Lisa Gill

THE WRITTEN FORMS OF THIS MYRIAD BODY:
Essay and Poems

When I think of either the physical body or a body of poetry, I think of two interlocked processes: adaptability and discovery.

With a neurological disorder dating to childhood, one that periodically wreaks havoc on everything from my olfactory and auditory perception to my ability to walk to the bookshelf or even read what I find there, I remain conscious of the tension between unpredictability and possibility. While many ordinary goals and expectations are undermined, different opportunities crop up daily.

Some times survival is the most I can muster, the very basics of "abiding." Yet even in despair, I remain curious. What do you do when months of study drop off into the abyss of burned gray matter, when physical strength comes and goes like a whim and concentration interrupts itself, when half of the torso is an oak tree, when the body recovers?

Every book I've written explores a different aspect of what I call "tethered freedom," where I work with some constraint of content or form, and some flexibility. For me, that is "organic." My sense-making, pattern-seeking, magical-thinking impulses are strong.

Equally strong is my desire for discovery. I don't want to only write what I know. Relinquishing the control of my conscious mind to the rigors of even a light form, inevitably leads me to alternative ways of being and moving within the poem.

The inaudible rhyme is a form I developed initially to honor the poet Delmore Schwartz as part of the Eden the Plumb series. Later, in grief, the form called me back. In pain, again I returned to it, daily for almost a year. What began as a desire to respond honestly to one poet culminated with a utilitarian and practical discipline that let me reap benefits you might expect of deep meditation, including rendering pain moot, forgotten, oddly alleviated.

The first stanza is written willy-nilly, free verse, using whatever words desired–and as many lines as wanted. The second stanza, however, must mirror the first stanza, and requires both front and end rhymes that reference all of the initial lines, albeit in an inverted and flipped pattern.

Ultimately there are as many pairs of rhymes as lines in the poem, though only one should be overtly auditory–the hinge pin* which happens at the stanza cusp.

Sample Formula for Six-Line Poem

A-------------------------F
B-------------------------E
C-------------------------D*

D*-----------------------C
E-------------------------B
F-------------------------A

I consider the inaudible rhyme a dialogue between free will and fate, a tale of action and consequence, revelation coupled with the discovery of what that revelation means.

In dream, a slip of paper with the solitary word "malleability" is handed to me. Awake, what is steadfast is my desire for the ability to change as needed. Writing is where I learn how to embrace new forms, physical and literary.

***

Ten Poems from "The Inaudible Rhyme"
And One for Delmore Schwartz from "Eden the Plumb"

#1 Mala Beads for Carmela with Everyday Empathy

Extricate: the tumor, the narcissist, the barrette
pinning stray hair back. All our heady tumplines
frayed to rasp with fear and grinding, propriety–
every fat seed of attachment–will one day snap.

Map the exhalation. Breath has invisible topography,
piety of molecules making way for some twisted braid,
fine twine of something still and something spinning,
cold sweat of transforming "abet" into "a bet" so delicate.

*

#2 Officers Can't Talk Down the Suicide

A slashed wrist cannot hear
the city's song, sirens flashing,
blades and teeth glinting. A lyric bullet
traverses through morning into flesh:
We will take your body, wounded, back

track to the ward. Which of us doesn't flee
enmeshments for an hour: suddenly averse,
gullet tight or taped-off. Fight crime. Fight aubades,
sing a ditty and let the dawn remain pretty,
fear offed like any nineteen-year-old awash.

*

#3 Croon for the Incredulous Dropped Eave

I remember days I didn't listen,
slippery indiscretion. The slope of ear
merits more than giving lip. "True that"
language is best when accidentally overheard:

words ripped from the context of our vantage,
spatting with the moment we thought we'd inherit,
adhere more closely to mind-blow, brainwave blip
kissing the day so full of tongue we come unhemmed.

*

#4 How to Carve a Presence into Now
(Inscription Rock, El Morro)

Paso por aqui, we say to each other.
You reference my thighs, I your chest,
our bodies geology. The cliff steeps,
carved with longing, each incline a test
of balance. Why, I ask, must you make
each letter a pitch-perfect footed seraph
when time is short? Look at the dead:

threaded names on rock face. 1600s men
bluff their way into history books. Peachy,
the stake a girl or two chisels on chance,
best record of life before internet verve.
Keep in mind we make daily the same sour
request: remember me. This is no easy boon:
loathing to be forgotten. Centuries amass, O.

