Petra Kuppers

KATHI WOLFE: "ASHES"*

In Ashes: Rome 1946, Kathi Wolfe intersects a narrative of war and death with the narrative of one of the icons of disability culture, Helen Keller, a socialist woman who engaged workers' battles, and the subject of Kathi Wolfe's chapbook. There is much written about Helen Keller in disability studies, and my little writerly engagement with the poem does not delve into this valuable and rich material. Instead, I am sitting by my copper fire pit, laptop in hand, and spend time with a beautiful poem. I gift the reading back to the poet.

To me, this poem is a meditation on embattled language: language carried on soldiers' bodies, language dis- and re-integrating in a woman's aging body, and language in touch.

Ashes: Rome 1946
By Kathi Wolfe

Soot bombards my hair.
Soldiers, blinded in battle,
tell rough-edged jokes to hide
their tears. If only I could
conjure spells. I caress their faces.
My hands smolder. The Braille
dots smell like acrid socks.
Your home in Connecticut
is gone. It went up in smoke,
everything lost except
the silver, a friend writes.
The dining room chairs,
Japanese vases,
the dog's water dish,
my manuscripts,
turned to ashes.
I wipe sweat off foreheads
of wounded vets, brush dust
from my wrinkled dress, and write
in the beginning was the word,
the potion against self-pity.

In the short note that accompanies this poem, Wolfe tells how the poem is set when Keller is sixty-four years old, and visiting wounded soldiers in Rome. There are different textures to the touch here, fragile things, effluvia, the closeness of bodies and temporary material: soot, hair, tears, socks, ashes, sweat and dust. They all run through fingers, intertwining with sense echoes of those 'blinded soldiers', the Braille, the stories we know of Helen Keller and her position as a blind and Deaf woman. Fragile touch, of things disintegrating, and of flying ashes - and smell, in smolder, the acrid socks, the flowers in vases, the dog's smell: the poem passes through a world of senses, sensing things that are passing, and have 'turned to ashes'. In this elegy of enumeration, the finger's brushing creates a world/word, in a condensation, a girdling.

The 'I' is under attack and bombarded. The agent of assault is fire, leaving its soot, its alchemy of material transformation, lodged within the I's bodily frame. There's a distance from these soldiers who march into this image in the second line - for her hair, her body is contained, marooned in that first terse sentence, on the line. The soldier sentence unfolds more leisurely, and is full of familiar imagery: 'blinded in battle', 'rough-edged jokes', hiding tears. These spoken lines, as lines, are to be expected, visited, yes - by one blind woman as a gift to a blinded man. They are what is expected of a good woman who is deemed to be within the circle of charity. But the familiar lines and images do not have the urgency of the soot in the hair, that material not quite yet dust that is still half-smoldering, ready to set alight into smelly catastrophe a woman's body. The 'If only I could' breaks - and I see frantic hands patting at an elaborate hair-do, panic-stricken in the hospital. But the next line brings me back to the appropriate performance of femininity: conjuring spells of charming witchy-ness of a woman in her sixties. The caressing of faces has more transgressive power, a bodily contact (like the tracing of her teacher's mouth, Anne Sullivan, when Helen learned to speak as a child, such delicious sensuality hidden from the archive). But eros is reigned in quickly by the frame the poet sets up, alerting us that the poetic 'I' in this poem is THE Helen Keller. To touch, to transgress social rules of the 50s, to be a close-up nightingale - this is sanctioned only by that saint, that Helen, that woman to whom marriage was denied.

"My hands smolder: ' again, in my reading, passion for man's rough edges wrestles with saintliness, the woman going up in flames for God's glory, unsullied, a martyr's death. The Braille: the hands are in touch with other matter, too, with another skin that has stories to tell. In the poem, the line breaks and leaves the temporal and spatial connection open: 'dots smell like acrid socks' - is this the hospital, or a sodden Braille book rescued from a burning house, is this the letter winging its way across the Atlantic, or maybe the scarred skin of veterans?

Smoke and silver, that's what's left of here of a home. Reading this, I see shadows, the fog of the battlefield, the silver-nitrate of old black-and-white films, the smoky images out of train windows I've read of before in Kathi Wolfe's poems. In this particular poem's devastation, ashes are what remains of journeys, of the sure signs of a home's habitation by pets, and of the labor of writing - the dots, sweaty with effort, those touches reaching out to readers.

Gathering up, the last sentence sets the I to action. 'I wipe sweat of foreheads' - her own, or others people's foreheads. Sweat is what remains, what stays after the fever of activity or war, that cold sweat of mortality, corpse sweat - the ancient humor that everyone who has stayed with the dying and laid out the dead knows about and have felt clammy on their skins.

Dust to dust. Death folds close to a body, a wrinkled dress or skin that feels some premonition in those stubbles of new hair against glassy burn wounds, those scars and their time-writing, those vets in the hospital. But the 'I' rescues herself, turns firmly away from the end, and towards the beginning that a word might just, magically, afford her.

Self-pity: pity for a falling self, a wounded self, hair about to go up in smoke: Helen Keller's story is often told as one of eternal battle against that pity - of others, or her own reflection, with great energy and cheer performing the super-crip. And coming closer to the death of matter and of bodies, there is a grim grin beneath the skull here: a battle of disabled lives, not able to take pity on themselves, and cry their own tears. That 'word,' that battle for literacy, a battle that might end in distance and the brush-off, might erase something else in those italics, leaning into the end.

Wolfe's poem captures a tenderness, a textured attention to the world in a woman who might just feel herself nearing departure, having lost possessions, her work aflame. Ashes: that is the traditional motif of the end of carnival, on a scrawny Wednesday, an image well available to a woman in Catholic Rome, surrounded by burnt soldiers. But the language of the poem lives on, reaches out as it attracts its readers, and makes my eyes and tongue follow what my fingers cannot. Whose touch did Helen seek out? Was she searching? Wolfe's language resurrects the heat of Helen, the embers of touch's passion. Helen Keller as an icon of disability culture survives herself here, survives those abandoning her as an uptight strident woman. The poem honors her as a complex being caught in the smoke of burning times.

*This material is an excerpt from an essay on alchemy and the death of others, in Disability Culture Poetry, an essay collection forthcoming somewhere, sometime. The version of "Ashes" referred to in this essay and the accompanying note originally appeared in Ragged Edge magazine.

Petra Kuppers enjoys reading poems, writing responses, and writing poems, too, preferably in collaboration. Check out her forthcoming collaboration with poet Neil Marcus and photographer Lisa Steichmann, Cripple Poetics: A Love Story.