Arnold Klein
– MS
I probe my pocket for my pen, but what I clutch
Turns out to be my thumb. The old obtundent touch:
Whose C-spine nerves demylinate expects as much.
They call this symptom “hand in glove.” – But, not to bitch,
When you can’t proprioperceive which finger’s which
To get a glove on straight, without some baffling hitch,
(Which I remember once dispatching with dispatch),
Is fiendishly complex: some digit’s bound to catch;
And hand and glove, which seem so much a match, mismatch.
*
They call it “foot in stocking” when your feet go blank.
Since balance much depends on feedback, sole to shank,
You tip when standing still, and when you move, you bank.
So every venture forth becomes a tightrope walk:
You have to plot a line ahead in mental chalk
To keep yourself from deviating. – Not to squalk.
*
My right foot doesn’t dorsiflex – it sort of wags
When lifted off the sidewalk. And the right hip sags;
So one must what’s called “vault” – that’s clear the leg one drags
By stilting on the other. And so on one chugs.
A ratchet slipping cogs. Until the leg one lugs,
Misfiring before, like loose-in-socket plugs,
Fatigues and scrapes the ground. The further on one pegs
The oftener one stumbles. By their final legs
One’s promenades imperil. So one walks on eggs.
*
But even slowing up, one falls. That quadriceps,
Enervate to begin with, by the end of schleps
Can’t get that foot out front in time to catch missteps.
*
There’s ways to cope, of course, with such small deficits
And years, perhaps, before what now relapse-remits
Begins progressing, and one calls this sojourn quits.
But whatsoever lesions claim which body parts,
One’s lost forever, once demylinizing starts,
What makes the self transparent to the self – Descartes’
“Immediate experience that self-unites
The body and the mind,” in which regime, by rights,
Without awareness, or intent, the soul delights.
*
A competence the fortunate may be absolved
For doubting .– It’s like base in which perfume’s dissolved:
Insensible itself, but everywhere involved
In everything the soul delights in or conceives
Delighting in – and what else no one hale believes
Is how ungenial a life its leaving leaves.
*
That present joys disrelish is a present fact.
But so must those imagined: one cannot abstract
A union so immediate the very act
Of apperceiving sunders it and not convict
The lie in the imagination: you depict,
If somewhat tweaked, diminishments that now afflict.
*
So even to one’s idylls one imports complaints.
And when one’s present projects and the ones one paints
Are just about as sickly, motivation faints,
Since who develops, not to mention, implements
Designs as disagreeable as what presents?
And consciousness is constituted of intents;
It ideates, to every enterprise it mounts,
A hundred it won’t execute. Should it renounce
Futurity, there’s little left in things that counts.
*
Another thing the hale may doubt. To one things cheer
Their value seems intrinsic – why he holds them dear.
It’s only when all outcomes are about as drear
That value is revealed as preference. Don’t prefer,
And everything’s as impotent to charm or stir.
Although, since pain remains, precautions still deter.
*
Since one is just alive enough to suffer things.
There’s always something some dysmetric member dings,
And lesioned spinal nerves, like sympathetic strings,
Bejangle weirdly through and after normal pangs.
One’s world consists of obstacles one shuns or bangs;
And so, with more that hurts, the further back one hangs.
*
And don’t forget, with numbness, and apart from raps,
One burns and freezes, bides Lhermitte’s electric zaps
And zonesthesias, like one’s trunk’s compressed by straps,
And knowing those are figments doesn’t (not to carp)
Make dysaesthesias less importunate or sharp.
Disease, then, like an underdrone, or vibraharp,
Compels incessant self-attention. – Not to grump;
Since plenty have it worse. And everyone must lump
The malady that constitutes the body-stump.
*
Who threw me in the body-stump? – Mankind’s estate,
To cite a gnostic hymn, not just sclerotics’ fate.
The answer is a fiend, of course, which who’d debate,
And throw implies a native place his cosmic plot
Prevents us from resuming, but can’t make forgot;
Else how’d we know from whence we came and into what?
