Airea D. Matthews's "Nevertheless: An Ecstatic Ode"
Thoughts on gentleness, noticing, and praise.
Nevertheless: An Ecstatic Ode
Praise to the father holding his sleeping daughter on the 52nd Street trolley To the daughter sleeping through the pothole thrum Praise to the diabetic with shorn feet & sugarcane blood To the shooting nerve through her left hip & lower spine To those flying gods on their routes Praise to the red-headed Rasta & his ganja-laced T-shirt To the Vietnam vet at Cass Corridor holding his sign To the sign which reads: “Not homeless Just strugglin” Praise to the barbers calming the fatherless in their chairs To the mothers trying not to overhear this soothing To soothing Praise to razed skylines & ruins To whatever replaces the horizon To the lost toddler who refused to speak to strangers To the strangers who would not let him be lost Praise to sisters in love with whoever won’t love them To others in love with whoever won’t bother Praise to the lovers who left lessons the lovers who left scars To the memory of topography raised surface, smooth to touch To id’s fragile shards & ego’s fringed edge Praise to boys who make beeswax fingernails To little girls who wear fatigues & eye black Praise to the overlooked the overlooking Praise to Miss Toto, Bambi Banks, Pearl Harbour To bombs that never landed To satellites that couldn’t be coaxed to Earth To the dreams in bodies that won’t hold a lie Praise to beauty that doesn’t suffer rules To dollar store sheik & sleek vintage tins To Type 2 wave & Type 4 curl To wanting to be To being Praise to the hard-won win against Chronos To the stone wrapped in swaddling the neurotic eaglet safe in hiding the sirens fostering seafamilies the eye uncrossed, uncrowed Praise to love’s resurrection incising shame’s jugular To the seven ecstatic hallelujahs To the left hand counting 5 of them To le petit mort & headboard bang Praise to boot houses children running over frayed laces Praise to the old kitchen, half-gutted, its springtime gnats & winter flies its mice hugging sweet corners Praise to that which endures To old doors, layers of paint years of storm beating solid oak To the gable roof that is a ceiling, the coffered ceiling that is also a floor Praise to what shoulders weight To brackets & load-bearing walls beams & spindly skeletons sacred geometry & tangents To levees & pregnant summers the bullet-ridden body coilspring & wheel Praise to open wombs & caskets any mother who must decide either To the crown & seed lowering into the thorny or fertile soil Praise to the ground unfastening To every earthworm’s bristle & every seraph’s six wings entwined in songwaltz of welcome To the body relenting solely to dust the spirit ascending straightway to stars Praise to all who rejoice in becoming To all who transform in return From poets.org (link here) — Originally published in Michigan Quarterly Review (Summer, 2019)
The moment I read the first two lines of this poem, I felt a big and huge welling in my gut, a giant softening at the same time, a whole warmth of I-can-just-see-it-ness, whatever kindness feels like when you feel it.
Here are those two first lines again:
Praise to the father holding his sleeping daughter on the 52nd Street trolley To the daughter sleeping through the pothole thrum
I keep a note on my phone of things I witness on my subway rides to and from work and wherever in between. Noticings, it’s called. Here are some of my latest entries:
It’s the same couple, I think, that I’ve seen throughout the year on the train home from school. They’re young, maybe still in high school, and there’s an impeccable style and silence that they radiate together that makes them enlivened and transcendent without any sort of perceived effort. They are tender beyond their years, one of them wiping down the orange seat for the other before they sit, always one head on another’s shoulders, taking turns. Maybe that phrasing — tender beyond their years — is wrong. Maybe they’re young enough to know — really know — tenderness, something I’ve been trying to learn again all my life.
There’s a father holding someone who must be his daughter on his lap. She is the size of one Build-a-Bear stacked on top of another, or maybe beside, and she sits with a book open. Classic children’s book: thick, near-quarter-inch pages that are like laminated cardboard. She turns the pages and he watches. She turns back and forth with no real order, though she seems engrossed. He is holding her and her backpack — cartoons galore — is wrapped around his arm, and his own bag is strung across his shoulder. He is holding so much, even as he sits. But it seems, too, that she is holding it all. Sitting in his lap, it seems that she is the body at the center of it all, that she is holding him holding her. Like someone with wings.
