Gravity, the Chariot, the Well, the Name: Being Pulled

If I get there before you do,
(Coming for to carry me home)
I'll cut a hole and pull you through.
(Coming for to carry me home)

Variant verse of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"
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In a chariot, you ride alone. You drive straight ahead and, crab-like, fight from the side.

I'd like to be pulled into the sky through a hole-punch cloud, straight to wherever you are.

I wouldn't mind blitzkrieg, and I've already been blindsided.

Take me in.
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Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina

There was no water at my grandfather's
when I was a kid and would go for it
with two zinc buckets. Down the path,
past the cow by the foundation where
the fine people's house was before
they arranged to have it burned down.
To the neighbor's cool well. Would
come back with pails too heavy,
so my mouth pulled out of shape.
I see myself, but from the outside.
I keep trying to feel who I was,
and cannot. Hear clearly the sound
the bucket made hitting the sides
of the stone well going down,
but never the sound of me.

Jack Gilbert
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Proprioception, from the Latin proprius, meaning "one's own" and perceptio, "to take in," is a neurological term for sensory awareness, the ability to sense the relative position of neighboring parts of the body.



I have lost my sense of place--my proprietary interest in the universe. I have lost "one's own." Like the widow (which I am), I search everywhere for that valuable thing I lost--in books, in art, in music, in dreams.

I keep trying to feel who I was,/and cannot.

That describes my stroke, when I could tell my left arm to move, and the fingers wouldn't wave. This is worse. How can I love my neighbor as myself, when I can't feel myself? Who am I now that everything is over and I am perhaps no longer Mrs. Harvey Parker. (I'm the only person I know who liked being called Mrs. I liked taking Harvey's name. It was not the surname of my childhood or of my first marriage. I loved the sound of Pamela Parker, and now I hear it in the same way as Paul McCartney might have first heard Eleanor Rigby, who as you know died and was buried along with her name.)

A name is "one's own," and now I don't know mine. I can hardly take it in.




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