Carolina Ebeid's "Epithalamium"
Thoughts on being reminded.
Epithalamium
If a tree falls in a forest & if we make our dining room chairs out of its freight & if we were meant to haul it, haul that behemoth tree the way one hauls faith, debt, imagination, a car from a slushed-over ditch & if the tree is older than we are, older than our entire life separately or added together & if we put the tree back into the ground in our yard, a Christmas come in June & if we were to unspool gold ribbons through its lower branches & name these soft rememberancers & no one, not a single person is around to hear that from We Call to the Eye & the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage (Persea Books, 2023)
This poem today sits almost at the end of an anthology of love poems — We Call to the Eye & The Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage — that I recently checked out of the library. I was asked not long ago to write a poem for a friend’s wedding, a wedding that is arriving soon, and, feeling stale as a writer and unsure even of how to begin, I sat with this book the other day, reading it and feeling reminded of so much (like this one poem by Jess Rizkallah that I love dearly, seeing as it is about, too, a friend of mine, and how it is beautiful when people write love poems about their friends), and then, I read this — an epithalamium, a poem for a wedding. And I felt, as I still feel now, so utterly transfixed by it, its beauty and its strangeness, how it begins and how it doesn’t really end.
I think it’s okay if, reading this, you read it again. And I think it’s okay if, reading it again, you read it one more time. I think it’s okay if you repeat that act. I know that I did. And I think I did this because the poem operates with this wild and wonderful tension, in that it takes an almost-mathematically proven formula — the if-then conceit — and then adds to it a relentless repetition that heightens the stakes of the payoff, that makes you crave, as a reader, the then, the thing all of this is coming to, and then it resists the then. It resists, too, a period. It resists a kind of finality, and leaves the poem open. If…the poem says. And then it keeps saying if.
I’ll be honest! It took me awhile to get over that. I wanted the then. I wanted, I think, to learn something about love. I wanted this especially because of the poem’s title, how something about the idea of writing a poem for a wedding hints at the notion of offering — oh, I don’t know — I don’t want to say advice. But I want to say something solid. Or tangible. Something to take away quickly, without much thought. And then I thought: oh, come on, Devin — why would you want that? And I thought, too, all this wanting that I bring to reading — all this wanting we often bring to reading. I want to leave that to the side. To come to a poem not wanting anything but an encounter with something I have never read before. And so then, thinking that, I read the poem again. And, letting myself want less, I let the poem be, and I was moved.
I love this poem. I love what it is trying, I think, to say about love and mystery and the unanswerable shit that we live with every day. Read, again, how it opens:
If a tree falls in a forest & if we make our dining room chairs out of its freight & if we were meant to haul it, haul that behemoth tree the way one hauls faith, debt, imagination, a car from a slushed-over ditch
Those opening three lines set up the present tense of the poem. They situate the poem within the present state of capitalism and consumption that dictates much of our culture. They name a fact: when a tree falls in a forest, no one really cares, often, if it makes a sound or how old it was or whatever consequence might come of such a loss, and instead, such a tree turns into something so far removed from a tree: a set of dining room chairs, the stool I’m sitting on, whatever you might be perching your books upon right now. Money, too. Sometimes a tree is turned into money, invisible thing money so often is, so that such money can be used — despite its invisibility, or maybe because of it — to make more trees invisible.
But then, the tense of the poem shifts, and a question wonders its way into this poem underneath the surface. It’s a question that goes something like what if? And the poem takes the wondering implied by that what if and wanders and wonders that same wondering towards the idea of love. And the result, I think, is beautiful.
What if, the poem seems to wonder, we were meant not to turn that tree into chairs, but instead to find it, to shoulder it, and to carry it the same way that we carry so much that we should and should not have to carry? What if we were meant to replant that tree in our own yard, or whatever space might be free — the empty lot between two buildings in the city — and make it beautiful again? And if we were to do that — to make that what if something more like what is — what might that teach us about love? Which is to say: what might that teach us about life? And if no one heard about any of this, if we simply lived amongst ourselves with this gentle gesture, and if we made a life that way, what of that? Would that be okay?
So yes, I am thinking, then, of the poem’s final lines:
& if we were to unspool gold ribbons through its lower branches & name these soft rememberancers & no one, not a single person is around to hear that
Again — not a single then. No solution. And no period, either. Just the absence of such things, which means, perhaps, that the poem goes on. It continues if-ing, which is another way of saying wondering. It makes no claim to know. And no claim to solve. It wonders and wonders and wonders. And, as it does, it offers us this image — a tree, saved after falling, brought to a new place, strung up with gold ribbons.
