Charif Shanahan's "Ligament"
Thoughts on the surprise of tenderness.
Ligament
Even after she cut into my shoulder
Coldly, with a scalpel, resetting my clavicle,
Tying it down with borrowed ligament and screwing it
Into place, even after she sutured me shut,
Sewing the two banks of skin across the thin blood river,
Watching me sleep the chemical sleep
Until tender and hazy I awoke — Even after all that,
What seems the least plausible is how
She had known, walking into that white room,
To put her hand for just a second in my hand.
from Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017)
It’s funny. As I thought about what poem to sit with for this week, I found myself drawn to Charif Shanahan’s Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing, a book so lovely and complex and rich that it always rewards a return to its pages. This poem in particular has been a lodestar for me, even more so in the past year, as I’ve recovered and rehabilitated myself in the aftermath of pretty serious knee surgery.
As I write this, it is the one year anniversary of that very knee surgery. I woke up early this morning — it’s Friday night now — to make it to the high school where I teach by a little after 7. I’m one of the track coaches for our upstart, ragtag track team, and we had practice at 7:30. There’s a field behind our school in the Bronx, and we met there. We focus on endurance on Friday mornings, and so this morning, we ran what seemed like endless laps upon the somewhat soggy grass, and I was able to run with the team. The goal was not to stop, to be okay with slowing down, to learn that our body has different paces for distances, and that our body — smarter than we think it is — knows pretty intuitively what is sustainable. So we jogged and jogged and jogged. And each step, I got to jog with everyone. I don’t know if a year ago I thought that would happen — that I’d be out on some dewy field in the just-after-dawn light, jogging laps with kids who were still learning how to run. But it happened. It happened not long ago. And for that, I’m grateful.
What I love about this poem is that it is a single sentence. One of the sublime acts of a lyric poem occurs when you realize, as a reader, that you are reading a writer who is paying attention to both the line and the sentence. Such a realization allows you to appreciate the poet as someone who is approaching their art with a care for multiple modalities.
You notice Shanahan’s attention to the line at the onset of the poem, when he writes:
Even after she cut into my shoulder
Coldly, with a scalpel, resetting my clavicle
The placement of Coldly — capitalized, breaking the adverb from the verb it describes — at the onset of the next line heightens the imagistic quality of the moment that is described. With the first line, the word cut implies a kind of violence, and even a kind of carelessness, and the word Coldly takes such an implication and renders it even more surgical, emotionless. In such a way, the poem begins with an image of supreme almost-negativity. It gives the sense that the person being operated on is a kind of victim, and the person doing the operating is a kind of maybe-malevolent actor.
But notice how, as the poem progresses, the surgeon is offered a more careful agency. Look at the verbs: Tying, Sewing, Watching. Though such words are interspersed between moments of the aforementioned coldness — “screwing it / Into place,” “the chemical sleep” — they still present a sense of care. And it is that feeling of care that is extended in the poem’s final lines:
What seems the least plausible is how
She had known, walking into that white room,
To put her hand for just a second in my hand.
That is the beauty of this poem existing as a single sentence. It captures, in an elongated moment, the wide gap between human coldness and human care, and the way in which the former can sometimes obscure the latter. In doing so, the poem captures something essential about the human condition: our tendency toward fear or anxiety, and our need for compassion. Shanahan does that in a single sentence, and he relies on the power of the word “even” to do such a thing:
Even after she cut
even after she sutured me shut
Even after all that
By repeating these clauses one after another, and building up an image of coldness, Shanahan heightens the emotional heft of the poem’s final lines. There is something magical depicted in the surgical moment of this poem. There is precision, and medical advancement, and real skill. But none of those things — as proved by the the fact of the word “even” — compare to the compassion offered at the end. The way the surgeon, before any of the medical procedure occurred, allows for a moment of real humanness to occur. A moment of connection. A moment to say: I know you’re scared; it’s okay.
All of that is contained in a single sentence. How beautiful is that? To refuse the period, to allow the poem to accumulate, and pause, and accumulate some more — such a choice on the part of Shanahan feels uniquely generous. By the time we reach the moment of tenderness at the poem’s end, we are still within the same structure of the poem’s beginning. And we are fuller for that, I think. And more buoyed up by complexity.
Sometimes I wonder if life is a sentence or a paragraph. A chapter or a book. I don’t know what it is. Most likely it is none of these things. Most likely a life is simply — or complexly — a life. But a poem such a today’s shows us the way in which a sentence can contain so much. With its clauses and pauses, its addendums and retractions, its self-contained arguments and corrections, a sentence can resemble some sort of complexity at the heart of humanness. A poem can do this, too. And a poem that is a single sentence? Well, such a thing can show us that, when a poet is paying attention to structure, beautiful testaments to life can occur. We can find ourselves within the line breaks and commas, the rhythm and the music, the compassion at the end of something that began as something cold.
