from The Air Year (Carcanet, 2020)
I think Caroline Bird is one of the most profoundly sincere, funny, witty, straight-to-the-heart poets writing poems today. As I was flipping through her most recent book, The Air Year, wondering about which poem I might write about — because I knew I wanted to write about one of them! — I was torn between the poem above and one of her other poems, “Drawn Onward,” which begins with the lines:
please love me
a little bit less, I’m standing on your front lawn yelling
for a helicopter
and ends with the lines:
I mistook my heart
for a helicopter, every morning the smell of your perfume gets
a little bit less, I’m standing on your front lawn yelling
please love me
In the in-between, the poem subverts and inverts and reverses itself, like some wild and beautiful accordion. It’s a testament to Bird’s playfulness and ability to use that play to get at something stuck in the heart of who we are and what we need. Today’s poem does the same thing. It’s hard to deny the humor in it. Notice the juxtaposition in the first line:
I do kind gestures. Remove my appendix.
There is an intense absurdity inherent in placing these two acts together. And yet the gesture sets up the rest of the poem, which is a poem of that same juxtaposition, a poem of placing expectation against reality. You see that in the second line:
I put my ear to a flat shell and — nothing.
That “nothing” repeats itself again, and again, and again, even when it is swapped out with different words. Throughout this poem, that “nothing” represents a kind of expected meaning, something given to us from the top down, a hope, maybe, something to butter our bread with. Contrary to so much else, which attempts to make out of that nothing a kind of something, Bird’s poem today places that nothing at the forefront of the work, and asks: what happens if you expect something and find nothing in its place?
The notion of sanity is a loaded one. The word itself, dated back to its origins, refers to nothing more than the soundness of mind and body. Which, when you think of it, means nothing. Sound how? By whose terms? Bird’s poem today poses the idea that the world itself seems to offer its own definitions of soundness, its own definitions of sanity. A checklist of sorts. Go for a jog. Host a party. Acquaint yourself with nature, but not too much. Expect enough but also not enough but also not too much. Be just right, as they say. When I read today’s poem, I think a lot about Nina Renata Aron’s recent memoir, Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls. In it, she writes:
Thinking about adults putting on a happy face for children, or worse, being unable to put on the happy face, is devastating. That we maintain this dishonesty with them, that we must. I have a longing to protect the kids from coming into some consciousness of the fact that taking care of them is difficult. I always imagined that keeping that fact from them was an essential part of good mothering.
There is a dishonesty we maintain with the world just as there is a dishonesty the world, at large, maintains with us. Bird’s poem today gets to that. We are often taught to “Learn / a profound lesson about sacrifice” while the world, at large, sacrifices nothing. And by the world, I mean the world that dictates our collective cultures of money and consumption and power and powerlessness. It is a world that demands our input, our creativity, our value, our effort, ourselves, our children, and our money while also offering up so little in return. Other than what? Self discovery? Self love? Terms that mean so little if they are commodified. Terms that mean so little if they, by the nature of their inception into our popular discourse, mean so little.
Some questions I have: What does meaning really mean? Why do we feel the need to put on a certain face in the face of all that is certain about life? To demonstrate a kind of insanity, a kind of cynicism, a kind of hopelessness while living this life of so-much-ness — isn’t that, in and of itself, a kind of sanity? And what is sanity? And what should you expect from this life? What is expecting too much? Too little? Who knows the right way? Can I meet them? Do they charge a fee?
Bird’s poem today seems to ask: What is this life? It does so with the most specific details. Divorce. Sobriety. Yelling into a valley. Coco-pops. In doing so, the poem seems to tally up all the odds and ends, all the daily minutia, that make up a life. And what is a life? Is it what it is? Is it what it is supposed to be? And what is it supposed to be? Aren’t you faced with these questions, too? These daily, brain-racking questions about how to make meaning out of nothing, and how to live when you expect meaning and find nothing?
What I love about today’s poem is the way in which it doesn’t attempt to transcend. It doesn’t attempt to say here is how it is, and here is how it could be. Rather, it just says: here is how it is. I think, sometimes, that we think a poem’s job is forever to transcend. To offer the ordinary and to affix to such ordinariness an extraordinariness that is grace-filled, wonder-filled, dumbstruck with light. I certainly attempt to do this at times in my own work, and I am drawn to it as a reader. And yet, when is the world ever like this? Sometimes, perhaps most times, the world is simply how it is. A place where there are “No singing floorboards,” a place where the dead, even the dead birds, do not talk back to us. Sometimes, even though the world is asking us to transcend whatever small or large difficulty we are facing in the moment, such a transcendence is impossible, or unlikely, or just wildly inconvenient in the face of all the other shit the world is asking us to transcend at the same time. Sometimes, the world asks far too much of us. Perhaps all of the time.
And yet, you might ask, where is the hope in this poem? Because, perhaps, you want hope. Perhaps you long for it. I, too, long for hope. I think of these lines from Bird’s poem, “Checkout,” in the same book, in this moment where the speaker of the poem has recently died:
An angel
approaches with a feedback form asking
how I’d rate my life (very good, good,
average, bad, very bad) and I intend to tick
‘average’ followed by a rant then I recall
your face like a cartoon treasure chest
glowing with gold light, tick ‘very good,’
and in the comment box below I write
‘nice job.’
There are so many ways, so real and specific, in which this life is average, or below average, but the wonder (and hope) in Bird’s work is often in the unsaid. It is in the “cartoon treasure chest” of a face, in the way a face can glow like that, in the way these feelings that cannot be compounded or commodified or sold to us still somehow arise out of nowhere. Like catching the glace of a sidelong smile, or smelling the rain. Bird’s poem today is a litany of ways in which the world sucks us dry, renders us incapable of wonder, generosity, even love. But the wonder, generosity, and love is that such feelings are still there. Even after life has taken its toll, even after the expectation has never met reality. Such things are there in the unexpected, in the unsold, in the forever-uncommodified. They are there in the ways we simply are, and the ways in which we are, simply, to one another.
So what is this life? It is so many things at once. It is, as Bird writes, a litany of so much love and failed love, so much trial and certainly so much error, and so much expectation and, so often, so little reciprocation. What to make of this? Well, it hurts. But it loves. And it beckons. And it lives.