Colin Drohan's "Bear Witness"

Thoughts on insistence.

Bear Witness

Today I’m celebrating

That even if the flowers are dead

You can still water them

It just won’t have the same effect

But then again what else can you do

Did anyone see my body back there

Wilting in the dry heat

Asking for directions to the store

It’s impossible to manage

All of the symptoms

The garbage comes

From the garbage

We already destroyed

What we were given


first published in Frozen Sea (link here)

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Last weekend, in the midst of a cold snap that cut through New York City, I made the mistake of watering a plant that I keep by a window that I often end up opening in the middle of the night in order to compensate for a kind of raging, clanking heat that emerges from the radiator and turns our apartment into a cacophonous sauna, steam lifting the floorboards into warm, wooden mountains. I watered the plant and, not long after, opened the window, and all night a subzero wind blew through that same window, freezing the water on the plant’s leaves and tilting the plant this way and that. I woke to a plant that had collapsed under its own weight, the stems bent in half. It was dead by morning; it was brown by dusk. Now, it looks like a group of men frozen in the act of genuflecting. I don’t know what they wanted, but I don’t think they’ll ever get it.

It is true: as I type this, I am sitting next to my dead plant. It has been days. I think about this line from Colin Drohan’s poem today, and I feel a deep sorrow and a kind of gentle understanding:

But then again what else can you do

At some point, I know, I will remove this plant from its pot. I’ll keep what soil remains. I’ll walk down the street that is also the biggest hill I’ve ever seen to the other street where there is a plant shop wedged between an auto body shop and a bar, and I’ll buy a spindly, many-leaved plant, and the weather will grow warmer, and the plant will grow along with the light in the days, and I know, even though I don’t like this, that some day, months and months from now, I’ll forget what happened to the plant I am looking at as I write this, and it will be cold, and I will open the window, and I will rely too much and without thinking on the hardiness of other living things to withstand my own foolhardiness. I will depend on this plant’s strength because I forgot about its fragility. Foolish me. Remembering so little, and forgetting so much.

Isn’t this poem something? Doesn’t it just break your heart a bit? How it begins with the idea of celebrating, and then ends with this image of garbage regenerating from garbage? Drohan has a book coming out later this year, and I resonate deeply with this line from Dara Barrois/Dixon in praise of it:

How do you thank a kind-hearted messenger who’s giving you the bad news?

I think that’s it. There’s something so gentle about this poem that so abruptly and tersely captures a kind of malaise that feels endemic to ordinary life today. This is a unique gift of Drohan’s poetry: it observes with tenderness the awfulness of life.

The ending of his poem “A Life Without Crescendo” captures that notion:

I sat and watched the bus empty and refill
and felt sorry for nothing in particular.
I wanted to know why we were scared
but not enough to really want. We spent the days
looking for something to be bountiful
where there was nothing resembling abundance.

As does the ending of his poem “Doubting Thomas” — a gentle, pained skepticism coupled with a desire for something beyond what we are given in this life:

I am so tired
of being so scammed.
It would be much easier
if there were wounds
I could shove my hands into.
That’d be proof enough.

There is so much wanting at the heart of Drohan’s poetry. It’s there in these poems I just mentioned, and it’s there in today’s poem, too. There is a wanting that is less some escapist fantasy and more some kind of honest desire for the world to simply be better than it is. I feel Drohan looking around at “[a]ll of the symptoms” of this world and wanting, simply, something better than all of this. That’s real. When I woke to my little dead plant, and stood within the morning dark in my little slippers, my wife asleep in the other room, god, I was just like, fuck. I looked at this dead thing and said I did that. And I touched it halfheartedly and I felt ashamed and I knew there were bigger things at work in the world, bigger evils and bigger joys, and still, at five in the morning on some haggard Monday, I felt like the world was a little shittier for us being in it. True or not, such feelings are honest and they are real and they are pathways for want and for desire, for wishing that it could be the opposite, that we could be better for the world, and it better as a result of us, that, maybe, we could stop destroying what we’ve been given.

I turn weekly to poems because, often, they end up reframing my relationship to what has happened in my life. And, when I consider Drohan’s wry, tender observations in today’s poem (wry: “the garbage comes / from the garbage,” and tender: “Today I’m celebrating / That even if the flowers are dead / You can still water them”), I think of how poetry can offer people a structure with which to consider the world. I think of how there are people walking around, thinking about the world with language at their core. They see line breaks and juxtapositions. They see volta-like turns, and they see arguments. They see absurdity and strangeness and truth, and they see the music of words and the breath of white space threading between these things. To think of the world in this way gives some kind of ever-present pathway for that precious and deep undercurrent of sorrow to see the surface of your life, to meet the light and find some truth there.

How else, I’d argue, could you come up with these lines if you didn’t think, at least in some way, in language?

