The poem I’ve loved this month is “I Cannot Say I Did Not” by Sharon Olds. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know I usually feature a few poems. This month, just this one. This is the one poem I’ve really loved this month. The essay that follows examines it alongside a little bit of early motherhood.
After writing my birth story, I welled with tears. I kept writing—past the sight of him, past Jon singing him his first song out here, past the extended hospital stay and coming home and debating whether to open ice cream, even past pronouncements and Unabomber ramblings on love and meaning. I didn’t want it to end. Already, the push-pull of grief and joy at him growing, learning. My life, for me, feels perfect—and some grief in the realization that this overwhelming happiness, this cheery monotony, is temporary—in the same way that used to bring me relief (“This is temporary. This is only temporary.”).
Every day is full. Just finishing what I once considered basic tasks—going to the grocery, drinking a cup of coffee (hardly ever warm by the time I finish it), reading a short chapter—feel like monumental achievements. My son is healthy and beautiful. My husband is beautiful and kind. Our yard is unmowed. My hair is undone. I saw two groundhogs in my neighbor’s yard, and one of them (at least) spends his nights burrowing underneath our porch. Laundry multiplies like rabbits. Time disappears like quarters into a jukebox—six in a go. I must remind myself to eat; otherwise I forget until late in the day, at some inconvenient hour, holding a baby and calming a dog. I spend free minutes at my desk, writing. Writing what? The disappointment, I realize, eyes welling over my notebook, eventually just drawing a heart at the end of the story like a middle-schooler in love, is that I cannot put into language how glorious it all is. I can’t even remember it all now, much less get it all down. (Cue Emily in Our Town.) How the means themselves are the ends, how all of this was here before it was here and is gone even now. If I risk sounding precious, it’s because … I feel it all preciously. But my lack of language, or my lack of skill at employing it, will cost me the bulk of my memory of this time. Like how even in photos Wendell almost never looks quite Wendell. I don’t know that at the page I’ve ever felt like I had so many things to say and so little ability, so few words—mostly redundant—to say them.
But then a friend* posted this poem: “I want to say that love / is the meaning, but I think that love may be / the means, what we ask with.”
“I Cannot Say I Did Not” by Sharon Olds proves to me someone somewhere begins to have the language, a language generous and sparse enough.
This morning, Wendell was still sleeping—Jon had gotten him to go back to sleep, I lay there smiling into the dark like I imagine murderers do right before a kill—watching all I couldn’t see but knew was there around me: the dog whistling after a rodent in her sleep; Jon passed out, soon to be dazed and glaring into the glow of his phone for the time, deciding whether to bike or drive, Wendell heaving out little breaths, still (God willing) a “long portion” left. I was so content at all of this—and at the possibility of sleep—I lay there wakeful, breasts pained, overfull with milk, waiting for the day to meet me.
The line breaks in life, not “needing to be drained” but simply “needing to be (line break) drained.” Enjambment like a door jamb, one that dictates how quietly, how secretly, one can enter or exit a room, whether I’ll wake the baby. This door jamb isn’t square—light slips in, that little emphasis on “needing to be.”
This day I felt like even the sun, the day, was waiting on me to have this moment. (In point of fact, it’s fall, and the sun’s just coming up later every day.)
And then Wendell, not just my baby orbiting out from me further and further into personhood, but a wanting lodged within me forever—like a bullet left in the soldier, it wounds and protects. This sense that, no, none of us is a singular human; we’re all the detritus of ourselves—our outgrown clothes and fingernail clippings and abandoned summer gardens and diapers that have never biodegraded—and our forebears and all the things we may be—our future interests, our child in a bassinet in the dark, our dog on a walk darting at bicyclists while we avoid eye contact and apologize. And yes, the more sinister and slipperier histories and mistakes—a father’s “desire / for his orgasms and for [a] mother’s money.” We are the disappointments of who we can never be—“my mother’s longing for a son” and proof of injustices big or small—“patriarchy” but also a life of handmedowns. “Before I existed, I asked, with the love of my / children, to exist, and with the love of their children.”
Anaphora feels right: I asked, I asked, I asked. A literary device that can feel, to me, cheap—easy to sound right or deep or true, but be false, a way to get into a draft, scaffolding. I’m always suspicious of it when I’m reading. (Is the author trying to emotionally manipulate me? Is this adding an unearned, heightened drama?) But motherhood, repetitive, and childhood becomes a series of endless questions we learn to vocalize or enact until, as adults, we repeat them—often halfheartedly or less hopefully, in arguments or breakups or narrated over drinks or to therapists or priests. Sometimes I’ve become so cynical I’ve shoved the questions aside as kid’s stuff. I think a lot of us do that. Somewhere between toughening or sucking it up. But as Wislawa Szymborska says, “The most pressing questions are naïve ones.” Not Rilke’s “loving the questions” that’s quoted so much as a way of getting good with uncertainty, but love as the questions; love is the question—“what we ask with”—the articulation of asking to be.
And where the sentences don’t begin with “I asked” we get that turn (which she underscores by breaking a line on the word “turn”):
The repetition cut with something new is like the record scratch of the poem, right in the middle of the song, right when you’re getting in your groove as a reader. The first is an underscoring: “Before I existed, I asked …,” almost like a little improvisation to keep the melody interesting, though it does call attention to how serious the whole business is—this asking. Then the asking about the asking, essentially: “Did I ask with life or did I ask with death?” With breath or with the ground that will swallow me? Both? Then a return to the refrain: “I asked, with everything I did not have, to be born.” It’s the last time, and the rest of the poem drops it for the grand finale: which is abstract, rather than concrete, like the rest of the poem: “And nowhere in any /of it was there meaning, there was only the asking / for being, and then the being, the turn / taken. I want to say that love / is the meaning, but I think that love may be / the means, what we ask with.”
Lots of poems end in epiphany, a form so tried and true, it’s cliched, it’s expected. But Olds earns it. The means of her poem justify its end. (Puns always intended, thank you.)
And now I think, this morning, awake when I should’ve been sleeping, I was asking. I was asking with this moment, “with everything I did not / have, to be born.” And maybe, Wendell, unknowingly, out like a light, in this moment, was, too, through me. And today, poems didn’t seem more stupid than anything else. Still, I can’t say something like, “Poetry saved my life.” Life saved my life. Poetry deepens it. It’s been one of my ways of asking.
I’m so thankful today, dark again, for all the asking.
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*That friend is the poet Jessica Farquhar. Check her out.
