The Truth Rings
Sheila Black’s poem, “Reconstructed” in Beauty as a Verb is a poem that explores Black’s own experience with disability while leaving its readers rethinking and reimagining the constructed “normal” one may be subscribing to. She explores placing together complicated truths and shares her own experience as someone who lives with a disability in a world that constructed the “normal” for everyone. Black focuses on her experience with disability. However, she uses the imagery of nature to speak for her experience. She communicates the beauty and tenderness of nature and knits it with the violence and attack of pain and man-made elements to tell the story of her own disability, and leaves her readers resolving the conflict and reconstructing their preconceived ideas about disability.
The poem focuses on the speaker’s experience as having a disability. But, the imagery of nature speaks for the speaker’s feelings. The poem opens where the speaker shares what is on her mind: “I think of the trees there first:”(1). This is the first time we encounter the speaker, but instead of speaking about herself, she talks about “the trees” she thinks “there first”. The word “think” and “there” suggests that the speaker is not in the act of presently witnessing the trees, but the speaker transitions in focusing on what the trees are witnessing creating a connection between her and the trees as the trees are personified as “breathing” and witnessing the “loneliness of other people’s windows” (3–4). What is more interesting in this line is that instead of focusing on the people’s loneliness, the speaker focuses on the “loneliness of other people’s window”. It appears that the speaker is describing the loneliness seen from other people’s windows as inanimate and less affectionate, but the trees are personified breathing and witnessing loneliness above a man-made brick colonial which is two to three stories high.
Another style the poet uses to communicate her message along with the imagery of nature is through reconstructing sentence structure which affects the reader’s experience and access to the poem. The opening line of the poem where our speaker, “I” is present, follows a much proper sentence structure. But, notice how the poet deconstructs the following lines when we reach the punctuation mark colon: “how large and tender / they seemed’’ (2). The sentence structure is reconstructed and it becomes complex as the verb “seemed” is placed at the end of the sentence given that there is also an enjambment at next line to complete the message, it seems to relate to the same complexity of the speaker’s complicated and unstated emotion in dealing with a disability that is revealed to us at the end of the first stanza, “I could feel / my bones knitting themselves/ into a new shape”(9–11). Also, it encapsulates the unfamiliarity and uncomfortability a person with a disability may experience or how one experiences looking into a disabled body just as how a reader will find it complex following the lines. Moreover, on lines 3–8 notice the lack of conjunction and the deconstructed sentence structure: “breathing green / above the brick colonials, / the loneliness of other people’s windows, / glittering under the sulfurous / street lamps, / past midnight / when the pills stopped / working,”. This shows that while the speaker gives us a stack of lists bringing us far from her while giving us a message that is not explicitly apparent, “seemed” also suggests that it is too complex to state what may be certain for all people with disability experiences. The choice of the word “seemed” gives the speaker’s impression or sensation on how the trees may appear “large and tender” on their physical appearance, but metaphorically speaking, one of the ways we may understand this is that the trees are “large” and they are taking their own spaces to exist, and with their relatively large size, it is impossible to ignore them as one sees them. In relation to disability, this brings up the context of how one may be seen as visible and invisible due to disability. In addition, “tender” may refer to a physical characteristic of a tree, where a tender tree may not thrive in a cold temperature. Cold is often associated with a feeling close to “the loneliness of other people’s windows” (3). Lastly, cold is linked as the sensation produced by lack of feeling comfort due to the absence of warmth from the body due to homeostatic imbalance, a common symptom of one who experiences bone condition problems. In other words, these trees foreshadow and relate to the speaker’s experience and disability condition in the poem on the last three lines of the first stanza, “and I could feel/ my bones knitting themselves /into a new shape”.