I love the craft of this poem, and I love, too, what is attempting to say about our human condition. A year ago today, I walked into a hospital in New York City absolutely fearful of a surgery that might make me able to run again or leave me unable to run or, most certainly, alter the way in which I approached running — the thing I love most to do — forever. When I entered the hospital to check myself in, I was struck by how ordinary the whole thing seemed. And by ordinary, I mean bureaucratic. There was a part of me — a big part — that was hoping for a constant stream of reassurance. Instead, I was met with some forms to fill out, an elevator to take to one level, one waiting room and then another. I put my clothes in a plastic bag, having traded them for a gown, and I sat up in a bed in a room that had no door. My leg was shaved, my knee was marked with a purple felt-tipped pen. It all felt, like Shanahan describes, cold and clinical. The whole time I felt like I needed something, but I didn’t know what. I just needed something.
It wasn’t until the anesthesiologist came by my bed right before they wheeled me into the operating room that I felt a little more at ease. She looked at me and said: I know you’re probably scared, but you can trust me. We do this every day. It wasn’t an overtly kind thing to say, but it was kind enough. I was so scared. Scared for myself. Scared for my future. Scared about being put under. I just needed someone to tell me that it would be okay. That was all. And she did. And she talked to me as they wheeled my bed down the hallway and into another hallway and through a door and through another door and under the bright fluorescent lights within the metallic room where I imagine they cut through my leg. She talked to me the whole time. Her voice was the last voice I heard before I went to sleep. I needed that. A voice. Just one. Someone to talk to.
In another poem from this collection, “Trying to Live,” Shanahan writes:
I want to enter my life like a room. Blue walls.
A floor painted green. Three large windows. Light.
Within the same book, this room of gentle light — blue, green, full of large windows — is contrasted with the surgical, bare whiteness of an operating room. I find such a juxtaposition to be a testament to the many rooms we find ourselves within that are not the same as the rooms we want to be in. It is also a testament to the way that, when the room we enter is bare and surgical, we are so often reliant on the kindness of others to allow us to feel safe in such a room. Safe, seen, heard. In teaching, we ask ourselves often if our students feel these three things before we ever ask if they are ready to learn. But so often, our world neglects to ask such things. It either assumes we are safe, and seen, and heard, or — worse yet — it doesn’t care that we are not.
I recently watched the 2021 film C’mon C’mon, directed by Mike Mills, and couldn’t help but think of it as I read this poem. In the film, Joaquin Phoenix plays the estranged uncle of his nephew, played beautifully by Woody Norman. Tasked with caring for the child, Phoenix’s character is faced with the ever-challenging demands of parenting: the audibles, the patience, the anxiety, the fear, the stress. Shot in black and white, the film reminded me of the “white room” of today’s poem, and the way that, almost unexpectedly, a kind of tenderness emerged.
In the film, there’s a scene where the nephew puts his stressed, anxious uncle to sleep. Phoenix’s character is sprawled in bed, and Norman’s character crawls on top of him and says: “Rest your feet, rest your legs, rest your hands, rest your arms, rest your eyes...rest your mind.” The whole time, he is touching him, caring for him, showing an unexpected and unbelievable compassion. Something filled with remarkable tenderness. I couldn’t help but cry. The tenderness emerged almost out of nowhere. I was struck by it, gently surprised. Moved to tears.
There’s a poem by Carolyn Forché, “Because One Is Always Forgotten,” where she writes:
The heart is the toughest part of the body.
Tenderness is in the hands.
And it’s true. Tenderness is in the hands. It’s there in that scene in C’mon C’mon. It’s there in today’s poem. It’s in the hand held in the hand.
And I wonder, out of love, where such tenderness is at all times. Why are we not putting our hands in one another’s hands? Why are we not cushioning the blow of coldness with the soft compassion of tenderness? Why does tenderness, so often, come as a great surprise? Perhaps it is because we have been collectively whittled away by the surgical efficiency of bureaucracy. Perhaps it is because we no longer have models of everyday tenderness — the kind that doesn’t surprise you, but simply is. The ordinary tenderness. The empathetic stranger. The last person you thought would care, and the way they care.
Tenderness, sadly, is one of the first things to go in a world that does not value people’s ordinary attempts to survive, in a world that does not provide the economic and social means for everyone to simply live as they are. Tenderness takes work, and patience, and care — such things become cast away when your patience is tested every day. And then, in such a world, tenderness is celebrated as a rarity. You are in a hospital, feeling the bare fluorescence, and someone says it will be okay. You are crying at an intersection, and someone hands you a tissue. But tenderness should not be a rarity. It should be a part of our everyday existence.
I try to live, as Shanahan writes in today’s poem, “tender and hazy.” I try to live with a willingness to be compassionate and a desire to admit my own uncertainty. But it is hard. Tenderness and uncertainty — how rarely are such things valued! This morning, before we began to run, I told my team that the mind sometimes cannot comprehend how far the body is about to go, that it sometimes sets out on a pace that is too fast, before having to slow down or walk. I told them it’s best to go out easy, to give the mind a chance to listen to the body, and let the body guide it toward a pace that’s sustainable. There’s tenderness there, I think, in action. You can be gentle and go for a long time. It can be a beautiful thing, that gentleness. I want to cherish it for as long as I can.
Beautiful and tender 🌸💚