On the Application of Poetry - Guest Post by Don Raymond, Jr.

Sarah Lindsay’s What All It Takes

from Primate Behavior (Knopf, 1997)

November, 2007: the last phone call of the last hour of the day before leaving for Thanksgiving was my doctor telling me I had been diagnosed with diabetes. 

            Over the following weeks of measuring-cup starvation, I looked for ways to assign meaning to what had happened. I didn’t need an answer to the existential “why.”  I knew “why” – sugar was not one of the four food groups, no matter how much I wanted it to be.  Ditto for coffee, cholesterol, and cigarettes. What I needed was a way to give this meaning, to help me feel this was more than simply a struggle for continued existence.

            I found myself reciting Sarah Linday’s “What All It Takes,” over and over again. Sometimes in the morning, to brace myself for another day of measured almonds and banana snacks; sometimes in the midst of a panic attack brought on by too much exercise. And far too often, murmured under my breath in anger at the world.

            As the glucose meter read too high one moment, too low the next, I would mutter: “Up and down its red and blue chutes / my defective blood bumps / Oreos and gumballs one hour, / famished soap bubbles the next.” Describing red blood cells as “Oreos and gumballs” made the sickness tolerable.  If she could laugh at it, could sum it up in such words, the least I could do was survive. The least I could do was marvel at the mounds of pharmaceutical junk I was producing - the twice-daily blood sugar readings, the lancets for drawing blood, special strips for reading sugar levels, a mountain of biologically hazardous garbage, all to prop up my continued existence. I had become a medical cottage industry. All this stuff … “Christmas survived, / I find with the special sugarless candy’s / mild laxative effect time to wonder / at what all it takes to keep me up.”

I had been hurt, in ways that would not heal. I had reached the time of my life where ready access to hospitals was a major lifestyle decision. Though I’d always lived within walking distance of a liquor store, the pipe dream of rugged self-sufficiency was gone for good. “… in an Ice Age cave I’d be dead. / In a Roman villa with household gods and servants / I’d be dead. In a Gothic wheatfield town, / even before the plague came I’d be dead.”

            I made it through, and in no large part because someone else had before me. Someone had faced the same thing, and won, and Sarah Lindsay told me about it in language so vital, so heartbreakingly true, that it had to be true for me, as well.


For more on Sarah Lindsey, check out her page at the Poetry Foundation.

For more about Don Raymond, Jr., visit his work for Architrave.