Diane Seuss: A Celebration, and a Reckoning
You, or the Bone House
On our drive down to the Cleburne Memorial Park Cemetery in Texas, I call my friend Diane. My wife, Kelly, sits in the passenger seat. Theirs are the only two numbers stored in the favorites on my phone.
“Hi, hunneh,” Di says. I prefer being the one to call, since whenever I answer, she tries to imitate my greeting — a breathy “hi” or a low-pitched “hey bitch.” “What’s up?” she asks me.
“We’re finally on our way down to see Myrtle,” I say.
Di doesn’t miss a beat. “Will you tell her thank you for me?” she says.
It’s been six months since we moved down to Texas from Missouri. Kelly drove the U-Haul and I drove our car; Di and I spoke six times on the ten-hour trip. “Where are you now?” she always asked me, and I’d tell her whatever I was passing: a river, a correctional center, a lake. “I know exactly where you are,” she would say, and this gave me a deep sense of relief, even though she was hundreds of miles away in Michigan.
Our boxes weren’t even fully unpacked when Di mentioned that we should go visit Myrtle Corbin’s grave. “You’re only an hour away!” she texted. “Wonder what it looks like. Wonder if you could find it. Wish I could make the pilgrimage myself.”
Di wasn’t asking us to visit Myrtle’s grave, though I wished she had. She asks for very little. She’s hard to buy gifts for, though she often jokes that she wants gold fixtures in her nursing home if I ever get rich. We both know she would rather die than live in a nursing home. Di is sixty-five and her solitude is essential, both to her writing life and to her sanity. I’ve given her strange knickknacks, shoes on which I painted skulls, a cross-stitch I made of Frank O’Hara’s face, but the list of what she’s given me is far more extensive. She’s read and given feedback on every essay I’ve ever drafted. She’s backed every decision I’ve made. She’s the first person who texts me in the morning, “Wut up, heaux,” and in the evening she says, “Night, son.”
Neither Di nor I ever met Myrtle Corbin. She was born in 1868 with two pelvises, two vaginas, and four legs. I only knew about her via Di’s third poetry collection, Four-Legged Girl, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2016. Myrtle haunts the collection in a number of ways. She is most overtly present in the final poem, “Oh four-legged girl, it’s either you or the ossuary,” which begins, “For, having met you on the road to Ramptown/ For having taken notice of your four striped socks, green and plum they were…” On the drive down to the cemetery with Kelly, Di tells us the story: She was following her intuition — the road to Ramptown — a place she wouldn’t have gone without her big dog, Bear. “I was worried about my left-leanin’ bumper
stickers,” she tells us. “No telling who you’re gonna piss off, you know? It was cold. We passed by farmlands and fields. I just knew this was where I needed to go.”
“How?” I ask. “How did you know?”
“I just knew,” she says.
Suddenly, it occurs to me that I have forgotten to bring Four-Legged Girl with me on the pilgrimage. I had wanted to stand before Myrtle’s grave and read her the titular poem: Di’s homage to Myrtle and my homage to Di. In a small way, I was already a part of the book: I had taken Di’s author portrait for the back cover. We hadn’t known each other very well when she invited Kelly and me over to her backyard in Kalamazoo. I gasped when I entered the first time.
“It’s like Eden!” I had said, and Di beamed. Kelly patted Bear’s head and scratched behind his ears.
One thing we did not forget were flowers — yellow zinnias — which were resting in the back seat. When I told Di about the flowers, she said, “Good. You’re following your intuition.”
The first time I saw Diane Seuss, she was giving a speech at the small, liberal arts school I attended. When she introduced herself as a professor, my mouth fell open. She was wearing a shirt with arm holes so large that everyone could see her bra underneath. Her leggings were cheetah print. Her blue hair was pulled up in a messy side-pony. Right away, I felt a kinship with her. She looked free.
I signed up for a poetry class with her. In class, I learned that Di had been raised by a single mother after her father passed away when she was seven. She had raised a son by herself when her husband walked out. She didn’t have an MFA in writing: most of what she knew she had taught herself.
In class, Di talked about her in-progress collection, Four-Legged Girl. She talked about the importance of following her intuition, and I remember telling her that intuition was the reason I had signed up for her course. I rarely took classes outside my two disciplines, math and studio art. I was too busy trying to squeeze an entire undergraduate education into three years, which was in blatant opposition to the college’s motto, “More in Four.” In the years that
followed, Di and I would discuss this impulse at length. Her challenge for me, both in writing and life, was to “slow the fuck down.”
At the end of my quarter studying poetry with Di, I asked if I could talk to her about my future. Like me, she was working class through and through. She said she knew the minute she looked at me that I was queer and closeting. Closeting, for a long time, was how I survived. Rather than feeling like an invasion, it felt oddly comforting to be seen in this way. “I knew you were raised Catholic, too,” she would later tell me. “It just oozed off of ya.”
Di took me on a drive through the farmlands of Kalamazoo — pulled over on the side of the road so we could watch a large, black cow chewing on a piece of hay. Could Di feel it, I wondered, my discomfort with stillness, with silence, with myself? I squirmed as Di stared blissfully at the cow, its only movement the subtle hinge of its jaw.
We talked about many things on that drive: my working-class family, my writing aspirations, the abuse I had suffered at the hands of my mother that I couldn’t yet identify as abuse. Di had wanted to know it all, and she was one of the few people to which I was willing to spill. I had spent an entire term showing her carefully curated pieces of myself — poems that were, in a way, enacting my closeting. They were careful poems, delicate and in control. I
wanted her to know me outside of all that. I wanted her to see the unconventionality at my core — the part of me that was brave and bold but didn’t know it yet.