*
Or know this world the inn it is, to cite the rest,
And not our very dwelling? – The adept, not guest,
But internee. – In which transcosmic house arrest
He veils his extramundane portion, lest his host
Discover it and wean it earthwards. Fatal post;
But that he knows the stump is not his innermost
Consoles him for his sojourn, how so long it last
And alien his attitudes; at how so vast
A distance stands repose, when once the stump is cast.
*
Except there is no fiend, no plot, no inn, no hope.
A part of light am I – the basic gnostic trope –
And not a part of this! gives woes a cosmic scope
That lets a mortal take his existential lumps
Heroically, as bagatelles his real self trumps;
For all that, though, his consciousness remains the stump’s;
Which on the bright side means that when his heartstrings snap
His consciousness, like blockage in a toilet’s trap,
Gets flushed into oblivion. The oddments, scrap.
*
Unless oblivion should prove a cosmic bluff.
A universe like this, which has been cruel enough
To visit consciousness upon unconscious stuff,
Creating pain thereby for, it would seem, a goof,
Is cruel enough to further show its cloven hoof
And make that consciousness annihilation-proof.
*
Which renders suicide de trop – one still attends.
But even so, though no annihilation pends,
The body would be gotten through. At least that ends.
*
The gnostics pictured planet earth a penal hell
Around which fiends have stacked, concentric shell by shell,
Three hundred barricades. Our cosmos (prison cell
Enough, without the fiction of a fiends’ cabal)
Spans thirteen billion light years. Still, it helped morale
To feign that from beyond its void, which freaked Pascal,
Solicited another – thither would I bail!
Then physicists immensified the cosmic scale
Times fifteen trillion. Though one managed not to quail
Before an aeon fifteen trillion times as small,
One starts to now – escape just seems too long a haul;
Unless the soul, when it’s no more the body’s thrall,
And creeps no more, is turned to the transcosmic hail
And far outspeeds mere light. For light is of this pale:
So how can light escape it? And the soul: how fail?
Turns out to be my thumb. The old obtundent touch:
Whose C-spine nerves demylinate expects as much.
They call this symptom “hand in glove.” – But, not to bitch,
When you can’t proprioperceive which finger’s which
To get a glove on straight, without some baffling hitch,
(Which I remember once dispatching with dispatch),
Is fiendishly complex: some digit’s bound to catch;
And hand and glove, which seem so much a match, mismatch.
*
They call it “foot in stocking” when your feet go blank.
Since balance much depends on feedback, sole to shank,
You tip when standing still, and when you move, you bank.
So every venture forth becomes a tightrope walk:
You have to plot a line ahead in mental chalk
To keep yourself from deviating. – Not to squalk.
*
My right foot doesn’t dorsiflex – it sort of wags
When lifted off the sidewalk. And the right hip sags;
So one must what’s called “vault” – that’s clear the leg one drags
By stilting on the other. And so on one chugs.
A ratchet slipping cogs. Until the leg one lugs,
Misfiring before, like loose-in-socket plugs,
Fatigues and scrapes the ground. The further on one pegs
The oftener one stumbles. By their final legs
One’s promenades imperil. So one walks on eggs.
*
But even slowing up, one falls. That quadriceps,
Enervate to begin with, by the end of schleps
Can’t get that foot out front in time to catch missteps.
*
There’s ways to cope, of course, with such small deficits
And years, perhaps, before what now relapse-remits
Begins progressing, and one calls this sojourn quits.
But whatsoever lesions claim which body parts,
One’s lost forever, once demylinizing starts,
What makes the self transparent to the self – Descartes’
“Immediate experience that self-unites
The body and the mind,” in which regime, by rights,
Without awareness, or intent, the soul delights.
*
A competence the fortunate may be absolved
For doubting .– It’s like base in which perfume’s dissolved:
Insensible itself, but everywhere involved
In everything the soul delights in or conceives
Delighting in – and what else no one hale believes
Is how ungenial a life its leaving leaves.
