Bernadette Mayer's "Walking Like a Robin"

Thoughts on ordinary noticing.

Walking Like a Robin

take 3 or 4 steps then stop
look smell taste touch & hear
is there anything to eat?
oh look, there’s some caviar
it must be my birthday, thanks
i must be very old, like seventy
i guess i’m falling apart, i’ll just
sew myself back together but will it last?
please take a piece of me back home, each piece
is anti-war and don’t pay your rent, in fact
remember: property is robbery, give everybody
everything, other birds walk this way too


from Works and Days (New Directions, 2016)

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One of my favorite things in the world is to watch a bird hop. I see it all of the time. I cannot explain the joy it gives me. I will look down and then, yes, there it is — a bird, hopping. Little hops. Rapid hops. Hops forward. Hops side to side. A series of small, gestural hops, followed by a long pause. Hops of obscene proportions. A bird the size of a sidewalk’s curb hopping from the street to the tip top of that same sidewalk’s curb. As if I could do that! Hop five feet, six inches into the air! From wherever I am to wherever I want to be! All five foot, six inches of me! I cannot do this. There is no world in which I can do this. And so I watch the birds do this. I watch the birds, who make a miracle of themselves in being able to fly. I watch them waddle and hop. I watch them mind their own business. I watch them transcend awkwardness to beauty. I watch them make do. It is as if they are humans, but better. It is as if we are birds, but worse.

I think of birds hopping when I think of this poem. I think of so much. I think of another poem of Bernadette Mayer’s, “The Way to Keep Going in Antartica,” and how she writes, among so much else that is vulnerable and beautiful (if you haven’t read that poem, please do):

Look at very small things with your eyes
& stay warm

Bernadette Mayer passed away late last year. She was a poet of unbelievable perception and care and ordinary noticing. One of my favorite poems by her is a poem titled “Tomorrow.” The last lines read:

it would be nice to be able to walk today
so we could go to opus 40 in saugerties
followed by a dinner of oysters & mussels at the bear
then on to check out the sheep at the sheepherding inn
where we're able to buy riccotta cheese
which means twice-baked, with which we're able
to make a pizza with fresh figs gotten from the berry farm
                           war what is it good for?
                           absolutely nothing

There is something about these lines that comprises everything I love about a life — the niceness of simple things and the simpleness of nice things. Here, in this poem, is a litany of ordinary moments of great joy. Walking in a sculpture garden. Eating well with someone. Being among animals. Cooking. Sharing. It might seem, if you are feeling a little judgey, like simply a nice list, something — perhaps — just short of a poem. But then there are those final two lines, where, with sudden immediacy, Mayer reminds us not just of the intimacy of violence and the way it interrupts the kindness of everyday life, but also of the absurdity of violence. Yes: why lean into the disruption of brutality when it could be so much simpler, and so much kinder? And yet: Mayer sees all of the world as it is, and makes a point about it.

Today’s poem does that same work, and in a similar way. One joy of reading Mayer’s work is in its seeming-casualness. Some of her poems — and certainly not all, as her work spans the wide range of formality to informality, seriousness to levity, linguistic play to thematic expansiveness, and so much in-between — have the feeling that they were spun out of dailiness, composed while drinking a cup of coffee, or in the immediate aftermath of lovemaking, or while taking a walk. I’m always struck by the voice at the heart of them, which is idiosyncratic and inquisitive, almost like (bear with me) arugula — sharp, peppery, verdant, and needed. Punctuated and soulful even in its unpunctuated-ness.

But yes, what I love about today’s poem is its openness. Here’s a perfect passage from a New York Times review of the collection that contains this poem today:

Yeats said that a finished poem should click shut like a box. Mayer’s ­poems never do; instead, they stay open — to her, to her populous, flowering world and to the readers who might complete, or imitate, or simply live with them, taking their rough patches and digressions as part of her inviting whole.