I finished Di’s class in March, and in April, I began auditing a nonfiction class. I read all the books, even though I didn’t have to, and completed all the assignments. After graduation in June, I sent Di some of my essays. I wanted her to see that I was starting to go deeper, writing about family dysfunction and abuse and queerness. “Keep going,” she urged me. “Keep pushing.
Keep questioning. And keep sending me work.”
***
As we drive toward Cleburne, the sun emerges from behind some trees, and I point to the sunglasses resting on Kelly’s head. She hands them over. “You still there?” I ask Di. She has a habit of letting the silence linger.
“I’m here,” she says.
“How did you find out about Myrtle?” I ask Di, and she tells me she saw a photo of her online. I nod along even though she can’t see me; I remember a section of the essay Di published about Myrtle Corbin in tandem with her book. In it, Di writes, “I was initially drawn to Myrtle Corbin via the photograph itself. I knew nothing of her story. I loved the range of textures in her clothes — the fringe and braiding, the dark bloomers that squeezed each leg above the knee, the evil angle of the club foot, the way she met the camera’s curious gaze with a face that gave nothing away. The double-vagina hooked me for good, how this girl carried not only her half-absorbed sister but femaleness itself times two.”
Often, I think of all the things Di carries that might be impossible without poetry. To make a list for her feels like it would flatten the complexity of her life, but I think of everything I carry, too. My weirdness, my queerness, my past, both conventional and unconventional. On some level, Di must know that her very presence was a permission-giver to me. Everything about
her, from the blue streaks in her hair to the bumper sticker on the back of her VW Beetle that said “Yawp, dammit. Yawp.”
Myrtle, from what Di has told me and what I have read of her work, granted permission to Di, too. Di was riveted, for instance, by the fact that she married and had five children — two from one vagina and three from the other. In her essay, Di writes, “I love and lust after Myrtle Corbin because she is queered and empowered by her idiosyncrasy. I imagine her in bed at night
feeling like the only one of her species in all of Dreamland.” At the very end, Di closes with, “I experience my own body as a spectacle, an exhibit, a performance, and a condition. My legs are exponential. How do I freak thee? Let me count the ways. Muse, imagination, poetry: who among us can live without her?”
***
After we say goodbye and thank you to Di — “Bye, hunneh” — it’s not long before we take an exit into the town of Cleburne. We see a Dairy Queen and three cows, which stare at us as we drive past.
The cemetery appears small initially but seems to widen as we approach. The enormity of the task we are about to undertake suddenly dawns on me. We find a place to park and start wandering down one of the long aisles.
“How are we ever going to find this?” I ask Kelly, and she shrugs. I hold Myrtle’s flowers like a bride.
We walk in silence, both scanning the graves. It’s meditative, but also feels a bit disheartening. We don’t know what we’re looking for — not exactly. We don’t know if the grave will say her full name — Josephine Myrtle Corbin — or her married name, Bicknell. After about half an hour, Kelly stops and pulls out her phone.
“Give me a sec,” she says. “Maybe I can find the plot number.”
As Kelly searches, I take out my phone, too, and pull up the essay Di wrote about Myrtle. I’ve been reading it every day for a week, as though there are hidden answers in it. I am unsatisfied with what Di told me in the car: she doesn’t know what led her to Myrtle or why she felt so pulled to Ramptown. She doesn’t have an explanation. What she does offer is an origin story. “I believe my association with her predecessor paved the way,” Di wrote. “My first love was the taxidermied two-headed lamb in my little hometown museum. He was John the Baptist to Myrtle’s Jesus. In the lamb’s two soft heads and four sweet eyes I discovered the vulnerability and genius of marginality, the burden and the gift of originality.”
Was this what Di had given me? An understanding of my own marginality, the burden and the gift of originality? “To me, the four-legged girl is a symbol of distinctiveness,” Di once told me. “And how she lived with it. In the poem, I write about her power that emerges from her strangeness.” I recognize that Di is my symbol of distinctiveness. Di’s power comes from her strangeness, too.
In the last line of her poem, Di writes, “For having brooded on you in the leek fields of Ramptown/ I’m besotted, harrowed/ It’s you or the polyandrium/ You or the bone house.” There are bone houses surrounding me now, in this cemetery where the four-legged girl is buried. I have a choice, I realize. Every day, I have a choice between being myself or the bone house.
When Kelly finds a plot number online, she leads me by the hand across the cemetery. “I think it’s near here,” she says.
We split up and start scanning the graves again.
“I saw online that her family members had to watch over the gravesite until the concrete was fully dried,” Kelly calls over to me. “There were people — medical practitioners and private collectors — who wanted to pay for Myrtle’s body.”
We’ve almost circled the whole plot when we see it. Somehow, I know we’ve found it before I even read the inscription. Intuition?
JOSEPHINE M. BICKNELL (May 12, 1868 — May 6, 1928)
Someone has left pink flowers at the base of Myrtle’s grave. I can tell without touching them that they’re fake. We both stare at the tombstone in silence. I don’t feel a sense of urgency or anticipation, and I wonder if that means I’ve grown since the day Di took me out on that drive in the farmlands of Kalamazoo. If I could go back and do it over, I would’ve embraced my
weirdness earlier. It’s not too late, though. Di reminds me of that every day.
“Di wanted us to tell her something,” Kelly says softly. Her voice is almost a whisper.
“Thank you,” I say — both in response to Kelly’s question, to Myrtle, and to Di. I lay down my flowers and run my fingers along the tombstone, covered by moss that looks like lace.
“Thank you.”
