Brian Tierney's "You’re the One I Wanna Watch the Last Ships Go Down With"
Thoughts on not loving living.
You’re the One I Wanna Watch the Last Ships Go Down With
Dr. Redacted will tell me not to tell you
this, like this,
in a poem: how it’s all right, love, that we don’t love
living. Even actors don’t
exactly love the spotlight they move through,
as your sister, the actor,
has told us; they just need to be lit
for narrative motion
to have meaning. As such it is
with artifice and embarrassment
that I move through fear
to you, tonight, where I had dreams,
a short nap ago, about lines
of poetry I struck through
with everyday blues, month after
month, in dream
after dream; an attempt
I guess to forget, if I could: defeat
sometimes is defeat
without purpose. The news, at least, tells me
that much. I know now,
in fact, we don’t have to be brave,
not to survive a night
like any we’ve looked on
together, seeing blue-tinted snow
once in a Kmart
parking lot’s giant, two-headed lamp—
and my father hooked up,
up the street, with no chance
of waking—as many years ago now
as how much longer I’ve lived
with you than without.
Forgive me, again, that I write you an elegy
where a love poem should be.
from The Paris Review (Vol. 235, Winter 2020)
I first read this poem in The Paris Review almost exactly a year ago. And I had the feeling, while reading it, of knowing that the poem was something beautiful — even before it ended. Some poems truly have that effect. It’s like the first time I read Larry Levis’ “Linnets,” and encountered the following stanzas about halfway through the poem:
Your brother grows into a stranger.
He walks into town in the rain.
Two gold feathers behind his ear.He is too indifferent to wave.
He buys all the rain ahead of him,
and sells all the silence behind him.
This feeling of encounter in the midst of a poem is like reading a novel and coming upon a mini-novel intimately hidden inside the larger one. Some works of writing are such beautiful encounters with feeling enacted into language that to simply be within them rather than done with them is the most wonderful thing. That’s how I feel every time I read basically any Larry Levis poem, and it’s how I felt while reading this Brian Tierney poem for the first time — and every time since.
That feeling began immediately with those first four lines:
Dr. Redacted will tell me not to tell you
this, like this,
in a poem: how it’s all right, love, that we don’t love
living.
Already, so much is being tangled up and interwoven. That “like this” points toward the idea of poetry itself being an unsuitable method of communication, and the doctor referenced before — the one cautioning against admitting the about-to-be-admitted truth — seems reluctant about the very idea of admitting despair. And what is that despair? It’s the fact that one might not “love / living.” I felt my breath releasing at that sentiment put into writing — it’s all right, love, that we don’t love living. It’s the kind of truth that feels at home in a poem but cautioned against in the world outside of a poem. What a terrible thing, that there is such a distinction.
When a poem admits that level of vulnerability from its outset, it becomes, I think, a special thing. It’s why I held this poem close from the moment I first read it — it felt honest and true to hear that it was alright not to love this life. The poem continues that kind of vulnerability throughout. In fact, it is unrelenting in its admittance of the vulnerable. It moves, as it says, with “artifice and embarrassment,” which is a kind of honesty. Because so many of us move through the world in such a way, right, if we admit it? We all move with a level of insincerity, with a level of shame, with a level of guilt. It is part of living in a life that we are supposed to love but don’t often find ourselves loving. We have to mask ourselves and be embarrassed at the same time, like someone standing against the wall, wearing a costume to a party that’s not a costume party.
That level of “artifice and embarrassment” is enacted, on a craft level, through the poem’s alternating line-length and prodigious use of the comma. The poem’s very hesitance and searching-ness is quite literally punctuated, allowing the poem to become a poem of clauses and re-definitions and addendums. No line is the same length and every line hesitates or tumbles or falls into the next. As such, the poem quite literally sounds like a life. It sounds like someone trying to justify something to someone — or themself. It is full of phrases like “I guess,” “if I could,” and “in fact.” It fumbles and wants and lingers, like someone in love, trying to convince someone to stay, or trying to apologize, or trying not to complain about how hard all of this is, or trying to hold on to the one good thing, or trying to make a case. Part of the excellence of Tierney’s craft is that so much of this emotive searching and longing is communicated through those seemingly unrelated choices — that commas that lead the clauses, the lines that can’t hold on to the length of the one before, or have to reach themselves a little longer.
