It was my sister who recommended Veil and Burn by Laurie Clements Lambeth. The volume’s title hints at three metaphors running through the text. Overtly, veil and burn is the process by which one manipulates light exposure in an old-school darkroom– adding light to burn and covering to veil–in order to change the exposure and contrast. The photographs laced through the text are memories of loved ones, but also a way to interrogate her own vision which is affected by her Multiple Sclerosis. Lambeth’s illness is at the heart of the volume and she explores her relationship to vision, mobility, and memory in light of the disease. Finally, the veil also suggests her marriage and her changing relationship with her husband given the disease’s way of distancing her from her own body and sense of touch.
In the second poem of the volume, “Symptoms,” Lambeth attempts to convey life with MS:
I’ll try to tell you how it feels: girdle
my grandmother wore, tight-laced corset
worn by her mother in Wales, but seldom slips
from my ribcage. No hooks or laces, only
spaces of remission, then relapse,
a trip to the ancient clothes again:
crinolines, skirts grazing ankles, long
satin embroidered sleeves that rub and pull
naked skin, saying, now and then you must
try to feel through this, and this. All that fabric
wound around torso, legs, the dresses
and sheets binding to keep me in
bed. The cure is rest, they tell me. Dizzy,
drunk when I haven’t drunk, I’m drawn
to the wall to prop me. I’ve been known to sport
a cane, per the fashion, to smooth the gait.
Fix my mouth in a loose pout when speech
eludes its muscles, tired stiff as the garments
that hold me. On occasion, they’ll fall
to reveal this body, a window of cellophane
wrapping my limbs, a ring or each finger.
Diagnosed in 2008, at 35, my sister also has MS and also lives with this girdle, the remit and relapse that has come to dictate her life. I see the poems as an act of translation; Lambeth translates the language of pain and illness, as well as resolution and resolve, into something legible for those not living everyday was MS.
In the poem above, the connection between old, traditional ways of dressing women and the unyielding manner of the disease is illuminating– the claustrophobia of MS and the analogy to the outdated expectations of women comes back in the volume as she thinks through her complicated relationship to autonomy and dependence, freedom and constraint. It also underscored to me the desperate need for better treatment and a cure for MS– life with MS should be a vestige of the past.
My favorite poem of the collection, “Reluctant Pegasus,” is a long poem divided into 10 sections dealing with death, horses, myth, and rebirth. Lambeth’s line changes drastically from section to section, moving between tabbed lines reminiscent of Marianne Moore’s “The Fish,” to shorter lines in quatrains or couplets, and prose verse. The breadth of the kinds of line suggest the breadth of the horse mythology and, by extension, the human/ horse connection. In section 6, the speaker imagines the uncovering of the Ice Maiden in 1993:
Tattoos of creatures with flowering horns climb thumb and shoulder of the Pazyryk Ice Maiden of Siberia. Wild silk blouse, headdress of felt. Archaeologists deduce: shaman, visionary, prophet. Her olive skin, first thawed, nearly glowed alive, pliable, sutures with horse hair thread, body stuffed with peat and bark. Eyes removed in the mummification process, sockets packed with fur. […]
Preserved with her under ice, her six horses were sacrificed and laid just outside the burial chamber to accompany the Ice Maiden to the pasture of the afterlife…
The tenderness with which this ancient people dressed and preserved the body of a woman so central to their community is mimicked in the line which easily moves, but this easy form is difficult to maintain. In section 5, subtitled Reluctant Pegasus, she links poetic movement and bodily movement:
My poor cane is wounded, but I’m all right;
another chip in the handle. No longer
a three-legged woman, I’m a gimp,
a limper with a numb leg, no sense
of enjambment, no stride except
at the wrong moments, maybe a near
fall to scare me, or the sense of a skirt
against the skin where there is no
skirt, so it comes as no surprise
when that numb leg sprouts a tiny wing
at the ankle, another at the knee,
a fluttering one gracing the calf– (l. 1-12)
In section 10 MS returns with a vengeance and the line jumps across the page with fervor:
The numbness migrates,
charts the slowest route from left foot to my ribcage
along the thigh grown accustomed
to griping a horses’s abdomen, squeezing cues of forward,
reverse, passage, side-pass right. This numbness presses in, might be
a cue to me (cue so close to cure) to move
or lie down, lord knows which […] (l.1-7)
I am so grateful for Lambeth’s poems and that she unabashedly takes on MS. For my sister and others, living with MS isolates and distances them from the experience of their own bodies as well as separates them from the life they knew before symptoms and pain. Lambeth creates a new mythology, connecting her struggle to human experience across hundreds and thousands of years. While individual poems in Veil and Burn are elegiac, mourning a past existence that is no longer possible for her, the volume is insistently forward moving– persistent even in the face of such great opposition.