C.D. Wright’s “Poem in Which Her Mortgage Comes Due”

Thoughts on worth.

Poem in Which Her Mortgage Comes Due

the folds of a dark brown dress

the knuckles of a hand spent in dishwater

the jars of rhubarb

the folios of poetry

the suitcase filled with worthless notes

the fiery fields

the fields on fire


from 40 Watts (Octopus Books, 2009)

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The other day, I went with my wife to walk around. We were in Massachusetts, near my in-law’s place on Cape Ann, at a beach called Wingaersheek, the spelling of which surprises me into a smile each time I see it written on a sign.

It was low tide, which is important, because at low tide, the water near Wingaersheek recedes in such a way so as to reveal nearly a quarter mile of sand, made rutted and wavy by the ocean that had once been above it. It’s a real sight. You walk down from the beach into this place where the water used to be and then you walk out into the water. You’re on the ocean floor. You’re standing on your bare feet, and little rivulets of water — cold, New England water, even in August — are sneaking between your toes, and you’re taking care not to smush the smallest hermit crab you’ve ever seen, and maybe, too, you’re picking that guy up and wondering if he — though small — has grown too big for his shell. And then you’re placing him gently down and wondering about that, about these tiny guys searching for slightly-bigger-than-tiny shells, hiding from seagulls and shearwaters when the ocean stops being the roof above their heads and starts being a distant home, pulled away by gravity.

You’re doing that, and you’re walking, and the sand is so dense with water that each step you take sends waves of discolored density echoing out from the balls of your bare feet. It’s as if each step is a kind of music, and each footfall a kind of drumbeat, a pulsing made visible in the sand.

And you’re walking, and you’re noticing that thing about the sand, and out in the distance there are people standing on a sand bar that is, at any other time, hidden underwater, and you’re seeing them, and you’re joking to someone you love that maybe this is what people meant when they said they saw Jesus walking on water, because it does look like that; it does look like that mother there is balancing on a shimmering surface, and her child, too — the ocean merging with the place their two bodies meet the earth and becoming one, giving the beautiful, sneaky, magical illusion that there are two people out there, standing atop the water. Which is to say: a miracle made possible. And you’re standing out there, too, and wondering, and marveling, and someone you love is pulling out her phone and laughing, gesturing it toward you, because, according to her map, the two of you are just one blue dot surrounded by the blue of the sea. The beach so far away. You are both out there, in the middle of it all. Impossible, but not.

I am thinking of that moment from not long ago as I read this poem today because I am thinking about magic. And enchantment. And the distinction between what is useful and what is not. And what is worthy and what is not. And what can be bought and what can not. I am thinking of what matters. And I am thinking of the rent being due. And the bills in the mail.

Carl Phillips writes:

I think that’s all art is, a record of interior attention paid.

He continues:

Is this what Horace meant, about poetry being like a picture? I think so. The pictures are various—a picture of what no one else can understand, or more often a picture of what others do in fact understand but can never understand quite as we do, through the personal lens of our own individual experiences of the world, which is to say art presents the world both all over again and—even if only slightly, sometimes—anew, made strange.

I think we can all understand — some with more gravity than others — the rent coming due. And I think what Wright makes me consider is that those who ask for the rent to be paid (and who ask for payment of all the manyfold iterations that something like rent takes) don’t make the effort to understand what Wright names in this poem: the rhubarb, the poetry, and the love or lost-love or communion or loneliness inherent in a suitcase full of notes.

(One thought: Those things, the stuff of life — enchanted stories, relationships, the light through the window in the morning — they don’t pay the rent. But maybe that’s part of why they’re beautiful.)

I am thinking of a time, years ago now, when I was surprised by an envelope in the mail, which, when I opened it, surprised me with a letter that asked me for money — something like nineteen dollars and an exact amount of cents — for a pair of crutches I had used in the hospital after surgery, crutches I had never taken home, crutches that balanced me from the hospital bed to my dad’s arms, which were what balanced me into the front seat of his car. Crutches that stayed at the hospital after I left.

(One more thought: Maybe the worst surprises in the world are the ones that ruffle the feathers of your enchantment.)

And so, I am thinking of C.D. Wright’s poem today as a meditation on worth. I am thinking of it as a litany that challenges what we perceive and come to perceive as worthy, as we navigate lives that navigate those same conceptions and preconceptions. I am thinking of this one line:

the suitcase filled with worthless notes

Consider Wright’s use of that word — worthless. I imagine it being used in relation to the poem’s title. As in, such notes are worthless when it comes to paying off the mortgage. As in, there are other notes more worthy of such a thing. And I am thinking, too, of how such a juxtaposition exposes that the very idea of worthiness is one that is defined relationally. In some other world of definition, some other relationship with the world and those in it, the notes that Wright mentions might be of worth. They might tell a story. Describe a love. Unearth a feeling. And if one is in need of a relation with such things, then there is worth there. But also: maybe not. Maybe the love is gone. Maybe there is nothing worth going back to.

What matters, then — such a question is perhaps one of the central questions of a life.

Wright’s poem offers a litany of things that have mattered and maybe still matter:

the jars of rhubarb

the folios of poetry

And, too, a litany of things that struggle to matter, things that grow tired, weary, and different, thing that accumulate a narrative of labor that exists alongside the imaginative narrative of something like poetry:

the knuckles of a hand spent in dishwater

I read this poem today, then, as a list of very human stuff. A list of things that sit within the relational context of mattering or worthiness offered by something like a mortgage, something like money. And, too, a list of things that sit outside that context. Things that can’t pay the rent but still matter deeply.

