In the title poem of Dark Card, we learn that the book’s subject is its speaker’s son, whose Asperger’s Syndrome has shaped their lives in such a way that these poems have arisen as its outermost edge. Asperger’s is part of the autism spectrum, which means that some people have it worse than others; that with luck and the best of care, you can move back from it toward the rest of the human community; and that it makes you miss out on most of the social world, while it also shows you things other people can’t see. This is very much a mother’s book, since it records a set of caretaking experiences whose pathos arises in the universal truism that we all love our children more than the world ever will. Yet it’s also a book of the self, because there’s a clear parallel between the mind of a person with Asperger’s and the mind of a poet. Each is a one-person outgroup, a holy fool who overlooks what other people know best and perceives what they’d never notice in a million years.
I’ve figured out that difference pays freight
when linked with intelligence; genius trumps odd,
alchemizes bizarre into merely eccentric.
After bitter poems of maternal outrage like “Palace Eunuch” and “Apologies to My OB-GYN,” it’s a relief and a joy to read the unironic “Homage to Teachers” near the book’s end. There, little vignettes of authentic nurturance show the adult world finally coming through with the decency it always promises: “Ring the bell for Ms. Ruto, / gentle and neutral when she described / him sitting on the first grade rug / facing this way while the rest / of the class faced that way…” If the book divides the community into sheep and goats, a defense which psychoanalysis calls “splitting,” the neurosis isn’t in the speaker; it’s in the busted values of a culture that wants to be Jefferson and Jesus on the one hand, and Henry Ford and Rambo on the other. In Dark Card we find out who the boy is who has been dealt this card, and we find out just as much about who the other people are, in the way they respond to him.
There are two protagonists here; a mother (the source of a flawed but beautiful child, as well as flawed but beautiful poems), and a child (who is vulnerably conspicuous where he’s better than others and where he’s worse than others; where he’s typical, he’s invisible). The antagonists are the medical professionals of body and mind, whose bad faith and emotional cowardice are either real, or projections of the mother’s resentment, and the dumb schoolboys who beat and mock the kid because that’s what dumb schoolboys do. And indeed, some kinds of difference are a lot easier for Mean Joe Average to forgive than others; for example, it’s much easier for a bully to accept someone he sees as a retarded kid, than a smart kid who seems a little crazy. Asperger’s is a confusing mix of intellectual strength and social weakness, a recipe for disaster.
But it can also make for a life of fresh, vivid perception that often shades into euphoria. The same deserts of inert data through which the rest of us slog all our lives, searching for a patch of beauty, can be experienced by an Asperger’s patient as a giant forest of exquisite repetitions-with-variation:
ASPERGER ECSTASY
The excitement in the difference between two pennies
increases exponentially when there are twenty,
a hundred; a thousand, and he vibrates with joy.
It can be tying flies under a microscope, knot patterns
the size of this period. It can be cataloging washing
machine brands or the note variations in a symphony,
or committing to memory for joyous recounting
the entire year’s schedule for the El-train.
Or picking up rocks from the road, distinguishing the ones
that were indigenous from the gravel trucked in;
beach detritus—what wealth lies strewn—infinite variety
of shell, pebble, seaweed and broken bits of broken bits of stones.
Oh, never to grow bored or experience a numbing
sameness of things! To immerse consciousness
in the sensory present of a bottle cap flattened by traffic,
or spend a whole school day with a paperclip stylus
carving whorls and curlicues in acorns, given
to the teacher instead of the worksheet—
each minute difference an opportunity point
on which another difference can hook
and turn and spread again; a thought diagram
of the branches that split and re-split,
blooming a pattern so rich
and complex it quickly becomes chaos to us—
and he’s never happier than when.
The poem ends where it began; the temporal clause leaves us nowhere to go but back to the beginning of the poem for another run-through: “…he’s never happier than when / the excitement… increases…” There’s something dark and scary about that, since it suggests that the mind is trapped in a loop and might forget all about the outside; conversely, the inside of this poem’s loop is a domain of fascination and joy, so how bad could it be? We get our answer in “Empathy,” the book’s penultimate poem, which honors autistic veterinarian and animal welfare advocate Temple Grandin. The poem explicitly compares the repetitive and circling behaviors by which some autistic people self soothe, and the similar patterns of movement that cattle use to cope with the stress of confinement in feedlots:
…she noticed
how they moved in the stockyards
to soothe themselves—in circles,
like water. She pondered her need
for pattern and order, how swinging
or rocking could calm her, and she
thought of a way to ease that ascension
to abattoir hell. She thought
of a ramp rising in widening circles,
like water. The feedlot execs could see
a PR trend, so they put the ramps in.
…
They did not, like Temple, wear
Bovine skin, snort blood and fear,
Flick flies with her tail, speak
With her doomed brethren
In Angus and Brahmin.
The ironies here need no literary critic to point them out; in fact, they stink too strongly to be repressed. The savant does succeed in making the plight of cattle more humane, but only in mitigating their march to the slaughter, not abolishing it (earlier in the book, the poet’s son is caught “liberating School Project Butterflies”). The “ascension” leads to helplessness and hell, but its rising spiral suggests Dante’s Purgatory of redemptive suffering. Dr. Grandin’s upward movement above the executives’ numb obsession with profit is also a downward movement into bestial “blood and fear.” When the poem ends with that last descriptor, “Brahmin,” we can’t miss the implication that the best among us, the aristocrats of the spirit, are also in some sense the victims of a rigged game that sends them to destruction. Dark Card is a tough and tender book of lyrics that has been receiving more and more of the attention it deserves.
reviewed by Jamey Hecht, Los Angeles
Rebecca Foust. Dark Card. Texas Review Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-933896-14-4.