Around midnight, as Deb backed Madsen and the Row of Life into the velvety harbor water, three of their friends gathered in the distance, careful not to get too close. Madsen floated for a long moment, rolling her palms around the oar handles, feeling their familiar grip. The first stroke came unconsciously. “See you on the other side of the pond!” one of the friends shouted. The white of the Row of Life’s navigation light bled a fragmented trail across the water until it disintegrated in the new-moon darkness.
Then there was no sound. The world behind her, Madsen was now in the place that had made her whole. “Whatever my purpose is in this life, my differently-abled, physically-challenged, broken-down, beaten-up body seems to be the vehicle required for me to achieve it,” Madsen once wrote. “If I could go back and change things, I would not.”
Why do poets write about the worst things that have happened to them? What do we mean when we refer to our identity? Does our identity consist of the totality of what we do and say? What we know and make? What others have done to us? What portion of our identity do we inherit from our family and ancestors? Which parts of our inheritance can we choose, and which can we reject? What does it mean to be a victim, and is victimhood a part of an identity?
One of my earliest memories is not a memory at all but a sensation, perhaps a kind of hunger: it is the taste of the wooden pew in the small church in which I spent every Sunday morning of my life from birth until high school. The ledge of the pew, where prayer books and hymnals and rosary beads rested, was just about shoulder height for a toddler wobbling to stand – so it was only natural to reach out and grasp hold of the ledge, put my mouth to its sweet, vinegary, golden wood, and suck.
Chinese superstition tells me it’s bad luck
to get a haircut when I’m sick, and my hair
gets cut twice a year, because I let it grow,
tying it into a ponytail, exposing my forehead,