I am thinking of this poem, and thinking of these noticings, because — this weekend especially — I am thinking of the gentleness of poets writing about fathers, or writing about fatherhood. I am thinking of noticing tenderness where it sometimes feels it is denied. I am thinking of the soft, fleshy parts of life — what makes up our bodies and our wounds and the fact of each of us pressed together before we become hardened and scarred.
I’m thinking, for example, of these lines from Joshua Bennett’s “Dad Poem (Ultrasound #2)”:
Months into the plague now, I am disallowed entry even into the waiting room with Mom, escorted outside instead by men armed with guns & bottles of hand sanitizer, their entire countenance its own American metaphor.
I’m thinking of the opening of Li-Young Lee’s “Little Father”, and how it created an image (“the birds” that “clean and comb him every morning”) I cannot unsee, so jarring it is, and yet so viscerally kind and tender:
I buried my father in the sky. Since then, the birds clean and comb him every morning and pull the blanket up to his chin every night.
I’m thinking of a poet I’ve written about before, Bert Meyers, and his gentle “Lullaby”:
Go to sleep my daughter go to sleep my son once this world was water without anyone
I’m thinking of the observed, tender witness at the heart of Linda Hogan’s “Walking with My Father”:
Years have passed through the doors of that house, of memory, doors of the past and my father's eyes are sad, looking in, his own memories, not mine, thinking maybe of his mother and some of his old belongings, the stolen Colt of his own father, the bracelet he gave me with his R.A. number.
I’m thinking of these lines from Gbenga Adesina’s “I Carried My Father Across the Sea”:
I’m the light of the world. My father’s body is the world. Sometimes when I’m singing, a door opens and gives my father’s body back to the night he was born. Fela Kuti dancing on the stage is my father’s body.
I’m thinking of the opening of Ariel Francisco’s “Translating My Dad’s Love Poems,” maybe my favorite poem of his:
It must have been ‘98, my mom leaving for work, the first night she doesn’t kiss my dad goodbye. He closes the door softly, walks slowly to his office and takes a hammer to the keyboard of his computer as though desperately trying to build something, until the letters fly through the air struggling to form the words he can not.
It was this kind of writing — about fatherhood, and sadness, and surprise-light, and so much more — that drew me to poetry. My first poet-loves — Larry Levis, Sharon Olds, Philip Levine, Terrence Hayes — offered, through what I now perceive as a kind of grace, space for the sadness they observed in the wake of the sometimes violent, sometimes silent damage of masculinity. They offered that space, and then they treated it with care to see what would happen if they spent some time there. In that space, they found sometimes more sadness, and yet sometimes they found light. In reading their work, and in reading work so much like the work by the poets above, I realized — because I was obsessed with the notion of fatherhood — the great, big, so-much-ness that a father could be, and, in realizing that, I realized the great, big, so-much-ness that anyone could be, the great, big, so-much-ness that could live at the heart of any living thing. That is one grace that poetry has offered me.
And maybe that is why I am so drawn to today’s poem. I am drawn to praise these days. I am drawn to praise because, though it is often perceived as a lesser kind of noticing, an easy thing, I find it to be quite hard and quite expansive as a practice. Praise, when offered well, is a conscious labor of attention, a way of turning to the world with real care. The other day, after I experienced a particularly difficult day, my wife reminded me that the sometimes-forgotten adage that educators should often use to frame their interactions with children — five moments of praise or positive attention for every one moment of negative or even seemingly-negative point of observation or criticism — applies to adults as well. And why wouldn’t it? We are fragile beings, temperamental, full of longing. To be seen in the way that Airea D. Matthews models in this poem is to be seen with a praise that offers a deep sense of care. And, as Christina Sharpe writes in one of the most remarkable books I’ve read in recent memory, Ordinary Notes:
Regard is a habit of care. It is appreciation and esteem. It is the right of repair.
Later, Sharpe writes:
Care is complicated, gendered, misused. It is often mobilized to enact violence, not assuage it, yet I cannot surrender it.
Finally, toward the end of the book, Sharpe asks:
What is required of us, now? In this long time of our undoing?
