Ben Purkert's "The Only Conversation"

Thoughts on holding.

The Only Conversation

look how the tide
lifts the boat by 
consoling it 
saying I’m here
now don’t worry 
the boat nods 
then looks away 
in a distant time 
on a distant shore 
this is how 
the world goes 
says the tide 
the boat listens 
with both oars 
in the water


first published in Jewish Currents (August, 2020)

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I remember when this poem was first published, at the tail end of the summer of 2020. I had just started writing this newsletter, and trying, perpetually and — at the time — unsuccessfully, to log off what was then known as Twitter. I read this poem, and the brilliant Claire Schwartz’s introduction to it, and I saved it in a folder where I keep an ongoing list of poems I want to return to over and over again.

As such, it feels both overdue and yet no surprise that I am sitting here right now, writing about Ben Purkert’s poetry. Purkert wrote a guest post for this newsletter over two years ago, and in that living-folder where I keep that forever-expanding list of poems are even more poems by Ben Purkert. There’s one titled “A Violent End,” which models that same jarring, off-kilter, unpunctuated rhythm of today’s poem, a choice that delights as much as it surprises, and which holds these lines in its heart towards its end:

I nearly felt myself swayed
toward a kind of belief
not in them or their world
but something that bordered
on love

And there’s this recent poem, “Elegy for My Friend Who Was, among Other Things, an Orchestra Conductor,” which is perhaps why I returned again to Purkert’s poetry (after reading and loving his recent novel). This poem — beautiful, tender — is full of descriptions of a kind of grief that is so intertwined with the world that it makes everything, even the flowers, ache. And, in it, there are these lines:

He could’ve picked
anyone to love, and the world

would’ve agreed. 

So yes — I’m thinking of Ben Purkert’s work as I write this, and I’m thinking especially of today’s poem, which Claire Schwartz, in her introduction, says reminds her of the “imperfect togetherness” that “is all there is.” I love that.

I can’t help but think of another poem — Matthew Rohrer’s “There Is Absolutely Nothing Lonelier” — as a kind of companion poem to this one by Purkert today. A poem-cousin. Or poem-friend. Rohrer’s poem reads, in full:

There is absolutely nothing lonelier
than the little Mars rover
never shutting down, digging up
rocks, so far away from Bond street
in a light rain. I wonder
if he makes little beeps? If so
he is lonelier still. He fires a laser
into the dust. He coughs. A shiny
thing in the sand turns out to be his.

I’ve never been able to un-think, to un-remember these lines: If so / he is lonelier still. This is a poem that, like Purkert’s, anthropomorphizes an object into something with a soul, something that reflects the circumstances of our own world back to us. The loneliness, too. The sorrow.

Rohrer’s poem sends that anthropomorphized object out to space, so far away from us. But it’s not really Rohrer who does that. We did that. We sent this little rover out to some faraway planet. Rohrer just thinks about this, and wonders aloud about this strange act of ours. When I read this poem, I think yes, it is the little rover who is lonely, so far out there on its own. But I also think that the loneliest part of this poem is us. The unnamed we. The people who, trying to learn something about ourselves, kept saying there, go look out there, and then sent a machine so far away to do some searching for us. I think of how lonely we are in this poem. How lonely we must be, to make something else so lonely, as well.

Today’s poem by Purkert does that same anthropomorphic work, but it remains here, in this world, where we, as readers, linger in the margins, listening in on a conversation. The only conversation. Schwartz asks in her introduction: “Does the use of “only” to describe a conversation temper its particular loneliness, or amplify it?” I wonder the same. I wonder, too, about that word only, and if, in describing the word conversation, is either saying that this is the one conversation happening in the world right now, or is saying that this is the one conversation we should be having in the world right now. Or both. Or more. Is this this only conversation that matters, given the state of things?

But regardless of the myriad answers to that question, one joy of this poem is that we, as readers, are privy to this conversation. And notice how Purkert makes such powerful work of the eavesdropping we get to do. Notice how, in just a few short and slim lines, Purkert makes us feel for the tide and the boat as if they live. And they do. They do live. I’m struck, perpetually, by the work of these seemingly-simple lines:

the boat nods 
then looks away 

I’m struck because I see the boat doing this, bobbing as it does along the water. I see it the way I’ve seen a fishing boat in a harbor, unmanned and yet anchored in the morning mist. And now, as I see it, it’s no longer bobbing, but nodding. And now a whole world has opened up, a whole wealth of description made possible that connects and re-connects and energizes our relationship to the world. I think of the boat’s passivity, nodding as it does simply because the water is moving under it. And then I think of my own, those days when I move passively through the world, nodding and speaking and not speaking and scanning and moving and standing, so often without thinking, looking and then looking away, not registering, just being. Yes. Here I am, nodding and then looking away.

