I had an idea that I would start with a poem by Vassar Miller, who died some years ago in the mid-1990's. Miller was born with cerebral palsy, and her parents were told she would never have a functional life; her intellect, however, was not scathed by the CP (I don't know her physical limitations) and she went on to publish maybe a dozen books.
Some of Miller's work is oppressively formal. Her subject matter was religious, which has also shoved her to the margins of the canonized poetic world. Her stance was agnostic though--in her life Miller was a Baptist but only because she liked the social atmosphere of that particular church (a liberal congregation in Houston.) She also was an erotic poet, which made her a particularly strange brew.
Here's what I believe is her best poem. She's pretty much gone from poetic memory, if she ever had a place there, but I think a street in Houston was named after her.
ON A WEEKEND IN SEPTEMBER
Come God
be man woman child old one
bread breast of the world and water
for that matter
lamb stretched down and down down to the meanest grub
struggling to swim on concrete
merged into mortal stuff
Ancient of Days of Seas
mirroring
hauled to your hard wood
Creator brought to creature
here where I remember Lee Palmer
who 80-odd years ago
prayed by no book but that terrible book of the deeps
on a weekend in September
I quickly skimmed
Dear Jesus
make the waters recede
and give us a pleasant day tomorrow to play
and save my little dog Youno
nobody remembers Lee Palmer now
why would they
he would be an old man now
dying maybe senile maybe
nobody would like him and would wish to hell he'd hurry
still I hope
Lee Palmer
swept out from Galveston in l900
was swept up to you on the Gulf's gray tongue
because were one lapped
and loved in the very body of the beloved
that were not bedding deep enough for one to know
and be known back
when each should tremble
cradled in the other's memory
shifting
such risky ocean
Open Sea
whose sides
eye cannot touch
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