Caylin Capra-Thomas's "Search History Sad"

Thoughts on searching and not knowing.

Search History Sad

Do whales have a concept of death sad. Baking
with applesauce sad. How many towns in Massachusetts.
How many towns in California, Vermont, Rhode
Island—sad. Hip flexor pain sad. Rotator cuff pain.
How many towns in MA. Difference between a city
and a town. Define druthers sad. Define bourgeois
sad. SI joint pain sad. Define nugatory. Do bats
have a concept of death. Do whales sleep sad.
Whale vocabulary. Bat vocabulary. Bat words.
Bat sleep. Motel 6 San Diego North bed bugs.
La Quinta Inn San Diego bed bugs.
Old man skull long hair wig. Synonyms pang.
Synonyms anxiety. Garlic sweats. Signs
of the flu. Stardew Valley fan art sad. Banged
my knee whole leg hurts. Synonyms haunted.
Synonyms meaningful. Body changes after 30 sad.
Get rid of hiccups. Word for divine loneliness.
What is grace. Crispy home fries fast sad. Time
immemorial sad. Fluffy Chihuahuas. First
person or first-person. Nutmeg secrets. Nutmeg jam.
Where am I. What is the address of where I am
now. Zoodles too watery sad. What does a portal
sound like. Do rivers get deeper over time.
How to be happy sad. What do I need sad.
Do rivers get deeper over time. How many
towns in New England sad. Do rivers change
size, change course over time. Do rivers
deepen, will I deepen, how much can I know,
how much knowledge can I hold, can I hold it
while running, flowing, while getting carried
away, am I getting carried away, do rivers
get deeper over time, wider, faster, define
shore, define caulk and float, can I cross,
will I make it, can I carry myself away—


first published in Harpur Palate (Issue 19.2/20.1) (link here)

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It’s funny how you can come across a poem. I came across this one through some strange chance, which I will try to map out for you, perhaps as proof that it is still possible, without Twitter (or X, now, I guess), to stumble upon lovely writing. I think it just takes a kind of attentive lostness, like setting up a bread crumb trail back to where you started your walk, knowing that the wind will blow the crumbs away. And then you have to catch those crumbs! It’s a longer walk. It can be worth it.

Anyways, here’s the map of lostness that led to this poem. I saw, awhile ago, the wonderful poet Alexandria Hall (who I’ve written about here) post a poem of hers published in Send Me Press. Here it is. It’s great. Then, new to this press, I browsed all of their poems, which are these absolutely beautiful things published as gorgeous broadsides. Sitting with them is a really welcome way to spend a morning, an afternoon, another morning.

New to all of it — the press, the poet who publishes it (Katherine Gibbel) — I read through some of Gibbel’s work, and spent a lot of time with these poems, in Tyger Quarterly, which I had never heard of before. Then! I saw that Tyger Quarterly published Capra-Thomas’s work, and that name came back to me. I remember reading her poems years ago, and I was excited to read more, and to see that she has a book out — here it is. And so finally, I came across this poem of Capra-Thomas’s from awhile ago, which I really love.

I sometimes miss the constant notification of new work and issues being published that more time spent on a place like Twitter offered me, but then I am reminded — especially now — that community can be something you devote yourself to doing, and that it is possible to seek out work because you care about seeing what’s out there, to seek out surprise because you care about being surprised, to seek out language because you care about language — what it does, what can be done to it, and who is communicating what with it.

All that to say: I love today’s poem. It does something with language and technology and modern life that feels at once surprising and on the nose to me. In essence, it captures something. But maybe I don’t like that word, captures. Instead, I’d say it communicates that sense of a vast, weirdly specific lostness that seems true to my experience of being alive, in this very second of right now.

In some ways, today’s poem feels in conversation with another of Capra-Thomas’s poems, “For My 20-Year-Old Sister on My 30th Birthday,” which begins with these lines:

Nobody knows what they’re doing, Maddie. 
Sometimes I can see, as if from above, the wave 
of each fresh generation gathering, drawing 

more of itself into itself and looming, perilous 
and untenable, above the lower water. 

Later in that poem, Capra-Thomas writes:

Know me, sister. 
I bequeath you the decade between us. It was 
useless and warm, like a house party. 

Useless and warm, like a house party — what an apt, striking simile. And then, even later, that repetition of knowing, but different, almost its absence, the swinging-and-sort-of-missing of it:

I felt like I knew 

something then. It was mostly a feeling.

