Adam Tedesco's "Panic"

Thoughts on always. Thoughts on sometimes.

from Mary Oliver (Lithic Press, 2019)

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I think Adam Tedesco’s work is a deep embrace of gentleness. Perhaps I say that because for the last month I’ve only been reading the novels and essays of Marilynne Robinson and the poetry of everyone else. But I find a gentleness in Tedesco’s work. Maybe you do too.

I’ve loved this poem since the first time I read it. I loved, in particular, the movement of it, the way each couplet felt like its own observation, and the way each observation felt inexorably linked by the white space that bordered both sides. And that’s the way it is with life, right? If your thoughts made any sense at all, if they proceeded, each day, with perfect rationality, well, why even speculate what would happen? And who cares. So much, as this poem articulates, is sometimes.

The way Tedesco’s poem begins sets up the dichotomy that fuels the rest of it:

The beauty in life is that

someone’s always dying

It’s the first and only use of the word always in a poem that then begins a litany of sometimes. But it’s true, right? Maybe you don’t think it’s beautiful, but someone is always dying. It’s a fascinating way to begin a poem, and perhaps you disagree that there is a gentleness here, but I believe there is. I believe there is a gentleness in this admission, because I believe there is a gentleness in acceptance, and I think the supreme acceptance is the acceptance of death. I think there is compassion in acceptance, and there is love, too, or at least the possibility of love.

I don’t know how to talk about the rest of this poem, to be honest. The first time I read this poem, I reached the final couplet and realized I hadn’t breathed. I felt a woosh leave my body. I remember saying to myself, almost in a whisper:

When people say sometimes

what they mean is this never ends

And so maybe what I want to do in this space is use Tedesco’s poem as a way to meditate on absolutes, and our collective desire for them, and the way, collectively, those pesky absolutes almost always (notice the almost) fail to arrive. And yes, I have been reading a lot of Marilynne Robinson. I think of how, in The Givenness of Things, she writes: “But things must be described before they can begin to be understood.” And I think too of how, in the same book, she writes: “There are worse things than uncertainty, presumption being one.”

Poetry rarely presumes. I was going to say “good poetry rarely presumes,” but I didn’t want to make a distinction. I think poetry’s willingness to dwell in mystery, and approach the the world from an acceptance of uncertainty allows it to offer, or describe, what little truth there is. Sometimes there is truth in mystery. Perhaps all the time. Tedesco writes:

Sometimes faith is a desire

to believe the tricks of light

Haven’t you felt this desire, at least once? Haven’t you wanted to believe what light played upon the top of a wave? Haven’t you wanted to believe anything, even if it means undoing yourself a little bit from the knot of reality? Haven’t you wanted to believe something would happen if you only, if you only, if you only? Haven’t you slept with the windows open because you felt the moon’s light might heal you? Haven’t you made up names for the stars? Haven’t you prayed in more ways than one? Haven’t you tied your left shoe before your right, for ten years, just because it meant you might fall in love? Just me? I’m sorry. I guess I am being presumptuous.

There is an always-ness in our sometimes-ness. We don’t always do what we sometimes do, but we are always engaged in some liminality, some deep uncertainty, some contradiction. Life is lived, perhaps always, in the in-between of our fears and our desires, our convictions and our ordinariness. And so, when Tedesco writes, “When people say sometimes / what they means is this never ends” — well, what never ends is all of this. And what is all of this? I think, sometimes, that it is the givenness of more than a few truths: fear, love, joy, suffering, sorrow, and more. Each truth, and each truth’s opposite. In The Unreality of Memory, Elisa Gabbert writes: “I think sometimes that sadness, pain, and even suffering are part of happiness, that sadness and happiness are somehow alike.” The contradiction of her statement is, I think, what makes it true.

The repetitive phrase in Tedesco’s poem is Sometimes people say. Why don’t we ever just say what we mean? Where is our conviction? Our truth? Perhaps we don’t ever say just what we mean because what we mean is so much. How many times have I said that’s not what I meant? I think of the famous lines from Eliot’s famous poem: “That is not what I meant at all; / That is not it, at all.” And why would it be? We are told so often to be precise, to say exactly what we mean, but what if what we mean contains the multitudes of contradiction? And what of mystery, is mystery is what you mean? And what of love, if love is what you mean?

Our sometimes-ness, I am trying to say, never ends. Sometimes I want it to. Sometimes I want what I mean to be a simple thing. Sometimes I want what I feel to be simple as well. Sometimes I am too scared to sit in mystery. Sometimes I have no words for what I want. There is so much sometimes that it must be always. I guess, what I am trying to say, is that I am always scared. And I am always tidying up the house of my mind and finding something hidden in between the cushions of the couch. I want to love this. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don’t.

If there is an answer for this, it might be gentleness. And it might be the model that Tedesco sets forth in this poem. To acknowledge what ends, and what doesn’t. And to live in between these poles, in a myriad of sometimes. I never said it wouldn’t be hard. There is, as Tedesco titles this poem, panic. And fear. But there is joy there, I think, and the kind of compassion for self that is its own form of joy.