This question stands alone. Then, when you turn the page, you notice the title of the book’s final chapter:
to notice or observe with care
That work — of noticing and observing with care, of holding life in regard — is part of the work I notice in today’s poem. It is not just a poem of praise, if anything could be just a poem of a praise. It is a poem that, through its habit of noticing, turns us toward a world that is a world of care, just as much as it is a world in need of care, because of the violent and daily ravages of racism, late capitalism, and the brutality of anything that denies someone what they need — their right to be seen, truly seen, wholly and without reduction. When we shirk away from the notion of praise, when we write it off as overly sentimental or generalized, we perform a kind of brutal work. And though I understand, sometimes, where this comes from (I think of a question from Martin Riker’s wonderful new novel, The Guest Lecture: “What does it say about a culture that it churns out citizens full of antagonism toward itself?”), such denial of praise is also the denial of the possibility that the imagined and needed world of care is part of the real world that exists right now. We deny the idea that what is living now is worth praising now, and such denial is its own violent thing.
Read with me these moments from today’s poem again:
Praise to the barbers calming the fatherless in their chairs To the mothers trying not to overhear this soothing To soothing
Praise to razed skylines & ruins To whatever replaces the horizon To the lost toddler who refused to speak to strangers To the strangers who would not let him be lost
Praise to boys who make beeswax fingernails To little girls who wear fatigues & eye black Praise to the overlooked the overlooking
Praise to that which endures To old doors, layers of paint years of storm beating solid oak To the gable roof that is a ceiling, the coffered ceiling that is also a floor
In Ordinary Notes, Sharpe writes that “a word might hold you close when the world does not.” These lines from Matthews’s poem are words that hold such particular things close. I find myself stunned by the holding of the “lost toddler” at the same time as “the strangers who would not let him be lost.” In such noticing is a recognition of the way in which multiple forms of agency can exist and be seen together, and how, through this act, we can care for what has been lost and subsequently restructure and imagine our notions of home. I find myself moved to new forms of looking by the “roof that is a ceiling / the coffered ceiling that is also a floor.” Such lines make me look again at any literal home and any imaginative sense of that word — home — and how it places us in relation to one another. And it’s so beautiful and humbling that Matthews writes “Praise to the overlooked,” when so much of this poem looks again and looks kindly on what has been overlooked: beeswax fingernails, every earthworm’s bristle, the diabetic with shorn feet. Through all of this, Matthews displays another form of care, as well — the care for the craft of a poem, the craft that places such things next to one another, the toddler and the stranger, the roof and the ceiling and the floor. When we read such craft, we are reading a literal and formal enacting of care.
I long for the form of looking that this poem models for us. It is a form of looking that is a form of regard, which is a form of care, which is a form of holding, and turning toward the light, and even loving. It was my own father who was probably the first person I ever thought about thinking of as a whole person, someone with a life beyond just the life I experienced with him, someone with thoughts and feelings and so much unspoken and nestled in the silence between us. Maybe that is why so many of my first poems were about him. They were an attempt to practice looking, to figure out how I wanted to look — not how I wanted to be seen, but how I wanted to see.
Now, growing older, I think of that as one of the prominent questions of my life. How will I look at the world? How I will I notice what I notice? How can I notice differently, if I must? And what to do when such noticing makes me feel scared, or lonely, or frustrated — even as it makes me feel enlivened, joyous, enraptured? I think this poem offers one answer, of many. When my noticing inspires cynicism that feels defeating, then perhaps my noticing is not entirely coming from a place of regard — a place where I can still praise what I see even in the midst of what seems difficult or hard to bear. I love those words — becoming and transform — in the final lines of today’s poem. They remind me that the work of praise or noticing or care or regard is active work, that such work is also part of the work of becoming, the work of transformation. Maybe this is why I love the opening lines of today’s poem as much as I do. I love the image of the father and the daughter together, yes. But I love especially that the image has been seen. That it has been noticed. And that it has, in such noticing, been cared for. That’s not just a poet’s work. That’s a life’s work.
Some Notes:
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I've always felt that poetry, at it's highest, is an observational artform, so that when I encounter such "noticings" of the kind delivered with the kind of musicality that Matthew employs, it immediately becomes a GREAT thing in my life.
Today's poem is a really great thing. And your commentary, as always, is filled with such patient solicitude. I wonder how you can say you've been trying to rediscover tenderness when all your words are so soft, dripping with it.