There are echoes here of my favorite poem by Denis Johnson, if it is possible to have any favorite part of his work, these few lines I think about so, so often — sometimes they sing in my head, especially in winter, and the steam of my breath fogs the air in front of me:

i thought
that i would make a fine football-playing   
poet, but now i know
it is better to be an old, breathing

man wrapped in a great coat in the stands

And so, these lines from Johnson, these lines above from Capra-Thomas. The way they communicate something about lostness, about not knowing. And I am thinking again of Carl Phillips, how he writes in My Trade Is Mystery: “To be given a map or compass would prevent my getting lost — what, for me, the making of poems requires from the start.” Yes, in these lines above, I notice a realization, something gleaned from time, something reached gently over the years, despite the way the years can sometimes be roughened things, a realization acquired through I-don’t-know-how-many heartbreaks and parties and cigarettes and quitting and not quitting, through missed attempts and missed connections, yes, a realization about that untenable nature of life, that deep uncertainty that never leaves us, that thing we must sit with, then, and try to learn to call a friend. If not friend, companion. If not companion, neighbor. If not neighbor, well, at least here, have this hello. Have it every day.

If that realization sits at the heart of the poems mentioned above, then today’s poem is, as Carl Phillips writes about poems in general, “a record of having been lost.” Today’s poem is a blueprint for lostness, a litany of specifics that detail what it feels like to be lost, to be searching, to be that person who does not know what they are doing. Which is me so often, and perhaps (and probably) you. All of us, nearly all the time. If we round up, probably every day.

Such a funny word, search. It is one of those words, that, thanks obviously to search engines, has become transformed by its relationship to accessible technology, a word that doesn’t just mean trying to find what has been lost, or trying to wonder towards the unanswerable, that means, too, the knowledge that something will be quickly answered, that any question can find its solution with ease. Can’t find god? Search for him or her or whoever in the ordinariness of your daily life. Don’t know the exact temperature at which chicken is fully cooked? Search for it. Don’t know if you should sue your landlord? Ask reddit. Ask the internet. The idea of searching has come to encompass the wide spectrum on which life is lived, that place that spans the gap between the mundane and the spiritual. Capra-Thomas captures that so well, right from this poem’s onset:

Do whales have a concept of death sad. Baking
with applesauce sad. How many towns in Massachusetts.
How many towns in California, Vermont, Rhode
Island—sad.

That choice, too, to add the word sad — unpunctuated, stubborn, insistent — after nearly every iteration of a thing searched in this poem, well, it captures something, too. It insists upon a mood — that restless, lost mood of searching that I know I so often find myself in. That first sentence — Do whales have a concept of death sad — communicates, with the word “sad” inserted at the end, that desire, in a moment of grief maybe, or in a moment that feels hard to understand, to find in a whale, in something, in literally anything, a metaphor that might make this life, this one you are living right now, more easily recognizable as your own, which might simply mean more easily understood, more easily dealt with, more easily comprehensible.

The communication of such a deeply complex feeling, one that exists at such different levels within a body and mind, is one of my favorite things about today’s poem. Because of information’s immediacy and accessibility, life today feels as if we have this jumble of frequencies always humming at different pitches against our skin — we long into infinity for some latent desire at the same time as we know we can find a recipe for roast chicken within the next second. My most recent searches span the gamut of the everyday and the existential. IT band soreness quick fix. Rent abatement for no cooking gas. How to forgive yourself. Sometimes I get sniffles when I drink beer. I notice this strangeness, this juxtaposition of lived and felt experience throughout today’s poem’s entirety, and especially here:

Synonyms anxiety. Garlic sweats. Signs
of the flu. Stardew Valley fan art sad. Banged
my knee whole leg hurts. Synonyms haunted.
Synonyms meaningful. Body changes after 30 sad.
Get rid of hiccups. Word for divine loneliness.
What is grace. Crispy home fries fast sad. 

