. . . You find yourself repeating yourself without even realizing it.
Embarrassing as this may be, it can have its upside. By seeing what you are saying more than once, you may begin to discover what topics or aspects of life are more important to you than you realized.
I seem to have quoted William Carlos Williams on poetry at least twice in this blog. In fact, I seem to have written repeatedly about the healing power of poetry, which is not something I normally think much about.
"Consciously," I tend to associate spiritual healing more closely with artmaking, Vipassana meditation, maybe a few body therapies I've been fortunate enough to experience (e.g, Feldenkrais).
Yet before I ever heard of most of these things, something in me was driving me to read and write poetry almost as if my life depended on it.
I remember sharing poetry with a kindred spirit at Walter Reed when I was 14, the summer I spent a week or two there getting sprung from my very last cast (hallelujah!). I wish I could remember her name. She was a beautiful young woman, one year older than I was and everything I was not, or so it seemed to me then. Most of us on the Women's Orthopedic Ward had fairly large problems: spinal deformity, bone cancer, paraplegia. Not to underestimate or downplay this one young person's condition, but in a way she was special. She had recovered from childhood polio with damage to only a single hand. She even had a special, classy sort of doctor: not the usual assortment of motley orthopods who trooped through the ward, but some elite, rather aloof specialist known as a hand surgeon whom she saw at his specially appointed office in another part of the medical center.
I remember her kindness, her lack of judgment. Back home, few girls that pretty and socially graceful would have chosen to be my friend. Maybe this girl was different in some way -- different in the way I was myself, intolerant of any sort of hierarchy or class system or categorization of the cool vs. the uncool -- or maybe we found each other simply because an Army hospital ward is its own kind of democracy and no patient is in much of a position to act snotty. In any case, we soon discovered that we both loved Edna St. Vincent Millay. Actually I had only read one or two of Millay's lyrical pieces -- "Listen children, your father is dead" -- but my new friend had a whole book of her sonnets, which she freely shared with me.
It was a lovely book -- a special, grown-up book -- for marking and celebrating my emergence from plaster after eighteen months in casts.
. . . and if the man were not her spirit's mate,
Why was her body limpid with desire?
I had just begun to understand such things, at least partially. Such things come to be understood, at least initially, through our physical organisms. Kim Rosen, writing of a somewhat comparable adolescent experience with a poem, writes, "At the time I did not understand how the rhythms, tones, and movement of a passage permeate the body so that the experience described becomes the experience directly lived."
Suddenly at 14, I was in a position to let things "permeate the body," as I moved back into my body after a considerable absence.
I had gone into the first cast nearly flat-chested. I emerged from the last one with a woman's breasts. Getting used to this change was an amazing and somewhat lengthy experience, that June in Walter Reed.
There was only one place on that ward you could find any privacy to speak of -- behind a curtain in one of the ersatz "booths" in the ladies' room. Fortunately there was never any waiting line for the booths, since it took me forever to (supposedly) finish peeing. Whenever I had the chance, I would spend the longest possible time behind that curtain. I would reach up under my shirt or nightgown and cup these two new parts of me in my hands -- incredulous, disbelieving -- just trying to get used to having them and to grasp (grasp literally, in fact, with my own two hands) that I included them now -- that they had come out of nowhere during the months of plaster and were apparently here to stay.
I've wondered sometimes just how it was for other girls, like my hospital friend -- for the large majority who did not have to grow their breasts in secret. What was it like to see yourself develop over time, to graduate from one bra size to another? My only frame of reference for the whole process was a period of pain on one side of my chest, a few months after I came home (in a cast, to another hospital bed) following my spinal fusion. I was rubbing against the cast there, and it hurt, and I couldn't sleep. My mother called the orthopedic specialist on our Army post -- the guy who had initially referred me on for all the plastering and bone-cutting that marked my early adolescence -- to ask what could be done so I would not hurt so much. He said to give me aspirin and wait for the next cast change several months hence.
Puberty. My puberty. How could I have survived it without poetry?
I guess that's what I get repetitive about without meaning to -- the core-things, the things that have sustained me. Stuff that might just bear repeating now and then.
Another fragment or two wafts back to me from my poetry-enabled youth -- this, I think, from Theodore Roethke:
Dark, dark the night, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill:
Which I is I?
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
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