In his poem, “Riddle,” Jericho Brown writes:

We do not
Recognize music until we can
Sell it.

That poem ends questioning, in some way, if we have lost ourselves in the process of buying and selling mentioned above:

Wait. Wait. What are we? What?
What on Earth are we? What?

And, in her poem, “Personals,” C.D. Wright continues the wondering put forth by today’s poem:

I'm still trying to find a job
for which a simple machine isn't better suited.
I've seen people die of money. 

And so it is money that makes Jericho Brown wonder if we have lost ourselves at the end of the poem above. And it is money that kills people in the middle of Wright’s poem above. And it is money, too, that makes Wright question the worth of so much that is not money in today’s poem. It is money, perhaps, that makes something like poetry — or even something like love — feel worthless in the face of not being able to afford something like a mortgage, something like rent.

That struggle — to reconcile the fact that something you love might not be something of worth, as worth is defined by the world — is a deeply brutal struggle. It makes it seem as if you don’t belong in the world, as if you sit just outside of it, wondering if anyone cares about what you care about, and how you care about it. It’s a struggle that is replicated, over and over again, by things like capitalism, things like the violence of empire — these ongoing, visible and invisible structures and actions that separate the world into those who have and those who do not have, those who are worth caring for and those who are not. And, bluntly, those who live and those who die. As such, our daily, individual reckonings of what matters to us are deeply political. When we insist that something seemingly small and tiny matters — the little thing we made, the poem written, the coffee can filled with old notes — we insist that it is possible for something small and tiny to matter, to be enchanted, to be of worth. And that small insistence: it matters on a bigger scale than we could possibly imagine.

In one of my favorite poems by Wright, “In a Word, A World,” she describes the beauty and value of words in ways that relate to whole spectrum of human experience. It begins:

I love them all.

I love that a handful, a mouthful, gets you by, a satchelful can land you a job, a
well-chosen clutch of them could get you laid, and that a solitary word can initiate
a stampede

I love this moment in particular:

I love that
the Argentine gaucho has over two hundred words for the coloration of horses
and the Sami language of Scandinavia has over a thousand words for reindeer

When I read this poem, I feel the strangeness and frustration exhibited by today’s poem, by the juxtaposition of the title with what is listed in what follows. I feel, in the terseness of today’s poem, in Wright’s unwillingness to say anything more, something tight-fisted. I feel her holding on to the jars of rhubarb and the folios of poetry as if they mean the whole world, even if they cannot pay the rent. I feel that frustration because, when I read a poem like the one mentioned above, I have to believe that there is something magical and transcendent at work not just in Wright as a poet, but in our experience of the world. How is it possible that we have come to be ruled by something as small and unimaginative as money when we live in a world where there can be over two hundred words for horses?

In another of my favorite poems by Wright, “Living,” Wright spends nearly the entire poem describing the ordinary, bureaucratic, mundane tasks that can fill up a life. Here’s one:

Go to Morrison’s for paint samples, that’s where housepainter has account (near Pier One), swing by Gano St. for another bunch of hydroponic lettuce. Stop at cleaners if there’s parking.

Pap smear at 4. After last month with B’s ear infections, can’t bear sitting in damn doctor’s office. Never a magazine or picture on the wall worth looking at. Pack a book.

But right in the midst of this poem which is filled with so much of the sometimes-mindless, often-necessary, very difficult stuff of life, Wright writes this:

Meant to tell F this morning about dream of eating grasshoppers, fried but happy. Our love a difficult instrument we are learning to play. Practice, practice.

No matter where I call home anymore, feel like a boat under the trees. Living is strange.

It’s a beautiful, painful moment that hurts my heart. It hurts my heart because of that word that starts it all: Meant. It’s a word that means none of this was told. None of the dream, none of the ideas about love. It’s a word that means that maybe this story was forgotten amidst all the task-doing and parking-space-searching and waiting-room-sitting that occupied a life. It’s a word that means that sometimes dreams and love take a backseat in this strangeness we call a life. And so it hurts, reading that word, and reading a dream that was kept to one’s self. But there is some small hope. I think: what rescues that dream from the self, and what resurrects it back into the space of living, where I can read it and where you can read it and where we can sit here with it? Poetry does.

And maybe that’s why I thought of that endless beach when I read today’s poem. The sandbar exposed, the ocean water receding. Because it matters. It has to matter. Because, after standing out there, in the middle of the blue, impossible but possible, we got back in the car, and we returned to the world of gas prices and highway exits and things done and things still to do, the world of savings accounts and interest rates. To be clear, that is still this world. The beach and the bank. They are in the same world, both of them. And yet, there is something about the imagination, something about enchantment, something about magic that I need to make every effort to remember. Because worthiness is a construct, and even if a story cannot pay the rent, and even if the ocean water between your toes cannot be turned into money, these things matter. They have to. Because, if they didn’t, I wouldn’t know why we do this thing that we call feeling.

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Some notes:

1. I’ve been following the work of the Gaza Sunbirds, a Palestinian para-cyling team also doing work to share resources and support relief efforts in Gaza. You can support their efforts to compete in the Para-cycling World Championships here, and also support their ongoing work in Gaza here.

2. Consider donating to the work of Doctors Without Borders to support their ongoing work in Gaza.

3. 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.

4. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.