In just these six lines are an entire symphony of human emotion and experience. The longing for an answer to something physical: Garlic sweats, Banged / my knee whole leg hurts. The longing for an answer to something deeper: Synonyms haunted. / Synonyms meaningful. And the way both of those things — the immediately physical and the wholly existential — run up against each other at nearly every second of the every day: What is grace. Crispy home fries fast sad. One aspect of human experience that I cherish as much as it confounds me is that it feels almost impossible to control — perhaps rightly — the way the universal lightning-strikes through the ordinary. Countless times, stirring a spoon through some boxed macaroni and cheese, I have wondered about something further out, something deeper, whether love or grace or god or all of it. I have been sitting in gym shorts, staring at the wall, shirt sweat-stained and dirty, an absolute mess of the ordinary, and have found myself struck by the twin play of shadow and light thrown against the bookshelf or the brick.

Today’s poem enacts that same feeling in its ending. Here is part of that ending:

Do rivers
deepen, will I deepen, how much can I know,
how much knowledge can I hold, can I hold it
while running, flowing, while getting carried
away, am I getting carried away

At some point, the mundane gives way to the existential, the spiritual. And yet each depends on the other. The ending of today’s poem — beautiful, running just like a river — rolls out of this litany of searching that captures the essence of human experience, the way we are each not just one thing, not just one worry.

And there is something so remarkable about this ending, the anxiety it gives voice to, anxiety that — paradoxically — seems to be a result of being able to search too much and too often, or maybe it’s not just that. Maybe it’s also an anxiety that’s borne from having an answer to so much of what is searched for. An anxiety that expects an answer to everything. It’s amazing how a phrase like am I getting carried away does such justice to that feeling of anxiety. Am I getting carried away. It is a phrase that hints at something at once passive and active. Am I getting carried away in all this active searching I am doing? Am I doing, in other words, too much? But then, there’s also: am I getting carried away by all of the answers? By the groundswell of information that exists, invisibly accessible, right in reach, but also just out of it?

Over a decade ago, when I was twenty or so, I didn’t drink. I was in college and often stayed home at night when friends were out. I worked, for a little over a year, for the now-defunct search engine company ChaCha. You might remember it. You could text a question, any question, to a number from your flip phone (I think it was 242-242), and that question would get sent to me and probably a few thousand other people. I’d try to figure out the answer, and I’d text a response back through some janky website interface. I’d stay up for hours, getting paid less than a penny per answer, responding to all these requests. I wish I remembered all of them. And it’s weird now, thinking that a place like Google does all that remembering with ease, all of our anxieties and desires and worries and insecurities and curiosities stored in one of many humming server buildings sprawled across this earth. But I would sit there and do my best to respond to people’s questions about how many beers would get them drunk or who the fourteenth president was or if they were really in love if sometimes they didn’t really like someone but still thought of them at the oddest times of each day. And I would maybe get a few dollars for an hour of doing that, and I would sleep, and I would do it again later.

A thought: perhaps it is not just poems that are records of lostness, as Carl Phillips writes, but also ourselves. Perhaps one question of life is what to do with that lostness. How to live within it, rather than try to escape it immediately, as I so often have. Our modern moment equips us with so many tools, so many points of data and information that supposedly help us understand ourselves, but maybe that finite, immediate understanding pulls us further away from who we are, these bodies that are, like poems, records of having been lost.

I wish I held onto those nights from long ago. I wish I held onto them not just for their idiosyncrasies or oddities or whatever, and certainly not for the pay. I wish I held onto them because they lived in that in-between moment, that moment before we were flooded with information, too much of it. I wish I remembered every question. I wish I had it as a reminder of worry and heartbreak and strangeness, of cheating at trivia or trying to figure out how to love, a reminder of how much we don’t know, how much we never will.

But I also don’t wish it, because I don’t need it. I have a poem like today’s, which reminds me of how vast and varied we are. How concerned we are. And how full of unknowing. How anxious and loving and desirous and longing. And how sad, yes. So sad. And how unable to let it go, how willing to be carried away. I’m sure, if I had those questions sent to me on those long nights, all of them, they would be filled with love and whales and injury and strangeness. With practical jokes and philosophy and stupidity and joy. Like me. Like you. Like all of us. What’s sad, as this poem communicates so well, is how alienated we still are even in spite of this. How we do so much of this searching alone. Even in pain. Especially in pain. You feel that isolation at the heart of today’s poem, the word sad repeated sixteen times. You feel the speaker searching from empty rooms, from quick looks at a phone, from the corner of a party. We often get answers, or give them, from that same place of loneliness, that same isolation. But there is hope, I know, and I think that hope is in the fact that, given the opportunity to tell someone anything about this life, we often give them permission. It’s okay, we say. You’ll be okay. No one knows what they are doing.

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