Another style the poet uses to communicate her message is through the use of contrast and dichotomy. Black contrasts beauty and violence that will force the readers to consolidate them. For instance, the trees are a symbol of indifference. They stand among the “brick colonials”. Unlike the brick that is man-made and strong, the tender trees are the living things that naturally grow and exist there, and they are sensitive to witness and connect with the emotion of the living beings. This dichotomy intensifies the senses involved in the poem. Thus, the setting and location in the poem happen to a place beheld in imagination, or a memory. The poet personifies the trees as “breathing”. Now, we can argue if trees do breathe, and we know that all living things respire, so they do. But, the trees are not only personified as breathing above the buildings. They were described as “breathing green”. Of course, green often symbolizes growth, life, nature, and its natural world. However, green may also symbolize health, physical illness just as the phrase “turning green” indicates”. Interestingly, as the trees are “breathing green” in the presence of the unnatural “brick colonials”, we are also referred to the contrasting presence of “sulfurous street lamps” (6). What is ambiguous in this line is if the speaker is describing the street lamps as the color of sulfur, or the lamps are activated by sulfur or both. Nevertheless, what is true is that the poet is consistently building the instability of the existing objects’ contradictions. These contradictions seem to mirror the environment people with disabilities often find themselves in. They may feel organically unique “breathing green” living and growing in a natural world where they feel the uniqueness of themselves, or/ and they may feel the struggle of coping with harsh realities and embracing the pain of the “bones knitting themselves/ into a new shape” (10–11). Moreover, instead of using more violent terms like crushing and breaking, or grinding to describe the feeling of her disabled body, the speaker uses the word “knit” to suggest a less violent effect as opposed to “breaking” or “grinding”. In other words, the speaker feels that it is more of creating tenderly what is new, and producing an effect or emotion that is “new [to its] shape”. In line with this, it rings back to the title, “Reconstruction”. However, this reconstruction or “knitting” is organic unlike the “brick colonials” (4). In fact, it is an unforced reaction of the body that grows and reconstructs “past midnight” (7). Like a tree that never stops growing regardless of the time and season of the year, “their green hearts [blooms] in [her body]” (49). These contradictions and dichotomy in the poem challenge the readers’ preconceived ideas about disability. In addition, they also represent what is unstable and what can coexist in the same space forcing us, the readers, to resolve what may be uncommon and uncomfortable.
Another instance where the strong dichotomy of beauty and tenderness is placed against violent elements is in the opening line of the second stanza: “The rings of trees accreted / slowly, one by one,”. Rings often symbolize continuity and progress. It also symbolizes perfection, but the rings of trees that grow significantly slowly signify the trees’ journey in different seasons and weather. These rings are an undeniable indelible mark within a body of a tree, and can only appear and grow through a slow and agonizing attack of the weather all year long. It is essential whether it will be harshly sunny or harshly rainy because, without the weather, there will never be a process of an organic, natural growth of rings on the trees which tells its age and the life span it survives the seasons. In other words, there needs to be a force; a violent or gentle force like how it is only possible to “spread ripples from a dropped / stone” (14–15). A stone must be chucked so that beautiful and calming ripples may appear. Although violent or tender, the organic and natural slow process of producing rings in the inner bodies of trees is what makes a tree more valuable. In the same way, as the speaker brings us to a close examination of the cross-cut trees, she intimately reveals to us the inner part of her body, her “healed bones hardening / a different white on the x-rays, / not even a ghost of the form they had been” (15–18). Unlike the others, her bone hardens differently as the purest of white that not even a spirit of a ghost has ever been this white. These distinct white healed bones took time for them to slowly heal, and just like “the rings of the trees” it leaves a significant indelible mark on the speaker’s disabled body as a mark of her “battle scars” making one more valuable as how they appear.
Overall, as the speaker uses the imagery of nature and the dichotomy of what is beautiful and what seems violent, the readers begin to embrace the ringing message of the poem circling from its beginning to its end. Bones give humans frame and structure, the bones the speaker has because of her disability are always reconstructing as “the bones [knit] to themselves / to form a new shape”(10). But, this does not only bring us back to the feelings and struggles of the speaker in the last lines of the first stanza, it also brings us back to the continuity of the poem and its recurring message throughout the poem. The dichotomy of the harshness of the chucking of a stone to the appearance of the calming ripples and the violence of the weather producing the beautiful rings on the tender trees are forced to come together, to co-exist, to collide even though they cannot find a resolution with each other. This relates to the sweet and bitter representation of people with disabilities, they have to consistently live circling in the structures of what is “healthy” and the “normal” that the place they are at tells them and everyone. While at the same time, they are forced to accept and love their body as they “heal” and “recover”, and where they are often seen as their disability. However, chuck all the constructed norms because we must embrace the beauty and the scars of the marks of a disabled body.
Works Cited
Bartlett, Jennifer, et al. Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, Cinco Puntos Press, El Paso, 2011, pp. 56–56.
