Richard Siken

Take a Message

So I’m ill again. The usual with a side of falling to the floor hard this evening when my lower extremities tightened and everything from my toes all the way to the middle of my thighs contorted until I looked like something with gnarled roots—maybe Donne’s mandrake—that had been unearthed and hosed off before being tossed to the ground until it could be transplanted elsewhere or fed to the wood chipper or cut into little slices as part of a fiber-filled culinary adventure.

I mean, I know I’m not fibrous. I’m meat and bone. But I’m doing an extended tree metaphor thing here, so just let me be fibrous for the purposes of this essay.

My floor routine went on for several excruciating minutes and I couldn’t get my legs under me and I couldn’t pull my legs and feet and toes back into their proper shapes and relationships with each other and I couldn’t massage the tension away and the pain was like someone had exposed me to a nerve toxin and I couldn’t reach my phone to call my husband for help and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because he’d misplaced his phone and so I had to scream as loud as I could and don’t worry the neighbors never come when I do that and my husband burst into the room and found me splayed and broken like a cow that’s about to be scooped up from the fecal mud and dropped onto a truck headed for the rendering plant because she’s too sick to walk herself to her own death like all respectable—all good—girls should, even ones with spongiform encephalopathy.

I’m just working the cow metaphor with that encephalopathy reference. Don’t worry, I don’t have mad cow disease. My diseases have other names, and so far at least one has eluded naming. That disease is all experience, the way Hellen Keller’s whole world was before water ran over her fingers and forever changed the way her body and mind met the world.

Reuven Tsur talks about Keller in his theory of cognitive poetics. I’m not making baseless statements about her just to illustrate my point, so please don’t get all, You’re being ableist and using Hellen Keller to do your dirty ableist work, Karen. The name’s Dana, and I’m trying to tell you how bodies break and how we live in them anyway. I’m trying to tell you I took a little spill. I’m trying to put that spill in a larger context that some of you may find important. Bear with me. Bear down. Grin and bear it. I’m trying.

My husband panicked the way he does when he has to confront the fact that I’m seriously ill. He got me up off the floor, then went into a fugue state in which he forgot about everything other than his lost phone. He flitted around in flight mode looking for the phone because it’s easier to be upset about the phone than it is to live through more than two years of thinking your wife could die, on top of fifteen years of intermittently thinking your wife could die, let alone this very moment when you’re seeing more evidence of your wife’s potential death on the horizon or at least more data that suggests whatever’s going on with her isn’t going to go away any time soon, if ever. And what do you do with that as a spouse? How do you live with a splintered wife for the rest of your life?

I almost said upper thighs in the first paragraph of this essay, but we don’t have tiered thighs. We just have the one main set, one main set of thighs. It’s the way I also think I have two noses, when I just have the one nose with two nostrils and the way I always think I have two butts because I have two butt cheeks.

The body is confusing. Taking inventory isn’t as straightforward as it seems. At one point in American history, a window was considered a single pane within a larger window. So a window with six panes counted as six windows. Why? Taxes. Taxes were assessed per pane, so each pane became a window. At least I think that’s true. My rhetoric professor, Dan Mahala, told our class that in college. This was in the ’90s, when institutions still taught actual history—or at least tried to—not the ticky-tacky history being peddled today.

If U.S. politics applied to bodies—which of course it does, mainly those of women and trans and nonbinary folks, but bear with me again for the purposes of this essay—we might very well have been taught that we have two noses and two butts, especially if that meant we could be charged more for lugging all that flashy and fleshy gear around. Two butts! Two noses! How indulgent of you. One of each is subject to the luxury tax! You clearly have spares that are purely ornamental. (Don’t tell the tax collectors about the set of kidneys dangling in our trunks or the lungs or whatever else is doubled up in there like sets of animals shuffled onto a dingy for safekeeping during what looked to be the makings of a pretty big storm.)

All that contrived body taxation would be a real pane, wouldn’t it? I mean pain. And trust me, the body is definitely a pain.

But I digress. Who turns to stone? I’m asking because that’s what my body felt like today. Sisyphus, maybe. You could argue that pushing stones turns him into the very thing he’s pushing: Something that moves but that isn’t quite alive; someone whose stony but who isn’t quite mineral.

Demosthenes filled his mouth with stones to learn how to speak clearly. But that’s not the same thing as turning to stone.

Oh, I know, I know! It’s those who gaze into Medusa’s eyes!

Whose stare must I have returned to be cursed this evening? It must have been someone in my dreams. I’d just woken from a nap when the compacting began, soles first, a crushing invisible force making me denser and denser. I felt the hardening creep upward. The stiffening. The molecular tightening. I couldn’t do anything about it. It was like watching a virus spread through a computer taking out file after file after beloved file and replacing them with junk code.

I realize I can’t make the stone metaphor work alongside my earlier tree metaphor. Adding the computer-virus reference is making things even worse. Let’s just acknowledge all of that and move on. I don’t have time to put the right slant on this truth. (My apologies to Emily Dickinson.) I’m sliding downhill, and everything I write is sliding with me. Besides, wood can turn to stone. I know. I’ve seen it. I have a chunk of opalized palmwood right here that makes my case for me.

That rock is science. It’s fact. And like science and fact, opalized palmwood is beautiful when you place it on a black light in a dark room. It looks like magic and could be passed off as such if your audience doesn’t know any better. A divining rock. A soothsayer’s stone. Not the soft, boring sandstone my body is becoming, the kind of stone miners here tossed to the side when looking for the good stuff like silver and uranium.