Part of that openness is in the way today’s poem begins almost as a guidebook for that same expansiveness:

take 3 or 4 steps then stop
look smell taste touch & hear

It sounds simple, right? But it’s a lovely way to begin a poem that is also titled “Walking Like a Robin.” It requires that the poet observe the action first, to see in the way a bird walks something worthwhile, and to then imagine a life lived in such a way. In other words, Mayer begins this poem with the wide-openness of imagination and also invites the reader to do the same. (As an aside, that is what is missing in an oft-used and diluted phrase like anything can be a poem. Such a phrase reduces the work of imagination, and acknowledgement, and play — the actions of enchantment and listening that, in and through their work, then allow anything to become a poem.)

Though some readers might think that today’s poem almost devolves from such an opening into a litany of unrelated thoughts and ideas, I’d argue that the opposite occurs. It is as if, through that the opening invitation, Mayer opens multiple windows of potentialities, so many different ways for the light to get in.

Here are the lines that follow the poem’s opening:

is there anything to eat?
oh look, there’s some caviar
it must be my birthday, thanks
i must be very old, like seventy
i guess i’m falling apart, i’ll just
sew myself back together but will it last?

These thoughts and questions move from the casual — is there anything to eat? — to the deeply existential — i’ll just / sew myself back together but will it last? In doing so, Mayer lets her poem be a space that holds all of that at once, the mundanity of wondering what to eat, the surprise of lovely food, the joy of aging, and then the fear of it, too — the anxiety and questioning that comes with a recognition of frailty. And a voice to hold it all, a voice of tangentiality and personhood. All of that — which is to say, all of life — is contained within these lines that seem, at first, to be only simply casual or digressive.

And then Mayer, in a kind of volta, ends the poem with these lines:

please take a piece of me back home, each piece
is anti-war and don’t pay your rent, in fact
remember: property is robbery, give everybody
everything, other birds walk this way too

The poem begins as a guidebook, an invitation, and then it ends almost as a last will and testament. A generous one, at that. A division of the body among the world. And a reminder, too, of values — ones of compassion, and care, and solidarity. The poem does not just become political in this moment; it always has been. Mayer reminds us that our politics live in our bodies: each piece / is anti-war. And they live in the bodies of birds, too. She reminds us of this just as she reminds us of pleasure, attention, surprise, and more. Because our politics live in such acts and feelings as well.

I think, awhile ago, I was put off by Mayer’s digressive qualities. Sometimes, I thought, her poems seemed to be about so much that they were about nothing. Or, I thought, they were too easy. That was a word I used to use a lot. I had a hard time, many years ago, reading her work because of this. But now, reading her work, I find in Mayer’s poems such generosity of spirit, and I find in my earlier critique a kind of ungenerosity. I think this is in part because I didn’t value the work of noticing when I was younger. I did not see in paying attention a kind of work that might be comparable to the work that Mayer often rejects, the work — to use a phrase from the review quoted above — “of poetry that requires perfection and uptight isolation.”

There’s an interview with Bernadette Mayer where, when asked if she has anything to say to someone who is, say, thirteen years old and looking out a window, she responds:

I would just say write any way you want. You can make the lines short, or long. And looking out the window is a good way to write a poem. A good way to write a sonnet is to walk fourteen blocks. Write one line for each block. I knew a poet, Bill Kushner, who used to do that. I used to see him all the time with his notebook on the street. You can do it easily in a city, because there are all these words around.

I love this advice because it reminds me that the world can never be a boring thing. It absolutely cannot be. It is, in its ordinariness and dailiness, wildly mesmerizing. It is full of inconsistencies and joys and things we use the word miracle for, even and especially when such miracles are happening everyday. One sadness of this world is that I think we often privilege work to look a certain way. We say ah, looking out the window is not a kind of work. We privilege the work that renders itself visibly studious, or rigorous, without acknowledging that one can engage in forms of rigorous attention or study in ways that don’t seem to be acknowledged as such. In ways that look like play, even, or leisure. This happens in schools all of the time, in conversations and subsequent demands about posture or urgency. I need to remind myself that work — and writing — can look like a fourteen block walk, an intentional attempt at noticing, because, as I have gotten older, I have found myself having to forgive myself almost daily for not being a poet or a writer in the way I think I have to be. I’d rather not have to continue this daily forgiving. I’d rather remind myself that the work of noticing is a work of value. The poem is in the world as much as it is in ourselves.

