I Hand My Heavy Body Over for Massage

I’ve brought you sadness
near the bone, trained to work
for nothing but the slim
reward of shouldering a truth:

outside this body, hurricanes are
narrowing their eyes,
turning toward tin roofing, concrete, sticks –
open gashes weeping in the wind.

Facts do carry on.
This body holds such data tight, muscles
hard with every name and town.
Each Jérémie, Au Cayes is

knowledge
internally displaced – that’s the formal
name for daughters of rubble, mothers’
disbelief – and I,

easy in my standing home, bear
rocks inside my skin, stiff homage to the crumbling
gingerbread house. I’m here to
ask: can you restore my frame?

Ready as a child to receive the father’s
tender kiss outside the school, I wait,
even in the smallness of my will, my
narrow range of motion.

I’m sharing this fresh draft for its process more than its product, which is so new that I’ll need to let it sit for a while before I can tell what it needs. The process was fun, though, because I set myself a series of tasks and then watched what invention those limitations would invite. I knew I wanted to write about the helplessness I feel in the face of the devastation in Haiti after Hurricane Matthew (though it’s possible to substitute any of the endless stream of tragedies, national or personal, that pass by in grim parade in any given week). A conversation with a massage therapist reminded me of just how much we carry global pain in our own bodies, and the ways we transfer that pain to one another through acts like physical touch. And I’ve also been working with my creative writing classes on using the acrostic form as a revision tool, and writing from art in what is called ekphrastic poetry. So I decided to choose a photograph that, for me, portrayed a transfer of burden, and use that photograph’s title as the acrostic guide to my poem, and then use the image in the photograph someplace in the poem itself, though the poem wouldn’t be about the photograph directly. This was the result. The photograph is Hans Staub’s “In Front of the Kindergarten” and you’ll notice the poem spells the title down its left margin, and the image informs the simile in the final stanza. I took other language, such as “internally displaced,” city names, and gingerbread houses – an architectural style of home in Haiti that’s disappearing because of the cost of restoration – from a little research on Haiti and the storm. All this is framed inside a request to a master of massage to take my body into her hands and lift the burden out of the muscles that store this information in their fatigue and tension. In short, there’s a lot happening here. I tell my classes that poets set up weird rules for themselves just to see if they can still make meaning inside the restrictions, and to strengthen new muscles. This is a bit of strength training that has taught me a process I’ll likely use again.