*

#5 The Best Laid Double Yellow Lines of Discourse

Sixteen lesions, one black hole, and black top.
No neurologist approved this road trip to Tucson.
My mother wants me to stop traveling for months,
be freed from any asphalt obligations except the ones
she wants me to honor with green bean casseroles,
my illness lauded like tablecloth or door wreath,
decorative knowledge with no legroom. Feeling–

reeling, I can't help but wonder about this wreck.
Beneath every crash is only the private wish to spill.
Holing up, housebound, would let my mind carry
tons of physical strain to some other metaphorical keep,
fermenting the body in stillness, yummed to shudder.
Ruse/fondle/sonnets: good poems always burrow,
track rock to subterranean's beck, dirt-gleaned.

*

#6 Solace: The Accidental Visitation Untoward

When I get a chance to breathe, belly full
enough to exhale, something falls to sleeping.
Call it the great tirade, call it the tired grate,
that fat yammering set to sudden stunned silence,

stints of peace. I hear God; the unanswering cat
crates up my monstrosities and lets befall
steeping, the ear ringing with possibility, stuff
culled from hope. I forget to worry some then.

*

#7 The Fine Art of Various Devastations

Cringe: the shelf falls and blown glass shatters.
Sweeper and dustpan rival the gallery's insurance
if you account for the shudders amassing so fast
breath only returns on the body's compulsory cue.

Who can truly live with empathy? Our slipshod method
lasts longer than feeling every nuance of grief, stiff
stance of corpse. The melting point of sadness deepens,
matters more than silica in ovens. Sweat, sorrow, hinge.

*

#8 About This Crammed Mass Per Unit of Volume

Mitch tells me I am not making a sponge cake.
I laugh, then frown at my friend. Really I want air,
blue molecules of sky stuck between my teeth,
breaths taken, held, expelled slow as remorse,
or as quick as a person can bake a yellow rise
from a box mix. Crack an egg, a stanza breaks,

takes my breath and enjambs it into a galumph,
size of petulance. Charged words are mere hiccup,
sourced from the body. My breast wrote this: Lethe.
Knee deep in Hades, how can I do anything but chew,
tear, bowl my way into the presence of language–half
ache, left torso, amnesia leavening the past, that bitch.

*

#9 Let My Consciousness Be Upright

"Reflect the source like a mirror,"
the psychic says and I picture
my navel as a moon held aloft,
torso a sky hewn so blue I blush.

Hush, the body has said more "No,"
soft stubborn negations, than open sigh.
Sure I change, now even loving time
for how words daily become erect.

*

#10 Perhaps I Want to Love You Faster Than Yesterday

Hymen of each hour rips within the first minute, sound
unfurling with my exhaled sigh. Cry for us. Nix that.
Dare me to be less impatient. This is what I would plea.
(The pomegranate still on the tree for the birds splits,

hits the ground already open: psalm of eons' innate
legacy.) Lover, you offer fruit, cracked wings of prayer.
Six arils on my tongue, I have kissed the underworld,
found longing to be something we learn just in time.

* * *

   "Touches her grossly, although a word" with Delmore Schwartz



A  could make me check into a hotel with my typewriter                    X

B  or hit the White Horse Tavern. Either scenario is possible–            W

C  lust or the disgust that makes me phone my mother                      V

D  and say, "Fund one more round with language." A scrimmage,             U

E  with all the books and pop references bickering, imitates              T

F  living; perhaps words are mightier than the call of the crotch,        S

G  perhaps not. Language is appetite. Or appetite is the bane             R

H  of language, grizzly caricature of poet in a gritty tabloid–           Q

I  or worse, shuffling from university to university, whoring,            P

J  until the call of the park bench and scrap of paper unfolds            O

K  what remains of sanity, that disheveled tattered thing                 N

L  that leers from the eye sockets of every last writer with kick         M


M  or dick. Who doesn't want to attack an art critic, too pat,            L

N  flinging criticism, an affair with denunciation? Every rebuff          K

O  upholds the far rockaway splash.  A poet dallying in a bird's bill–    J

P  soaring down the gullet, a man swallowed, spat on the shore,           I

Q  void of stature, scrapping with substances. Even I languish            H

R  in profane wallows then pretend peace with every past collapse,        G

S  botched use of time. How many days did I go sniveling,                 F

T  gravitating toward the gutter of my manufacture, that pith             E

U  image of self that neglects daily heed until the inner demand          D

V  smothers despair with a keystroke or translation, that combust-        C

W  ible thing we can't help but do with time, as if we could ever forge   B

X  brighter days in a furnace or skull, that gaping chasm of should…      A

Lisa Gill is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship and the author of five books, including the poetry collections Red as a Lotus, Mortar & Pestle, Dark Enough; plus the hybrid memoir, Caput Nili: How I Won the War and Lost My Taste for Oranges; and a verse-play featuring Woman and Rattlesnake, called The Relenting. She is the founder and executive director for Local Poets Guild and currently lives in "The Projects," a new warehouse theater and home for poetry in Albuquerque, NM.