange way to meet, it seems fitting.
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On the inside cover of your book, it says you were “handicapped by cerebral palsy,” which reminds me of how sitting on a horse, you can do nothing but straighten your spine… a strange sensation. If I could just ride a horse to the bathroom… to the grocery store maybe. I wonder if people would stare at me in the checkout line. ‘Feel like my mode of travel is none of their business… I wonder if one of them would be willing to put my left foot back into the stirrup—these stirrups are not very accessible; my feet never stay in.
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I think by “handicapped by cerebral palsy,” someone may be implying that you have some catching up to do.
What do you think, Ms. Miller? Are you all caught up yet?
Between you and your words, between reading them, between adjusting ourselves to hear each other, we may, in fact, be catching up.
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Can you describe your suffering as a function of time?
In one poem, you write, “Now I sit idle, my hands / shaping wide arcs of nothing / serving as poems.” In idleness, time is a great wave washing against the stomach (assuming you’re lying on your back, under a ceiling fan). How fast does a fan have to spin for the air to hush against the warm want of the stomach?
In between two words, there is a distance measured only in absent units.
When I was young, my mother told me God was everywhere all at once.
What is the distance between word and want?
(Please answer in meters/sec2.)
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When you write, “Each moment is a thorn aflame with God,” is it because you snagged your right hand on an overgrown nail? Does the disability dissolve in its pain? Does pain belong to the disability, to the person, or to God alone?
If you look closely enough, there’s a palimpsest of tiny scars on the backs of my hands. I call it the beautiful account of my crippled activities. You call it “…Christ’s sprung grace.”
Does God reveal Himself through pain? Does the disability belong to God?
The Ancient Greeks had a clear answer to the latter question: exposure—in an effort to return the disabled infant to the gods. I wonder what those Ancient Greek mothers did with their hands after returning from the mountains childless.
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On the inside cover of the book, “cerebral palsy” is doing the “handicapping.” This is easy to hear if I say it in the active voice: “cerebral palsy handicapped Vassar Miller from birth,” where “cerebral palsy” is the subject, and “Vassar Miller” is the object, and “handicap” is still a verb that reminds one of horses and racing and betting… and making things equal.
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When “[you went] down where God Himself is only / the solution to a thorny equation,” were there lots of disabled people there among the green stalks, balancing the variables on their cattywampus limbs so that their disabilities became a way of finding value?
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I really hope you had a chance to hug a fellow spastic. If you’re both in wheelchairs, you have to find the optimal angle… it is all in the angle, Ms. Miller.
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I’ve been trying to identify this thing they say we have in common called “cerebral palsy,” which we have been “handicapped by… since birth.”
We may be touching, but only at the vibrating tangent lines of our cerebrums, only at the spasticities of our hands, never at the hands themselves. It’s not the crippledness we share, but the “…precision known / to the crippled….”
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What is the distance between precision and pain, between pain and word, between word and want?
You write, “All those comfortable words that would gather / My beloved Stranger, My strange Beloved, / To my mouth, O, that O, where my words orbit.” Still, it is strange meeting you like this, as word, as paper mouth, as paper O.
My fan spins above me, its blades circle a fixed point in space. My stomach receives its distance as an act of cooling, as an act of listening, where the limit as word approaches want is silence.
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The full sentence from the inside cover reads, “Handicapped by cerebral palsy since birth, she has overcome its disabilities with energy and courage.”
In the above sentence, “cerebral palsy” has (many) disabilities, all of which you “[overcame]” like a horse carrying a heavy load.
As you may well know, a horse carrying a heavy load must have “energy and courage” to compete with the other nondisabled horses.
What then is the mass of your cerebral palsy? and how much energy is required to overtake the lightest horse?
(Please answer in kilograms and joules respectively.)
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“Lying here past pain and pleasure / I am heavy with my wait.” Just as you say, Ms. Miller.
Lying on my back as the load pressing down on my mattress, the fan high above my stomach, lying on my stomach the words under my face, lying down on your word, lying across the space in between, the load as me, lying here, belly up, stomach down, in between mattress and fan, I am trying to overcome the insurmountable need to overcome.
Wish me luck.
Yours,
Latif
Notes
All quotes taken from If I Had Wheels or Love: Collected Poems of Vassar Miller.
I rifted on Jacques-Henri Striker’s analysis of the term “handicap” in A History of Disability (146-150).