So much of life is about the then. Perhaps that is one of life’s most asked questions: then what? Not as in what’s next? But rather: what do I get out of this? If [insert thing], then what?
There’s a moment in Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home where she writes, of her protagonist:
Continually he had to verify online that he was not a robot. He was required to identify traffic lights, taxis, crosswalks. Confirm your humanity, was the request. Demonstrate your discernment, your disenchantment…
Yeah — to be human, in this contemporary moment, seems more about identification than it is about mystification, more about disenchantment than enchantment, more about the then than the if. And I wonder — there’s that word again — about the consequences of such thinking, a kind of thinking that links almost every wondering (oops, that word again) toward a hard fact, a data point, a proof of concept, something, anything, other than that word: if. And when I think of marriage, and love, I can think, perhaps, of no greater middle finger thrown to the very idea of a solution. Because what is love if not a massive, wild, and wonderful wondering that exists in the face of one of the only facts we know — that this thing we share, this thing we call life, is mortal and fallible and fragile and entirely limited? And what is love if not a desire not to overcome such fragility, but rather to wonder what we might make of ourselves and each other within the confines of this mortality we share? If, love keeps saying. If, if, if. All the while, the great fact of our fragile lives looms above us, and we make our own love within it.
Perhaps you, like me, wondered about that word in this poem — rememberancers. Don’t you love it? Maybe you, like me, googled it, to see if it was actually a word. And maybe you saw that it sort of is? That it was a role given to old English clerks, those who were charged with reminding the powers that be of business that they had to conduct. Or, more-fucking-awesome-ly, that it was a role assigned within a game I have never played, Warhammer 40,000 — a role given to journalists and poets and artists, those tasked with reminding people of their history, of chronicling the world as it happened. Lovely, how lovely.
It’s a beautiful word, rememberancers. It’s a beautiful word for a poet, someone who does the work of reminding people of what language can do, or of what the world could be, or of what might fit within the space we call this life. I forget sometimes. I forget often. And it’s a beautiful word for a person, I think. Rememberancer. A beautiful word for anyone, if we offer enough attention to look. The way, walking down the street, I will find myself struck by the way a child grabs a fistful of their parent’s ear. By all the different ways two people can hold each other’s hand — pinky to pinky, palm to palm, four fingers interwoven, sometimes just two fingers curled into two fingers, like hooks on different lines finding each other in the middle of the ocean. That child. Those hands. Rememberancers. Little things that remind us of bigger things, if we want to be reminded. I want to be reminded now. Remind me all of the time.
It’s like how, in Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting, he writes:
When most of our learning is learning to ignore…we need a path back to simple awareness.
And it’s like how, not long after reading this poem, I watched the newest season of The Bear, and was almost moved to tears by the opening sequence of the second episode, how it moved from person to person, place to place, small act to small act, a litany of rememberancers offering their rememberances, so that we might be reminded. Of what? I don’t know. Take what you will. Love, joy. Little bloops your heart makes when it is moved. Remember that — that your heart can be moved.
And so, I return to this poem, and all the if’s it makes out of life, which is to say, all the possibilities that can happen within a life, which is a possible thing — life is — as we are living it, impossible though it sometimes feels. And I return to what this poem does not offer about life and love, which is to say the then, which is to say a solution, which is to say an answer, or a fix, as if all of this could and should be done one way and one way only.
If only, I sometimes find myself saying when I want something more than what I have. But I forget that we are living in the if only — the only world, with all of our wonderings, our little if’s making out of this life a possible thing, each day, by the wild fact of us living within it. If only is right. Wild thing. Almost impossible. But not. It is possible. And when you look around, you see each person, don’t you, and maybe you are reminded of their fragile impossibility, the absurd and strange and beautiful fact of their presence, which is to say their very possibility, the love they make possible right now, and now, and now, by being alive with you, as you are alive with me — this beautiful if of a world we step into each second that comes after the second we are living in right now.
And so, a blessing for a person, a marriage, anything, anyone: I believe in the if you make possible, each day, by being in this world today.
Some notes:
Consider donating to the work of Doctors Without Borders to support their ongoing work in Gaza.
As I will continue to mention, 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. Here, too, is a link to the New York War Crimes page — their ongoing publication.
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