The Incognito Body

Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to...the sounds and cries a human being makes before
language is learned. 

                                                                Elaine Scarry

For that is one property of poetic language: to engage with states that themselves
would deprive us of language and reduce us to passive sufferers.

                                                                Adrienne Rich

1. In another country

Wake to breeze and satin-
sheen of blue past
village clattered
up since gale-force
winds flattened it

With slow, slug-
moves (gray-
pouched skin), I

                  more contemptible: since ours is to preserve
                  earthewormes: didst thou ever see a Larke in a
                  cage? such is the soule in the body...

limp to this shore,
stand in white
light on white sand,
step into sea so salty
I float free
              of gravity

2. Much that I don’t remember

All dreams  

Sometimes cOMplete    withdRAW
no sexual
not touched at all  

was to flOat
without gravity
                I had been gOing to say 
                Could think of nOthing to say 
                Had sOmething to say
                and suddenly after a sentence 
emptied Out until
nO “me” left
tO act human 
gONE 
would nEVER cOMe back

                                               As art this SHATTERing
                                               can disPLAY the prO
                                                                                                 ductive basis
                                               of subJEctIve and iDEO
                                               lOgical sig-
                                              nIFying FORMations
                                                                                                I began to                                                                                                 lose language

3. The Nerves like Tombs

As if an island under fog, memory’s
outline blurs in fall and disappears
in spring.  A broken chrysalis, the soul
dries up, self-emptied.  When I try
to drive through town, I do not see
a stop light that I hurtle (deadly)
past to find myself crossing the river
out of town.  I don't know why I stutter,
or sentences stop, words like crows
wheeling, cawing, away.  One fears
nofor a self, but I have no fears
for this no-more being, this body-shell
with nothing-left to say.  First—Chill—
then Stupor—then the letting go.

4. Green surrounds the mind of summer

Taking time, patience
This new body a new land
The doctor said, “Let’s say
that people with green hAIR             
are more likely to DEVELop
this disease, so for our purposes
it’s as if you have GREEN hAIR.”
He wOn’t kill
but he cannot

                                                         cure you

There is no cure
                your mind left
                without your body
                Where did it,
                where did “you,”
                gO?

If nothing means anything
the medical report
a construction of meaning to mean something

then disease-free
is a state of being
I can claim
to emBODY, saying if
I do, I do, and I dO
(it’s a lie)

5. She forecast the future

One with a scarred fin trolled alongside us, dis/playing himself, so close that he
could have flipped the boat.  He’d arc sideways and dive past the hull, his great
tailfluke reaching straight into the air.  Then he’d turn around and do the whole display again.
We shared him with another boat for an hour, the whale
crisscrossing between us.

6. My body in dream-language

Because we don’t know when we will die
we get to think of life as an inexhaustible wealth.

                Yet everything happens
                 only a certain number of times,
                and only a small number really.

I’m too high on the horse’s neck 
(it is my own horse I ride,
and the manor where we are
I also own, or owned).

                How many more times will you remember
                a childhood afternoon, so deeply
                a part of your being you cannot
                conceive of life without it?

I hold the reins too tight.
The horse stumbles.
We start to fall.

                Perhaps four or five?  How many
                more times watch the full moon rise? 
                Yet it all seemed so limitless.

But we do not fall.

7. The Hour of Lead

8. Since I cannot think

There are LESSons here—
humility, de-
tachMEnt from ambI-     

                                             shuns—
                                             wORld-
ly not spirIT-

                       ual:  how else can one
who has felt whOle
accept the still i-
MAGInation, the VITAl EVEning:                                                                                         moving
                un-
(able

favoring my left 
wrist has erupted)  YESterday 
for the rest of the day, in-
crEASING             By evening 
FULLy affected 

beCAUSE so
far, (ex-
cept for mOrnings)
to walk with
pain do  not
know what will
learn to stay
tendering the tENDer

                                               pARTs 

to cultivate all winter 
                                             Patience
I am “blank,”
not tHERE
not the self
not the laugh with
                                                not the drive to NY
not my wILL 

It is not little
left to dream—
to wish for 

no

                      consciousness                      of anything
but WILD                                                  and unsavory
          sadness 

to see what it hOLDs
from fear so often from       
rAGErage

9. Body Scans

Almost comforting, cradling &
claustrophobic, the metal tube
surrounds you with
driving sound, your head strapped in
so nothing moves. A voice
floats through the little mike:
“All right in there?  Are you still
all right?”  You’re told half
an hour but it’s fifty minutes. 
Cold, you're hurtling
in space toward Mars,
chanting though you know
they can hear you as they scan
your brain deeper than the sea
& differing from God
as syllable from sound.
Later, when you huddle
on a metal table, they place
your feet, hands on a graph,
take pictures to see you
through & through.
Light cast from above
the machine marks
you with a cross,
a slanted star, a stained
glass window of a church.
“Don’t breathe,” they call,
                                         & you don’t. 