But guess what? I tricked you, and you didn’t know any better. Petrified wood isn’t stone. My science wasn’t science, and my facts weren’t facts. Here’s the truth. You ready: Though the phrase petrified wood or petrified tree comes from Ancient Greek πέτρα meaning “rock” or “stone,” literally “wood turned into stone,” petrification doesn’t change organic wood into stone. It merely preserves the wood’s shape and structural elements.

Sometimes language gets things wrong. Sometimes, even the Ancient Greeks got things wrong. Is it so hard to believe that sometimes we get things wrong? That we get things wrong most of the time, actually?

Maybe I’m not turning to stone. Maybe parts of me are just undergoing a change, being preserved. My shape. My structural elements.

My husband found his phone. It was in the garage. He went out there frantically looking for it like a prospector trying to lay claim to a seam of silver in a sandstone reef in a town called Silver City in the 1870s. He cast aside all the piled-up crap garages tend to take on as his world was reduced to two things: phone and not phone.

When he found his phone, the world made sense again. I was in a chair by that time live-tweeting the unfolding disaster. My upper body still worked, which meant I could be a writer and write things down. So I wrote things down just like Richard Siken says we should. What else would you have me do? Come unglued?

This is marriage. This, too, is marriage. Sometimes it’s broken. Sometimes there’s no diagnosing what’s wrong with it. Sometimes it’s all experience and no name and no remedy. Or maybe no remedy is needed because legs are not roots and flesh is not stone and a phone isn’t something jacked out of the Earth for profit or for prophets.

Sometimes a phone is just a phone, and we can use it to hear the voice of the person we love more than anyone else on the planet. Sometimes we can take that call. Sometimes we can’t no matter how much we want to. We just let it ring through to voicemail and hope the love of our life leaves us a message that we can receive when we’re ready.



Ad Astra

There’s a point at which there are diminishing returns with regard to learning more about a place, a culture, a collective mindset, a community fever.

There’s a point at which it becomes time to pray with your feet. I’m at that point. I’m not an investigative journalist nor do I want to be one. I’m a creator. I want to create. As Richard Siken says, I’m just a writer. I write things down. That’s what I do and what I need to do. I need to create. I need to bring beauty to what’s awful, to what we want to look away from, to what we want to deny and suppress and ignore. But the beauty part is key. Beauty first, beauty always.

I don’t want to be pulled further into what this place is and does and isn’t and doesn’t do. I don’t want to be somewhere that takes and takes and takes everything from me, leaving no me left to love, to grow, to write, to create.

I’m leaving, come hell or high water. There, I said it. It’s time. It’s beyond time. My return to this place in March was necessary because of my health, because of my trauma, because I had issues to resolve with my husband, and because I needed to make sure I’d done all I could possibly do to be part of this community. I’ve done those things now, and I’m done.

I’m going to Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri in September. I’m looking at MFA programs in Oklahoma while I’m there. I’m evaluating the healthcare system, housing costs and availability, and employment opportunities. I have family in Oklahoma. My family. My people. Oklahoma, my home, my home, my home.

I’m going to need help to do this in the form of love, support, and understanding. There’s so much more trauma for me to address now after living in Utah for five years and Southern Utah for three years. I’m a strong person, but I’m now a broken person. I can come back. I know I can. I can become who I am again, who I’m losing, who I may have lost.

Tomorrow is my birthday. I’ll be fifty-two. One year ago, I was radioactive. I was sitting in a rented tiny home overlooking the Virgin River Gorge because I had to be isolated for several days. I spent hours talking to Jose Faus on the phone after watching the gorge all day. I had just started writing poetry again. I read a short piece to Jose over the phone as he fell asleep. Maybe my words put him to sleep. That’s OK. I always fall asleep reading my own writing, too. Anyone out there with insomnia might consider using my work to help them regulate their sleep.

Seven years ago, I was sitting in a hospital room in Kansas City with my husband, my legs under constant pressure and a breathing device on the table that I had to use every thirty minutes or so—the former to prevent leg clots and the latter, I think, to prevent a pulmonary embolism. I’d just had my thyroid removed to cure my autoimmune thyroiditis. They found tumors during the procedure, but the doctor assured me they wouldn’t be malignant. He came into my room all ego and narcissism and said there was only a one-percent chance the tumors would be cancerous. That’s why he went easy, left a little tissue in sensitive places. That’s why he didn’t remove the lymph nodes. Then he wished me a happy birthday. The pathology report came in a week later. It was cancer, and it hadn’t all been resected.

What will tomorrow bring? My husband and I plan to look at the stars with a telescope we’re borrowing. I plan to visit a bookstore. I plan to play with our dog, Lexi. I plan to write and write and write and read and read and read. That’s the plan. We’ll see what actually happens.

Love to those dealing with health issues, emotional issues, addictions, dependencies, and any form of pain or suffering. Love to those who’ve almost died and managed to survive. Love to those who tried to survive and didn’t manage to do so. Love to you beyond place, beyond time, beyond loss, beyond memory.

Love to you all. All of you, love.

Ad astra per aspera. PrairyErth, we are one.

It’s not Oklahoma’s fault that I was abused in Oklahoma, that I was raped in Oklahoma, that I was trafficked within and beyond Oklahoma. Humans destroy each other. Humans destroy the land. The land never destroys us. The land never trafficks us. The land never rapes us. The land never abuses us. The land never destroys itself.

I am grateful for this pain. This pain is a compass. This pain is a signal. This pain is my dearest friend, my greatest protector, my guide, my heart. This pain is everything.

Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home. ― Matsuo Bashō