Auto-immune diseases are invisible, overlooked, and ignored in a culture that privileges health, fitness, and performative physical prowess. Selfies flood our mental landscapes with unattainable images, gym culture, and antidotes to the stress of existing in that landscape. Where poison promises to cure itself, the poem knows better. Molly Spencer’s Hinge offers the mothering body as a site of silence, fear, and guilt during the long process of a lupus diagnosis. Lupus, the Latin word for wolf. Bringing the wolf of lupus inside the flesh, these lyric poems alter time, expanding temporality into a sort of epic and ominous endlessness.
- An ongoing present tense
Spencer does not name the physical ailment at the outset. Instead, the poems build suspense, wandering through a forest, seeking answers or a diagnosis, while navigating the responsibilities of mothering, working, and making a home. Dan Beachy-Quick and Srikanth Reddy have discussed the lyric poem’s relation to time, or the way in which the lyric — like the epic or the myth — inhabits an “ongoing present tense” that refuses an end to history by enacting its concurrence and repetition. The mythic and clinical voices merge in Spencer’s lyric. Beach-Quick describes “this sense that I don’t live my life, but my life lives me. That sudden reversal from subject to object, not of holding power, but being held by power …”
In Hinge, the mythic is gendered. “Survival Guide for the Girl Trying to Avoid Capture” feminizes danger in the idyllic space of the orchard, where the poet implies knowledge will save the girl and make her stronger. “Picture of the Sun” gives us a mother looking at her son, comparing the sun, itself, to “God — warm, reliable.” Although Spencer does not use the word singe, I kept hearing its shadows by implication. The absence of the word singefeels like an intentional echo, especially given the final image in the myth of Icarus as a hinge or opening outwards, as if the fire is also an opening — to know the sun. We know our sons differently from our daughters. And I kept seeing the house, hearing the title word, thinking how things on the mother-house hang by a hinge.
“Most Accidents Happen At Home” brings the creation myth into the poem. It is not an image of progress but a picture of limbo, the second person address speaking both to someone and no one. The last three couplets with their fierce positioning of You at the beginning centers the mother’s role in teaching the son to wash his hands before joining the family at the table.
you are tired, you haven’t slept
in years. There are children close
together and meals to get. You
are in the kitchen getting them.
Your son walks in. You see blood
on his hands. You know
whose blood it is. You shift
the baby to the other hip, you breathe
deep, you say, Wash your hands
and come to the table for dinner.
The blood does not indict the son for anything except inappropriate hygiene. But the continuous intertextual references throughout Spencer’s poems, including fairy tales, myths of origin, religious stories, bible verses, Persephone, evoke the gendered spectrum of American childhood.
The ongoing present is occupied, colonized by endless medical tests, misdiagnoses, and humiliating clinical experiences which treat the human like market meat. “Idiopathic” describes the gendered female body pinned by helplessness in a doctor’s office where the distance between body and clinic is blurred (“the ransacked room of your body”), beholden to ongoing diagnoses of shrugs.
These rooms never have windows. You’re alone
and waiting, still dressed in the endless blue
of their gowns. Outside this room, your whole life
swallows hard. Your husband paces the waiting
room, flinting his fists. You wait like a cold house
waits for a fire to make it warm, wait while the sky
goes down to an early dusk, mending boundaries
and gaps by failing to reveal them.
Fricatives feel flint-like. The alliteration of w-sounds aligns with the expectant female body, mimicking the word woman, weaving the “w” throughout as a connection. The second person narration ends the first section of this book in a clinical question–which is also a question of naming.
- The “patient” body
“Patient Years” is a long poem, divided into sections, which rests in the tension between the adjective patient (a virtue) and the noun patient (a clinical dehumanization). The second person address speaks from an ongoing present, a waiting which surrounds the clinical body — “a ladder of bones / and blanks on a lit screen.”
In “#3,” Spencer suggests that children are the anchor, the reason for staying alive, for not letting go and escaping the pain by dying. In “the blurred threshold between mother and creature” one feels the trap of the mothered body, its “house” as metaphor for the lack of porosity in relationships of ownership and duty. The struggle to find a diagnosis is centered in this poem. The narrator mentions a “vague constellation of symptoms” which the doctor both underplays and over-determines as something that cannot be answered. I felt the mother’s investment in this diagnosis as a way to move forward, not to meet a new life but to inhabit one’s own presence, to be given an answer which permits survival. Spencer shifts metaphors to convey the mother’s confusion and sense of futility: “Now you are a warped doorway” or else, a “boat” — what words exist to describe the flesh’s betrayal of the numerous (also silent) duties of mothering.
It is hard not to identify with #10, which begins with the doctor’s assurance that she will get used to living in pain. It is hard to explain to those who experience pain as a passing event what happens when it becomes a permanent condition. I think how silly this sounds when I visualize the faces of fellow patients who appear to be smiling on social media — and yet every night, they send emails wanting to die, living, remaining, lasting only for the children who resent their pain and who are socialized into feeling humiliated by it.