*
That present joys disrelish is a present fact.
But so must those imagined: one cannot abstract
A union so immediate the very act
Of apperceiving sunders it and not convict
The lie in the imagination: you depict,
If somewhat tweaked, diminishments that now afflict.
*
So even to one’s idylls one imports complaints.
And when one’s present projects and the ones one paints
Are just about as sickly, motivation faints,
Since who develops, not to mention, implements
Designs as disagreeable as what presents?
And consciousness is constituted of intents;
It ideates, to every enterprise it mounts,
A hundred it won’t execute. Should it renounce
Futurity, there’s little left in things that counts.
*
Another thing the hale may doubt. To one things cheer
Their value seems intrinsic – why he holds them dear.
It’s only when all outcomes are about as drear
That value is revealed as preference. Don’t prefer,
And everything’s as impotent to charm or stir.
Although, since pain remains, precautions still deter.
*
Since one is just alive enough to suffer things.
There’s always something some dysmetric member dings,
And lesioned spinal nerves, like sympathetic strings,
Bejangle weirdly through and after normal pangs.
One’s world consists of obstacles one shuns or bangs;
And so, with more that hurts, the further back one hangs.
*
And don’t forget, with numbness, and apart from raps,
One burns and freezes, bides Lhermitte’s electric zaps
And zonesthesias, like one’s trunk’s compressed by straps,
And knowing those are figments doesn’t (not to carp)
Make dysaesthesias less importunate or sharp.
Disease, then, like an underdrone, or vibraharp,
Compels incessant self-attention. – Not to grump;
Since plenty have it worse. And everyone must lump
The malady that constitutes the body-stump.
*
Who threw me in the body-stump? – Mankind’s estate,
To cite a gnostic hymn, not just sclerotics’ fate.
The answer is a fiend, of course, which who’d debate,
And throw implies a native place his cosmic plot
Prevents us from resuming, but can’t make forgot;
Else how’d we know from whence we came and into what?
*
Or know this world the inn it is, to cite the rest,
And not our very dwelling? – The adept, not guest,
But internee. – In which transcosmic house arrest
He veils his extramundane portion, lest his host
Discover it and wean it earthwards. Fatal post;
But that he knows the stump is not his innermost
Consoles him for his sojourn, how so long it last
And alien his attitudes; at how so vast
A distance stands repose, when once the stump is cast.
*
Except there is no fiend, no plot, no inn, no hope.
A part of light am I – the basic gnostic trope –
And not a part of this! gives woes a cosmic scope
That lets a mortal take his existential lumps
Heroically, as bagatelles his real self trumps;
For all that, though, his consciousness remains the stump’s;
Which on the bright side means that when his heartstrings snap
His consciousness, like blockage in a toilet’s trap,
Gets flushed into oblivion. The oddments, scrap.
*
Unless oblivion should prove a cosmic bluff.
A universe like this, which has been cruel enough
To visit consciousness upon unconscious stuff,
Creating pain thereby for, it would seem, a goof,
Is cruel enough to further show its cloven hoof
And make that consciousness annihilation-proof.
*
Which renders suicide de trop – one still attends.
But even so, though no annihilation pends,
The body would be gotten through. At least that ends.
*
The gnostics pictured planet earth a penal hell
Around which fiends have stacked, concentric shell by shell,
Three hundred barricades. Our cosmos (prison cell
Enough, without the fiction of a fiends’ cabal)
Spans thirteen billion light years. Still, it helped morale
To feign that from beyond its void, which freaked Pascal,
Solicited another – thither would I bail!
Then physicists immensified the cosmic scale
Times fifteen trillion. Though one managed not to quail
Before an aeon fifteen trillion times as small,
One starts to now – escape just seems too long a haul;
Unless the soul, when it’s no more the body’s thrall,
And creeps no more, is turned to the transcosmic hail
And far outspeeds mere light. For light is of this pale:
So how can light escape it? And the soul: how fail?
