7 Overcoming adversity poems

After stumbling a long time over impossible trails you are up on top. Hardship didn't crush you, you trod it down, climbed higher. That's how you see it. After life has tossed you away, and you ended up on top like a one-legged wooden horse on a dump. Life is merciful, it blinds and provides illusions, and destiny takes on our burden: foolishness and arrogance become mountains and marshy places, hate and resentment become wounds from enemy arrows, and the doubt always with us becomes cold dry rocky valleys. You go in the door. The pot lies upside down in the hearth, it sprawls with hostile black feet.

Because of the first, the fear of wreck, which they taught us to fear (though we learned at once, and easily), because of the wreck that was expected (and metal given velocity and heft to assure it)— we became adepts in rise above : how many versions: the church steeple that took the eye straight up to heaven (though it seemed snagged on the cross-beam of that cross, torn blue at the top, where sense leaked out). And rise above , transcendence, on that higher plane, the vertical direction of virtue (a bony finger pointing up to where matter dissolves into distaste for it); the space program, expensive tons of rocket (soon to be debris) fired off the planet's crust at anything out there, pocked moon, red rocky Mars, ever the upward urge , carved in the marble arch of the old library door under which generations passed, hoping to rise above it all— like the woman the magician levitates over the table, her body floating an unlikely inch or two above the velvet-draped plateau... watch her hovering, weightless, the crowd staring in wonder, the trick of the thing still hidden, and the magician doing something now with his hands, a flurry of brilliant silk in the air, as she floats in the endlessness of art, the magician still waving his scarves, the air a bright shatter of wings, doves from a hat, our disbelief suspended, while below, the wrecks accumulate: scrap yard, broken concrete slabs, and all those bodies not exempt from gravity, beneath our notice as we ride above it all, like froth on a wave that will be water falling by the ton, soon, when the tide turns.

Everything you thought you knew must be relearned overnight. How to walk. Walk, not trip, over cords, 2x4s, used coffee cups, concrete cores. Walk, 40 pounds on your shoulder, across rebar or a wood plank; glide, not wobble, not look like the bounce beneath each bootstep scares you. How to dress yourself to work outdoors all day midwinter and keep warm, keep working, fingers moving; or midsummer, with no hint of breasts. How to climb ladders– not a stepstool or a 4-footer– ladders that stretch up two stories where someone’s impatient for that bundle of pipe. How to get coffee– hot and how they like it–to a crew spread out 10 floors; to carry muffins three blocks in a paper sack through sheets of rain. How to look. To never go back empty-handed when you’re told,Grab me a This/That from the gangbox, if all you’ve done is move things around, poke here and there; if you haven’t emptied out the full contents so the journeyman won’t shame you by finding This/That in a quick minute, after you’ve said,We don’t have any. How to be dependable but not predictable-provokable. Not the lunch break entertainment. How to read blueprints, delivery orders, the mood on the job; how long it’s okay to sit down for coffee; how early you can start rolling up cords. How to do well in school from the back row of a seats-assigned-Jim-Crow classroom How to learn tricks-of-the-trade from someone who does not like you. How to listen, to act-don’t-ask. To duck when someone motions,Duck! Or when someone tells you,Don’t talk to Zeke, to know what they mean so you don’t even look at Zeke, the ironworker who’s always first out, last in, standing there, so four times a day– start, lunch, quit–all the workers walk past him, like a sandbar, waves washing back and forth, that catches debris. How to pick up the phone and call your friend, the only one of the women not at class the night the apprenticeship director met you all at the door carrying the nervous rumor that one of the women had been raped and you all look at each other and it wasn’t any of you five. How to respond–within protocol– when someone takes your ladder or tools, imitates your voices on the loudspeaker, spraypaints Cunt on your Baker staging, urinates in your hardhat, drives to your home where you live alone with your daughter and keys your truck parked in your own driveway. Later, you’ll need the advanced skills: how–without dislodging the keystone– to humiliate a person, how to threaten a person. Deftly. So no one’s certain for absolute that’s what happened. Not even you.

Stumps. Railroad tracks. Early sicknesses, the blue one, especially. Your first love rounding a corner, that snowy minefield. Whether you step lightly or heavily, you have to get over to that tree line a hundred yards in the distance before evening falls, letting no one see you wend your way, that wonderful, old-fashioned word,wend, meaning “to proceed, to journey, to travel from one place to another,” as from bed to breakfast, breakfast to imbecile work. You have to get over your resentments, the sun in the morning and the moon at night, all those shadows of yourself you left behind on odd little tables. Tote that barge! Lift that bale! You have to cross that river, jump that hedge, surmount that slogan, crawl over this ego or that eros, then hoist yourself up onto that yonder mountain. Another old-fashioned word,yonder, meaning “that indicated place, somewhere generally seen or just beyond sight.” If you would recover, you have to get over the shattered autos in the backwoods lot to that bridge in the darkness where the sentinels stand guarding the border with their half-slung rifles, warned of the likes of you.

The house collapsed and I was crushed under the rubble, pulverized, but here I am, walking around as if I were alive — the swain, with an oxeye daisy in my buttonhole, the bitter voluptuary, never satisfied, the three-legged dog, the giant under the tiny parasol at the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, the only Abyssinian in the choir of the Abyssinian Baptist Church. (Somebody must have done a self-portrait of me.) Just amazing. I think I could wrap my arms all the way around the 24,901-miles-circumferenced Earth.

I am the last woman off of the plane that has crashed in a cornfield near Philly, picking through hot metal for my rucksack and diaper bag. No black box, no fuselage, just sistergirl pilot wiping soot from her eyes, happy to be alive. Her dreadlocks will hold the smoke for weeks. All the white passengers bailed out before impact, so certain a sister couldn’t navigate the crash. O gender. O race. O ye of little faith. Here we are in the cornfield, bruised and dirty but alive. I invite sistergirl pilot home for dinner at my parents’, for my mother’s roast chicken with gravy and rice, to celebrate.

This time I came to the starting place with my best running shoes, and pure speed held back for the finish, came with only love of the clock and the underfooting and the other runners. Each of us would be testing excellence and endurance in the other, though in the past I’d often veer off to follow some feral distraction down a side path, allowing myself to pursue something odd or beautiful, becoming acquainted with a few of the ways not to blame myself for failing to succeed. I had come to believe what’s beautiful had more to do with daring to take yourself seriously, to stay the course, whatever the course might be. The person in front seemed ready to fade, his long, graceful stride shortening as I came up along his side. I was sure now I’d at least exceed my best time. But the man with the famous final kick already had begun his move.Beautiful, I heard a spectator say, as if something inevitable about to come from nowhere was again on its way.