Poetry about raising a son with Asperger's Syndome, the high functioning autism disorder featured in the film "Rain Man."
This cycle of poems explores a mother's experience with raising a beloved son with Asperger's Syndrome, the high functioning form of autism sometimes known as "idiot savant" disorder and featured in the film "Rain Man." Dark Card won the 2007 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in June 2008. It has won two post publication Awards: first place in poetry for the 2009 London Book Fair, and HM in poetry for the 2009 Green Book Award. Most of Dark Card's poems were previously published in journals including Atlanta Review, Margie, and South Carolina Review; one was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the title poem was nominated for a 2008 Pushcart Award. Dark Card has been the subject of more than 20 revews and featured since its release; these are collected on my website.
Excerpt
DARK CARD
When they look at my son like that
at the grocery store check out
or at school assemblies,
I wait for the right moment, till they move
through laughter, raised eyebrows, clamped lips
—but before fear. Then I switch gears,
go into my tap dance-and-shuffle routine.
Yes, he’s different, all kids are different, him
just a little bit more—oh, he’s knocked down
the applesauce pyramid? So sorry, here,
my sleeves conceal napkins for messes like this,
and I can make them disappear. But before I do,
make sure you marvel at how the jars
made an algorithm when he pulled that one free.
Oh, he was standing on his desk again, crowing
like a rooster in your third-period class?
Yes, bad manners, and worse luck
that he noticed how today’s date and the clock
matched the hour of what you taught
last week in a footnote—the exact pivotal
second of the Chinese Year of the Cock.
Before they get angry, I pull out my deck,
deal out what they want. Yes, he’s different,
but look at his IQ score, his Math SAT!
I’ve figured out that difference pays freight
when linked with intelligence; genius trumps odd,
alchemizes bizarre into merely eccentric.
So I play the dark card of the idiot savant,
trotting out parlor tricks in physics and math:
he sees solutions the way you might breathe!
Or perceive! The color green! It’s my ploy
to exorcise their pitchforks and torches,
to conjure Bill Gates when they see him,
or Einstein, not Kaczynski or Columbine;
perhaps they’ll think him delightfully odd
or oddly delightful, dark Anime eyes,
brow arc calligraphy on rice paper skin,
his question mark flowerstalk spine.
But it’s a swindle, a flimflam, a lie,
Dark Card page 2 [no stanza break]
a not-celebration of what he sees
with his inward-turned eye:
the patterns in everything—traffic, dirt piles,
bare branches of trees, matrices in jar stacks,
Shang Dynasty history in tick of school clock,
music in color and math, the way shoppers
shuffle their feet while waiting on line;
how he tastes minute differences between brands—
even batches-within-brands—of pickles and cheese;
how he sees the moonlit vole
on the freeway’s blurred berm.
Rebecca Foust
[This poem first appeared in Margie, Vol. 6, Fall 2007, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in December 2007.]
Using Calgary as a backdrop the author satirizes the self-serving nature of the public as it continues to fatten itself, not only physically, but egotistically as well.
