A few MS-related poems I have written recently:
Betrayal of Dreams
Dreams, forever forgetful and fond of fiction,
tend toward betrayal. More often than not
these days, I dream myself standing, walking–
gliding, really–down hallways, up staircases,
into dances. In sleep, my body exists only
to satisfy its mind, settles into blissful illusions
of its own ability. Easily betrayed, I wake
each morning untrained and wholly convinced
by the night’s movement, once again sure that
this disease, like all those before it, has run its course
and left me—whole and healed. Morning, though,
promises nothing to limbs betrayed by dreams.
-Michelle Gibson
It has come to this
I must have dreamed this awful moment into existence, worried too much
over the day-to-day, busied myself wondering what life might be like
in the absence of so much time lost to movement through the necessary
repetition of work in the world. When I found myself home I listened
greedily to silence,breathed it in, embraced an insatiable appetite
for solitude and stillness. And now it has come to this: A voice
muddled by hesitation, by the sad, breathy resistance of a memory
that won’t quite gather words. A hand fraught with the hard
weight of its own weakness, refusing movement, insisting toward belly.
Legs in useless,spastic motion, forever resisting the weight
of a body intent on silencing itself, on bringing me up short.
-Michelle Gibson
Had I known
I certainly would have saved these: the scent of patchouli thick as a path
my students followed to the chairs in my office—the ones I loved
to see them in; the quick turn toward knowing when my voice, thrown
into a classroom, met its target, caught someone off guard just enough
to make meaning; every first day of school; the callow belief
in my own perpetual youth. Had I known, these would be close at hand,
having been carefully preserved, not as afterthoughts but
at the very moments they fell into being. I didn’t, though. I did not know.
-Michelle Gibson
Multiple Sclerosis
There is no poetry in “Multiple Sclerosis.” It falls flat in the ear,
a siren in place of music and meter. Like the disease itself
in the body, it is a silence loud as a crow’s caw in the solitude
of a warm afternoon. It comes to this: listening to the way
muscles refuse the project of movement, to sad hands that once
grasped with strength and fervor but now abandon that work for erratic
flailing, to a thought holding still and empty at the cusp of a word,
and all of this flattening into the clinical sound: fatigue—too early, too thick
in cell and marrow. Inclined as I am toward the ring of music and meter,
I despise “Multiple Sclerosis”: noise between body and poem.
-Michelle Gibson
