Poem I Loved This Month: September 2019

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.

Poems I’ve Loved This Month: November 2017

Tulip poplar in full fall color: golden

“The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson.

“One way to put off loneliness is to interpose God.”

Corey Van Landingham posted this poem on Facebook. Like everyone else, I’m a fan of Anne Carson’s work — except I hadn’t read this one. It’s long and worth being long. I am glad I did not read it before writing my first book or else there would have been no first book to write.

In it, Carson’s speaker weaves together a biography of Emily Bronte, a trip to the moors with her elderly mother, and the time spent in heartbreak. To oversimplify, this is a break up poem. It’s also an ars poetica. Why do some people get hurt? Why do some people observe? Why become an artist? Why become angry?

Or, as the poem puts it: “What is prior? // What is love? / My questions were not original. / Nor did I answer them.”

And it’s these questions, unoriginal but essential, that map themselves onto the moors for the speaker, the curtains her mother wishes she’d draw, the “glimpses… of soul” the speaker comes to call “Nudes,” the idea of Bronte’s idea of God, the characters of Wuthering Heights, sexuality.

It was about this time
I began telling Dr. Haw

about the Nudes. She said,
When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them?
Why keep watching? Why not

go away? I was amazed.
Go away where? I said.
This still seems to me a good question.

Why keep watching?
Some people watch, that’s all I can say.
There is nowhere else to go,

no ledge to climb up to.
Perhaps I can explain this to her if I wait for the right moment,
as with a very difficult sister.

‘On that mind time and experience alone could work:
to the influence of other intellects it was not amenable,’
wrote Charlotte of Emily.

The word “question” is repeated 12 times in the poem; the word “Nude” 25 times. There are 54 question marks. No answers in the poem, but glimpses of soul; the images those soul-pieces project themselves onto.

And in all of this, the self-indictment, the hurt feelings, the cold confusion of loving and no longer being loved. The line Corey quoted:

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is / to watch the year repeat its days.

Seriously. This one. Read it.

(Also Wuthering Heights is one of my favorite books and one of the few novels I’ve re-read.)

From “Oil” by Fatimah Asghar.*

We got sent home early
& no one knew why. I think we

are at war! I yelled to my sister
knapsacks ringing

against our backs. I copy
-catted from Frances

who whispered it when the teachers
got silent. Can’t blame

me for taking a good idea.
I collect words where I find them.

Read this poem on the Poetry website to see it in its true form (which I was unable to achieve here), or in the print edition (November issue). I think print actually enhances it a bit — all the white space, a full page, around each part presented in its glorious quiet, the threat and suffocation of the quiet, the whispering “bombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbomb” into sheets as a child whose “people might / be Afghani” post-9/11. This narrative poem, about identity formation, agency, and the collection of words, what one person can accumulate over a lifetime or in mere weeks, how the speaker scavenges for words, “know[s] that word’s not meant for [them] but [they] collect words / where [they] find them.”

This poem is a lesson in narrative poetry — how to hook with clarity and concision — and is the reason her book If They Come for Us is one I’m excited to read in 2018.

Rastros Corporales: Blood on Canvas: Ana Mendieta: 1982″ by Leslie Sainz^.

… it is near-game, this tracking of pulse and surplus/
when your country says give, you drain despite the clots.

I actually read this poem first a few months ago and have returned several times since: it holds so many mysteries, reading it is intoxicating. Poem as lure, me as fish. I felt not smart enough to talk about it then, and probably am not now, but if I wait until I am, I’ll never tell you about it, which would be a major loss for you.

Another ars poetica. This ekphrastic poem ironically reminds me of a watercolor because of its form — impressionistic, unassuming: a prose poem with line breaks hatched in, as one might write in a notebook. (See the art it takes as its subject here.) But the form is interesting because of the tension it creates with its subject: both the Ana Mendieta artifact (paintings made in a performance art piece in which slid her forearms down blank paper) from “Body Tracks” and the images the speaker shares.

As the title suggests, the corporal is central here — even the dice are “tooth-shaped.” But the speaker floats from body to body, an imagination more than a self (or the imagination is the self, the body is what’s imagined and experienced), the “you” she’s speaking to slippery — a beloved but what kind of beloved — the kind you’d paint a canvas with blood for, the kind who would bleed themselves for country “despite the clots” — a country, a mother, a lover, the reader? Why choose?

The genius of the poem — much of it in the syntax, the accumulation of meaning or allowance for different readings through commas and breaks — is how specific it is while letting in so many alternate realities — the speaker and the “you” transmorph into “dehydrated eels,” “polizia nacional rolling tooth-shaped dice,” from experience into image into sound.

In the past few years, poems in columns that can be read in different order for different meaning have come into vogue (and some are truly great), but here readers get many of these benefits in a sleeker shell; there is constraint and restraint, but it’s masked in a certain ease. More tension. Despite the slipperiness of image, of language, this speaker doesn’t let anything slip, even “blood on canvas” looks effortless without knowing the performance, the life, the politics that put it there. Factoring in not only the painting but Mendieta’s life as an artist, her death (a suicide, an accident, or a murder by her then-boyfriend and fellow artist), and the feminist response to all of the above, and “Body Tracks” and blood imbue meaning.

^I already told you all Leslie Sainz is a genius and saint. I meant it. Read her work now and say you knew it when.

“Woo Woo Roll Deep” by Angel Nafis.

… You can’t tell us
shit. We always down for the miracle.
The regular-as-fuck dawn making brand new
the farm of our hearts.

This poem is a joy. Reading it is a joy, it displays joy, howling it aloud is a joy. Calling or IMing your girlfriends about it is a joy. (And as Toi Derricotte says, “Joy is an act of resistance.”) Here, I mean joy in its fullest sense: that belly laugh heartbreak, the tattoo of dead lovers, the combination of unabashed support, astonishment, touch, and eyeroll that is female friendship. In the world of this poem, the police still kill citizens, but “A week after the 314th police killing this / year, Jenna mixes up a tincture…” Everyone reads their Chani Nicholas* horoscope and collates her affirmations with their upcoming periods. Walls are painted “miss-my-daddy red.” There’s tea and crystals and hopes for solutions and superstition and no guilt. As a proud-of-herself weirdo, I love other proud-of-themselves weirdos, of which this speaker is certainly one. I bow to the light in this poem. Woo woo.

*If you are not already, you really should probably be reading your horoscope from Chani Nicholas.

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