I’ve wondered, reading this poem, how it manages to feel so intertwined, and so compact, like a web compressed into a solid object. And I think this is because this poem today does not just thematically or metaphorically depict connection. It also enacts it. It sounds it out. I read the poem aloud and hear it — the sounds echoing each other. There’s tide…by…time…tide. Or there’s boat…don’t…goes…both. Or there’s shore…oars. These sounds hold one another in their repetition; they echo throughout the poem. As such, they reach through the poem, and they hold on; they don’t let go. They create connection through the shape they repeatedly make our mouths make, and through the sounds we make out of those shapes. It might seem small, but it works.

But what I cannot stop considering about this poem is the length of generosity and compassion in manages to twirl out of this single image. There is a real gentleness I return to, again and again. The poem says I’m here / now don’t worry. There is consolation. The boat listens. It feels as if I am being granted privileged and intimate access to something illustrative for all of us, something so simple — a boat being held up by water — and yet so indicative of our relationship to the world and one another. I am drawn by the poem’s final image:

the boat listens 
with both oars 
in the water

The first time I read this poem, I was trying to figure this out as if it were a riddle. What does it mean, I wondered. I walked with the image in my head. A boat with both oars in the water. And then I saw it everywhere. I saw people reaching their arms out for other people. I saw people hugging on sidewalks, in the middle of the street; I saw them through the windows of restaurants and bars, sitting there or standing, and holding one another. I saw people with one arm draped around another. I saw someone’s body so close to mine, because their arms were reaching out to me. And I saw my own arms reach out to someone else’s. We listen, don’t we, with our arms in the water. We listen with our arms around one another. We listen with heads cradled in the nooks of necks. We listen with one hand touching another hand. In this life, where there is so much need for consolation, we hold and are held.

There’s something about an image that can convey this better than anything else can. Sometimes I am too tired of the people of this world to learn from them. I am ashamed about this fact, but there is still something here in this world, yes, I know, to learn from. I guess I mean that there is something about a boat, bobbing upon the water, that can remind me of what it means to be held and what it means to listen and what it means to live better than anything else possibly could. Perhaps this is because the distance between the image and the reality of it — this distance that metaphor makes immediately intimate — is so great that it jars the senses into that beautiful place where magic can happen. Yes, I say while in that place, the tide is saying “don’t worry.”

There’s a poem by Grace Paley, “Walking in the Woods,” that reads:

That's when I saw the old maple
a couple of its thick arms cracked
one arm reclining half rotted
into earth     black with the delicious
hospitality of rot to the
littlest creatures

the tree not really dying    living
less widely    green head high
above the other leaf-crowded
trees     a terrible stretch to sun
just to stay alive     but if you've
liked life      you do it

Here, Paley does that same kind of work that Purkert does. She transforms the old maple into a thing that stretches terribly and awkwardly and painfully just to stay alive, and then while she holds us, the readers, in that space of magic where we see each and every tree as a stretching, moving, aching, and soulfully living thing, she tells us a little something wonderful about this life: if you’ve liked life, you do it.

This is the world that poetry makes possible. Not in some hokey, almost cliche way, no. I think of a line from the wonderful Thomas Lux from his absolutely wonderful poem “Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy”:

when your belief in justice
merges with your belief in dreams

That space that Lux names in his poem is the space and the world that poetry makes possible. It is that space where the magic dreamworld of our slanted, tilted, tangential imagination — one of boats being held by water and lonely Mars rovers and trees stretching outward to hold onto life — merges with our real acknowledgment of the pain and sorrow and difficulty of being alive in this world. In that merged space — which is a space so often disregarded by the powerful of this world, dismissed as it often is for foolishness or childishness or idealism — is a place of possibility and wonder. It is a place where what could be still remains — not hidden, but illuminated beneath the thin, ever-changing veil of what is. It is a place where a conversation is made possible. And not just any conversation, but the only one. The one where we talk about what is, and what could be, where we talk about we love, and why it matters, and where we talk about what we hold, and why we hold it, and why we keep holding it, despite everything, or because of everything, because of it all, because of all of it.

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Some (more than a few) notes:

1. I mentioned it last week, but this essay on witness in Jewish Currents, by Sarah Aziza, is still worth reading. Aziza writes: “Perhaps the fundamental work of witness is the act of faith—an ethical and imaginative leap beyond what we can see. It is a sober reverence of, and a commitment to fight for, the always-unknowable other.”

2. As I mentioned in past newsletters, the ad hoc coalition Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here. I also recently donated to this fundraiser, in support of the Gaza Sunbirds — a para-cycling team that is reallocated their resources to offer on-the-ground aid in Gaza. Maybe consider donating if you have the means.

3. A little note if you are a yearly paying subscriber to this newsletter: many of you subscribed around this time (in January 2023), and I imagine your renewal is coming up. So, if you intended to purchase that yearly subscription as a kind of token of your appreciation (thank you!!!), make sure to unsubscribe if you meant it as a one-time thing. No offense or strange ill-will will be taken or had on my part at all — just gratitude for your appreciation in the first place.

4. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.