Ellen: One-Handedness

Ellen:

One Hand Clapping 9/27/84

The sound of one hand clapping.
Since I have only one hand to use,
Never applause.
Only inner sounds.
Silence.

I want to clap, shout, scream out
My rage, my passion,
My visions, my pain.
My wild, crazy, insane energy, my joy.
Silence.

But I understand it.
I know its anatomy with precision.
Others' silence speaks to me.
But where is my voice.
What is my sound?


Rosemary: Reflection:

January, 1932. A breech baby, large, arriving fast – too fast. You arrived face down. You said you still saw – etched in memory – the black and white floor tiles and green walls of the delivery room. As you were born, your arm was torn over your head, destroying forever its supply of nerves. You were bleeding from the agonizing injury. Death was near. In 1932, they had just started performing blood transfusions, but still knew nothing of blood types. They laid you on your mother’s stomach and transfused her blood into you. Amazingly, you lived.

Your arm, paralyzed, would shape your whole life. You learned early the shame of feeling defective. You knew, an infant, that your family worried whether you would be mentally normal. You couldn’t crawl. You remembered the relief in your aunt’s voice and your mother’s face the day you, at 18 months, took your first steps: “The baby walked!”

All your life, you felt marginalized, shamed, disabled, other. You were always acutely aware that you had only one hand to use, that you had to measure up regardless, that there were many things you would not ever do in this life, though you longed for them. You explained to me how different it was to be disabled from birth – never having experienced “normal.”


Ellen:

But no

2/16/91

I hear, see, touch, taste, smell the world,
In that order.
Above all, I hear.
Words ought to be my way, my royal path
to the [un]conscious expression of me.

Or music- I mimic with my diaphragm, in my body,
The singer's control over her breathing,
Her taut way of making a sound.
Mahler sings in me.
But since I have no voice, no one hears.

My eyes caress the rectilinear solidity of the bricks across the yard --
Their mortar stripes connective tissue for their structure --
Trying by the act of perceiving to create them.
But no.
One handed people cannot lay bricks; certainly not make them.

My cooking, to be tasted and smelled, a tour de force-
Clean trim chop with your mind.
With one hand.
Concentrate..will the carrot not to roll.
A discipline, but no way to let me out.