The University of Pennsylvania keeps a digital archive of Bernadette Mayer’s list of journal ideas and writing prompts. It’s a fun, beautiful thing to scroll through. It’s also a reminder of what I mentioned above — that the work of noticing is a kind of work that is worth privileging however it happens, and whenever. So is the work of play. It is not labor to play, but it is, sadly, something we must remind ourselves to do. If we don’t, then I worry we will forget that such a thing is as vital to us as perhaps anything else. I love Mayer’s journal ideas. The elaborations on weather, or thoughts on life’s everyday machinery, or the same bus trip written about everyday. Mayer’s writing prompts are the same way. They remind me of the value of play, and wondering, and community. Here are some of my favorites:

Write what cannot be written; for example, compose an index.

Write the poem: Ways of Making Love. List them.

Attempt as a writer to win the Nobel Prize in Science by finding out how thought becomes language, or does not.

Write occasional poems for weddings, for rivers, for birthdays, for other poets' beauty, for movie stars maybe, for the anniversaries of all kinds of loving meetings, for births, for moments of knowledge, for deaths. Writing for the "occasion" is part of our purpose as poets in being-this is our work in the community wherein we belong and work as speakers for others.

Beautiful, right? Here’s something else that is beautiful — a clip of Bernadette Mayer reading today’s poem.

I love this short video. The lush and dense green awash in light that serves as a distant backdrop. The piles of books. The slight, seeming-loving disarray. But what I especially love about this video is that Bernadette Mayer appears so wonderfully and so holistically a person in it. Not just a poet. I think I sometimes forget that. I forget it about myself often. That I am a person and a poet. And that, while the person part of me spends nearly all of its day engaged in sense-making, the poet part of me thinks also of art-making. When I separate the two and distance myself from myself, I think I often become overly critical, and unkind. I forget that this sense-making is the stuff of humanness and of art. It is why we play, and dance — it is what moves us and confounds us and deepens us. It is what frustrates me about feeling overworked, or tired, when I no longer feel I have the space to make sense (and fun) of mystery, to live amidst and among the heaven and hell of it. When we fit that sense-making into art, we, by some degree, limit it. That’s okay. That happens. Some of that limitation — by way of structure or perspective or constraint — allows for even more of the light to get in, or to shine in a different way. Some of it allows for play. For a doorway back toward the human. But when I forget the humanness in the poetry, when I separate the two, I limit all of this even more, especially while reading or writing, through shallow judgement. I’d rather do that less.

Last week, I read a brilliant, thoughtful essay on complex reading, moral judgement, and more published by the novelist Garth Greenwell. I wrote down these sentences from it:

To be bearable, to be plausibly adequate, even our imperfect, sublunary judgments require an immense amount of work; the idea that we might carry that work out on social media is one of the genuinely repulsive aspects of our moment. I am immensely grateful, every day, that judging others in this way is not my job. The best thing about being a novelist, in fact, is that my job is actively to resist coming to such judgment.

I think that’s part of the joy of reading Bernadette Mayer. She reminds me of why it is a lovely thing to resist coming to that aforementioned judgement. She is not prescriptive, not reductive. Her humanness is at the heart of her craft. Her noticing. Her attention. When I read her work, I am able to value some richer, deeper complexity about personhood. Sometimes I laugh, even. Sometimes I imagine birds. I grow grateful that such work exists where someone is so richly and wholly themselves, and I grow grateful, in my reading, to be reminded that people truly do contain so much. We should love that so much so fully.

In her poem, “Untitled,” from Milkweed Smithereens, Mayer writes:

many of us have to live without beauty
of the traditional sorts of hearts, we are millions of people
just as earnest in our beings and skins as everyone

It’s a world of people, Mayer reminds me. Messy and lovely and ordinary. A world of birds hopping and walking. A world that resists our desire to limit it with whatever we choose to limit it with. And still we will, I know. And still I will. But through it all, that reminder is a beautiful thing. That we are at once so much. And that we contain so much — each aspect of which (not some, but each) is part of our wholeness. And that there is value in that. And so we write what cannot be written. And so we take our walk around the neighborhood. A line for every block. And so we live while we do this, too. The birds do, too.

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