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) 

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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.

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