Poetry Friday: We Enclose Sunshine

I couldn’t miss Poetry Friday today, since it’s hosted by my Poetry Princess sister Andi at A Wrung Sponge.

I’m sometimes glad that we don’t have access to much news here. Okay, admittedly, I could have access to “real” news, but my (bad?) habit at home was to get my news from, um, The Daily Show and people like Rachel Maddow and Stephen Colbert. (Sorry. It’s the age group. I’m in the demographic. I have to watch.) CNN blares everywhere, but the international version is, in a word, LAME. Via my computer, of course, I have access to everything — MSNBC and Yahoo news, and a constantly updated link to the SF Chronicle, but I miss my shows sometimes. (I think the UK TV people didn’t want American news shows to catch on here anyway; they kept changing the time slots and then canceled them due to “not enough interest. What. Ev. Er. I already pay for a TV license; am I paying for Virgin Cable just for Jon Stewart?? Um… maybe. In the deep Scottish winter when I’m longing for home. Weakness comes then…)

That being said, it was just as well that I didn’t hear about the hullaballoo over the President’s selection for Surgeon General. Hearing that the doctor chosen was “too fat” for the job might have made me deeply depressed and …oh, wait. It did.

I’m roughly the same size as this doctor in question (probably heavier) and it would appall me to be discounted from a job because of my height, weight, size, or color. We’re hired on the basis of brains and abilities, aren’t we? To make a woman’s job qualifications about weight is illegal, right? And yet… Here we are.

Note: I don’t mean to make this a political rant at all. I’m just …gobsmacked. And more than a little hurt. A part of my psyche wants to crawl under something and indulge in some serious self-hate, possibly with razor blades, even though I know that people can be and are healthy at a variety of sizes.. which is why it would be a big WIN if this woman could be confirmed, so that message could come out, and then the diet industry and all of the other bloodsucking hellspawn who make big bucks off of cramming women full of lies and fear and self-loathing would die like a giant esteem-sucking leech, doused with salt, sprinkled with paprika, hit with a twelve-inch wooden slayer stake and pouf!, die writhing and screeching and disappearing into a ashy pile of harmless, good-for-fertilizer dust,DING DONG, baby.

Ding dong.

*Ahem.*

However sharp my stakes, there’s no vampire in sight today, just people looking for a.) maybe a point to this post and b.) Please, God, maybe a poem? Sorry. Getting there. Today’s selection is by poet Donald Hall, who is perhaps most familiar for the poem Ox Cart Man, which seems to be required reading for all fifth grade Language Art classes, and for his marriage to fellow poet Jane Kenyon.

His poem spoke to me, because it is Whitmanesque and has that Song of Myself vibe. That lovely, energetic heartbeat of I am, I am, I am:
“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then, I contradict myself.

(I am large and contain multitudes.)”

The poet, who isn’t that large of a man, nevertheless depicts himself in self-portrait as a bear. Maybe Dr. Benjamin, who others might think of as a bear, could consider herself a lean, razor-clawed saber-toothed tiger. And then go pounce on America’s eating disorders and weight neuroses, and rip them to bits. I’m all for that.

Self-Portrait as a Bear

Here is a fat animal, a bear

that is partly a dodo.

Ridiculous wings hang at his shoulders

as if they were collarbones

while he plods in the bad brickyards

at the edge of the city, smiling

and eating flowers. He eats them

because he loves them

because they are beautiful

because they love him.

It is eating flowers which makes him so fat.

He carries his huge stomach

over the gutters of damp leaves

in the parking lots in October,

but inside that paunch

he knows there are fields of lupine

and meadows of mustard and poppy.

He encloses sunshine.

Winds bend the flowers

in combers across the valley,

birds hang on the stiff wind,

at night there are showers, and the sun

lifts through a haze every morning

of the summer in the stomach.

From White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006, Houghton Mifflin, © 2006 by Donald Hall. I use the poem in full just this once, and beg you please say who it’s by and where it comes from, if you copy it.

I’m going to work on containing sunshine for a few hours. Meanwhile, amble on over to Andi’s now, and partake in some calmer words. Enjoy her wonderworking floral photography, which always graces her blog. Bon weekend.