I love Paul Guest’s poetry for the same reason. There is an artfulness to the long poem that alternates itself as it moves toward an ending. I’m thinking of his poem “2020,” and how it moves long-lined through its beginning but then offers this moment, which stuns for both its honesty and the abruptness of its few short lines:
It was raining
the day I was born
and years later I haven't learned much more
about the stars
Tierney’s poem today has a similar moment, these lines — one of them quite short — where the speaker admits that:
defeat
sometimes is defeat
without purpose
The very idea of meaning is this thing that forever haunts and eludes and teases us. And the search for meaning has become explicitly commodified by our culture, to the point where defeat is always, at all times, supposed to be made into something digestible, likable, and purposeful. Purpose is a defining word of this moment — all things must have a purpose, and purpose is often equated with profit, or production. If we can produce something valuable out of our time, it becomes meaningful by default. As such, we are told to chunk our time into these compartmentalized things, each one with its own purpose and meaning. But what if defeat is just defeat? What if suffering is just suffering? If time is just time? What if what we are doing and what we are experiencing is just what we are doing and what we are experiencing? And what if that’s okay? What if that’s fine? What if admitting that leads us a little closer to a more authentic life, and a more authentic love?
This week, I read an odd and at times lovely book by the film director Werner Herzog: “Of Walking in Ice.” It’s this diaristic account of Herzog’s walk from Munich to Paris to get to the bedside of his ailing friend. If you’re familiar with Herzog’s wit and humor and curiosity, well, the book is full of it. And I found myself thinking of this passage (strange capitalizations intended) as I re-read Tierney’s poem today:
The universe is filled with nothing, it is the Yawning Black Void. Systems of Milky Ways have condensed into Un-stars. Utter blissfulness is spreading, and out of utter blissfulness now springs the Absurdity. This is the situation.
Though Tierney’s poem isn’t as overtly and imaginatively nihilistic as Herzog’s passage, it is still concerned with an idea of the absurd that exists and is amplified by so much else. There’s the advice given from “Dr. Redacted.” There’s the knowledge that “we don’t have to be brave” in order to “survive.” There’s the speaker seeing “blue-tinted snow / once in a Kmart / parking lot’s giant, two-headed lamp” while his father is “hooked up” to a machine just down the street. These moments of oddity and juxtaposition and strangeness and sadness highlight the absurdity of the everyday, the way in which, despite the advice from “Dr. Redacted,” despite the news, despite the pervasiveness of the common cliche, there is so much making sense required of this life, so much trying, so much balancing, so much coming and going and living and dying and changing and growing and failing and missing, so much of this so-muchness, that to live, just live, through it all is perhaps all one can do.
I’ve been reading Karolina Wacalawiak’s newest novel, Life Events, and found myself struck by a passage early on, when her narrator, Evelyn, joins a group of people with the focus of helping people approach their own death. Wacalawiak writes:
We were of varying ages in this room, but it felt like we had all somehow misjudged the big life events. We were focused on the end because we had already fucked up the middle part. We were failing. Or maybe just I was flailing…I had hit a point of stagnation, and I felt like I was dying.
I thought of the final lines of today’s poem:
Forgive me, again, that I write you an elegy
where a love poem should be.
There is the expectation of so much in this life. Wacalawiak’s narrator longs for those “big life events.” This poem longs to be a love poem. But instead, because of all that one encounters in this life, it becomes an elegy — a poem of loss. It reminds me of another Paul Guest poem, “All-Purpose Elegy,” which ends so powerfully with this list of all it mourns and praises and softens toward:
For the night, which becomes more immense
and depressing and utter
and the voices in it which argue and argue.
For this conflict with the stars.
For ashes. For the wind.
For this emergency we call life.
There is an honest tenderness that comes when you admit that this life, as beautiful as it can be, is also its own emergency. That it is also filled with loss and absurdity and things that pain us as much as they stun us. Wonder, after all, can be directed toward both what is difficult and what is lovely. When I think of today’s poem, I think of how grateful I am to feel the honesty of such wonder. The remarkable care that comes when you speak plainly about this world, which is not a plain thing. It’s permissive, that care. It allows for things. I would like to model that care in my own life, to be able to say it is alright not to find purpose in this. It is alright not to love this. Such permissiveness might reduce the dissonance I find inside myself, when I am at war with my own thoughts, each heartbeat its own disagreement. It takes care sometimes, so much, to say that it is okay that it is not okay, to lay the shovel down.
And so I turn to the we of today’s poem, and the way that pronoun allows this poem to be, in reality, a love poem. This is, I think, the poem’s most beautiful quality. Yes, it admits to being an elegy, but more truly it is an act of testament — a testament to the way in which some of the greatest joy in life comes from a sense of we-ness: the very sense of trust and compassion that allows us to be embarrassed, vulnerable, scared, trying, and living with one another. We should not be ashamed that sometimes — or often — we don’t love the life we live, but loving others allows us to be ashamed together, which is its own sense of solidarity. It’s not enough, and it will never be, but it is something. To have each other, and to have love for each other, allows us to share the elegies we write, rather than keep them for ourselves. And that act of sharing — amidst all the absurdity and tragedy and fear present within this life — is the enactment of love. It is its own love poem.