- Innocence as a form of good fortune or privilege
Spencer returns to the girl in “How to Lure the Wolf,” where the threat is invoked in the knowledge that anything is possible:
innocence lifts —
nothing unknown
can be known. The hum
of not knowing you’re lucky
Using interior rhymes (denning, nothing), alliteration (dream, denning), repetition (to, too), the poet stitches a blanket from tiny recursive gestures which feel safe, known in small words alongside unfamiliar ones. The poem ends with “And your unearned body / still so supple, / so blank.” Innocence is given as a blank rather than an idea. And luck is the lure, somehow, the sweetest lie, as well as the hinge.
The eyes of the clinician are replaced by the eyes of the “Everyone,” which I took as the eyes of the village as applied to young girls, in “Girl With A Book And An Angel.” Everyone “watches a girl / unfold into woman” in a series of tercets.
“Portrait of Hometown As Constellation” makes use of one long stanza with heavy enjambment and rich sensory detail to review friendship, love, the mythos of romances localized in lived details. Beginning with lines like “That night I learned to see love in a trigger finger — ” and moving into the mix of religious lore as mercy for animals, hauled forward by an anaphora on the metaphor, “Love in… love even … love in.” The constellation or guiding stars (what is given) rub against what we see or agree to believe (particularly in organized religion). Spencer carries this long dense poem forward with repetition and an anaphora on “I believe” –it is gorgeous. One stanza of perfect motion across time.
“The Object of Faith” is fashioned entirely from repetition of infinitives in three focal parts: window, berry, and basket.
To hold in place
one piece of the world — moon
in the oak’s arms, brushstroke
This section ends in “Girl with a House and Lost Boys,” seven unrhymed tercets cinched in a beautiful final stanza that made me think of Arcade Fire’s early albums:
And listen: All the lost boys are waiting outside,
shivering. Asking, Where is our dinner?
Tapping on windows, calling, Wake up, wake up —
How long will the pain and patience last? The myths fail us — myths don’t offer hope so much as a sense of resignation to fate. This is the promise of patriarchy: You will get used to it. This is the recursive refrain. But what if the structural implication of getting used to it is sustained by the myths and stories which mark one gender as the suffering one?
- The House As Metaphor
Section IV is one long poem, “First House,” divided into parts. It is the quietest of the poems in this collection, each short part leaving much of the page blank while expanding the extended metaphor of the house’s relation to female bodies, the house as a corporeal space of both safety and threat. New windows and walls don’t keep a house from being a house. Nursery rhymes structure the experience of the new house, thus keeping the past alive, and building a sense of horror. As “Here is the …” and “Here is the …” begins each stanza, one can imagine the church and steeple as an undercurrent. In the fourth part of this poem, Spencer recreates every mother’s least favorite nursery rhyme — the one that seems so funny when we are little and so twisted once we become the moms. She refashions the meaning of this rhyme by sharpening enjambment so that the verse slows down — and what skips so quickly off the child’s tongue moves slowly over the adults:
Step
on a crack
and you break
The house is sold. The next section arrives.
In “On a Drive Through …”, the title does the work of setting tone. The narrator begins with wanting to show the daughter a mirror, to warn her “that whole towns mistake / nearness for safety,” and that the worst can happen without ever leaving the house. The word spindle is used as a noun, a verb, and an adverb, strewn throughout like a memory.
“Flare” suggests the omnipresence of the body’s betrayal, this time in a clearer fashion, finally named as lupus, which is “hunch and vise-grip, a roof / pressing upon a slow-moving storm.” “What is a storm / but too much happening at once?” the poet wonders as she lists the disorienting symptoms of a lupus flare, during which the immune system attacks itself.
The poem “Elegy” is one of my favorites. Spencer begins in that epic second person address, mixing the tenses, speaking across what Ann Townsend has called “the episodic frame of mind.” The poem speaks to the lucky girl, the unknowing one, though Spencer doesn’t offer to this the reader until the poem’s turn at “Girl I was –”
“Love Poem for Lupus” includes lines from Little Red Riding Hood to illuminate the way dread thickens over time, and the wolf here is closer. Maybe the wolf has been here all along as the genetic mutations which cause lupus. The poem ends with “the house of luck and bone that made us,” again drawing the abstraction of luck into the story. I kept thinking back to my fear of getting lost in the woods like Little Red Riding Hood. Isn’t getting lost, itself, a question of luck? Was it ever her fault that she got lost, or that we enter a forest rooted in the myth of a garden which blames us for losing? What if the safety of the house and known streets cannot protect us from the wolf?
“Admission” begins in a sort of encounter, an address again to the girl that didn’t know, the childhood self — and where the hungers of the whole person meet in the present. The narrator lets the child into the house, into the haunted adult world — they meet in hunger for the apple, and the decision to eat it. I cannot stop wandering back into the living forest of Spencer’s poems, and trying to find a way out.
[Published by Southern Illinois University Press on October 20, 2020, 96 pages, $16.95 paperback. A volume in the Crab Orchard Poetry Series.]
Sources: “The Poem Makes the Mind Possible” (BOMB, August 26, 2020)