10. The exhibit of pain

In the Blue Gallery:

In the Gray Gallery:

In the Red Gallery:

In the Yellow Gallery:

In the Magic Gallery:

11. A season of pain

A sentence lasting all
year, then another in present
perfect: am having pain

Sentences, raked
into small shames
like so many piles of leaves
The phenomenon of any-
body, in essence a-
mazing, stops
you cold 

Take my body, your friend remarks
The rounded hips, overflowing breasts
of another era’s maternal
is such comfort with her cream soups,
homemade breads:  Motherly
Mother, mother
this soul’s dark night

                                —Es of essence
                                Chant of enchantment

Your friend laughs
The laughter runs over you
You laugh too
until you cannot
help yourself
                                Say: Even unto the end,
                                lo, I am with you always

Driving home you do not see
deer in brush beside the road
When they spring
suddenly away you
stop amazed to
watch them bound

12. Among Pain

For the body possibly to have gone through,
of the minutest and crucial sensations,
each having its purpose, or configuration:
In the mind everything goes, larger than sky
or God, the heft of all being in perception,

the weight of weight, of sense the same
only through feelings everyone shares:
I do not seem unbelievable or events improbable.
Pain bleeds through imagination, unimaginative:
it just is. One wishes to do something, go somewhere,

but everywhere the sensation remains,
the body in pain.  Its eyes still look out
on fuchsia and lilac overtaking
the back fense, it still bleeds,
but I do not knwo this

(body that cannot rise
from its chair,
that never weeps,
in earth's house-
hold of pain).

My mind scrolls through a list of disappeared,
decimated beings.  If there is no escape,
no separation, there are also no lies.
Sun shines on the arid soil of this garden.
Pain blooms in a body, blossoming without water.

13. In a Mute Season

Questions rail along the field
where winter wheat lies hidden
in snow.(We lie to justify
indefensible behavior, to protect
unprotectable innocence, inhaling
and exhaling with an evenness
of spirit to which we aspire.)
Who calls the sky gray?
or the seasons unsurvivable?

I visit doctors because
my body drives me to them,
beyond my dictates.  Ailing,
I am healing before
my mind understands
that the phenomenology of pain
syntax and order, predictable,
eventual inevitability,

until I grasp that order
eludes us, dispersing,
a wall of fog we drive through,
so frugal of speed, spendthrifts
of time. To feel alone is merely
the mind’s last defense-
a physiological white-out–
from the spirit's largesse.

Notes

Epigraphs: from Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain and Adrienne Rich’s
“Voice from the air.”

Part 1
          ***Portion in italics from The Duchess of Malfi (embedded in quotation
          in Rich’s essay, “Voices from the air”).

Part 2
          ***Portion in italics quoted from Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language.

Part 5
          ***Italicized portions spoken by Paul Bowles in Bernardo Bertolucci’s
          The Sheltering Sky (after Bowles’s novel of the same title; quoted lines
          are not in the novel).

Parts 4, 8, 10 
         ***Indented and framed medical discourse excerpted from an unpublished
         article entitled “Experiencing Health with Rheumatoid Arthritis: An
         Anthropological Study of Illness, Treatment and Cure,” by J¢n Haukur Ingimundarson
        (quoted with permission).

My thanks to anthropologist J¢n Haukur Ingimundarson, whose comprehensive
understanding of, and discussion with me about this disease helped me to
write this poem.  My thanks also to Charles Borkhuis, Kathleen Fraser,
Pamela Stewart, Adrian Oktenberg, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, whose comments helped me further it. 

Bio: Cynthia Hogue has published three collections of poetry, most recently The Never Wife (Mammoth Press, 1999). She is working on a fourth collection entitled The Incognito Body. She currently lives in Pennsylvania, where she directs the Stadler Center for Poetry and teaches English at Bucknell University.

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