The garbage comes

From the garbage

We throw away, in other words, what has already been thrown away. In order to notice this, you would have to be observant enough to look at the label of some just-purchased thing, to notice the strangeness of how we consume what has already been consumed, but then you’d also have to pair that attention with a kind of music of thought, the cadence of repetition sing-songing through your brain, garbage rhyming with garbage, sorrow singing its way into being.

People often talk about what poetry can do for the world, and I think they mean in it in a way that supposes that a single poem might result in something. Might result in the change of someone’s heart, or some sort of material change in someone’s life. We often share poems with this idea in mind. We say: this poem will change your life. But I think a different way of considering this has nothing to do with a poem being out in the world, and has, instead, more to do with the very idea that thinking through the lens and music of language and structure might change the way you process the world.

This matters to me, I think, because the very notion of thinking feels, at least to me, at risk. And with it: the notion of trying. And with that: the notion of living itself. Today’s title speaks to that. Bear Witness. To bear something is to carry it. We carry witness today, even if it’s hard. Which is how it feels, sometimes, to carry thinking in a world that seems to reject it. To carry trying in a world that prioritizes the frictionless. To carry anything in a world that valorizes convenience above all else.

What then? I think of insistence. How bearing witness means insisting on continuing to look at the world in a way that insists on finding something in it: whether truth or beauty or both and then some. The very act of carrying is an act of insistence. You are insisting on holding, refusing to let go. It’s there, I think, that art makes its claim of worth in this world. To make art is to insist on looking. I am going to look and look and look. I am not going to turn away.

I am reminded of something that happened in class not long ago, something I don’t think I’ll ever forget. I have been teaching a unit on existentialism, pairing Camus’ The Stranger with Sartre’s No Exit. It’s a fun unit to teach seniors, this little primer on free will and nihilism and absurdity and what it means to care and to negotiate one’s freedom with the freedom of other people. I ended it with a Socratic Seminar, where we discuss a handful of essential questions, one of which, simply, is: Why try? Why bother? And, the other day, one student, speaking for the first and only time in the seminar, addressed that question by saying that we try because trying is the way we author our existence onto the world, regardless of the outcome of our trying. It was a beautiful point, thoughtful and mature. At the end of class, I thanked him for it, which is my favorite thing to do as a teacher — to say thank you, I forgot about that, or thank you, you taught me something today. And he’s right, I think. All of this — navigating the strangeness of this world, navigating the awfulness, navigating the deaths of little plants, navigating the cruelty of those with power, navigating the absurdity of our obsession with consumption, navigating what feels like meaning, navigating what feels like meaninglessness, navigating crowded streets, and navigating loneliness amidst those crowds — requires trying. And it’s a hard kind of trying. Some days, it is brutal. But it is, I think, in part, how we live. Bearing witness. And bearing each other.

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A Note Before the Notes Below: Before I close, I’d like to mention a little something. I am in the middle of teaching a virtual class for the Adirondack Center for Writers. It’s called Rewriting Your Life, and it’s on giving yourself permission to write between and among and through genres, to feel more possibility than limitation when you consider the fact of genre.

I’ve asked my students to, in the week between classes, engage in reading and writing prompts that work toward that permissiveness. I’d like to offer the prompts here, each week, as well — in case you, reading this, are interested. I don’t want to gate-keep every aspect of that class. Here’s this week’s prompt:

As a guide, read excerpts from both Eula Biss' Having and Being Had and Ross Gay's The Book of Delights.

Then, consider how each of them writes into a single word or idea. Biss writes into this notion of a "gift." Gay writes into the idea of "joy."

Pick a word. Any word. It could be a small word that holds a huge theme. It could be an object. It could be something ordinary you are looking at right now. And then, write into it. Let that word become the lens through which you thread your writing. And see what happens. It could be a poem, a paragraph, an essay, a story. But let it happen. Write into that word.

Here is an excerpt from Having and Being Had. And here is an excerpt from The Book of Delights.

Have fun. Write into a word, any word. Let it be joy. Let it be garbage. Let it be light. Let it be whatever. The dead plant on the windowsill. The window itself. Let it be whatever. We make up names for the world as the world figures out what to do about us.

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1. I teach a Journalism class in my school, where students work on creating a public-facing publication lovingly called The Python Post. Our most recent issue dropped this past week, and featured some thoughtful, powerful reporting on ICE’s effect, both in Minneapolis and in New York City. You can read it here.

2. A friend and fellow teacher from Minneapolis shared a couple links for mutual aid resources, in case you have the means to offer anything. Here they are:

   1. Safe Haven MN

   2. MPLSMutualAid

3. My novel, Pilgrims, is out in the world, and I am deeply grateful. Thank you for reading it and sharing it and all sorts of things. If you are interested, you can buy it here. Consider writing a review on Goodreads if you’d like. Consider asking for it from your local library. I appreciate it. Thank you a million times over.

4. The word ceasefire seems to be just a word. As news outlets report, Israel has violated the terms constantly, and, as the Gaza Sunbirds posted awhile ago, the language of ceasefire does not mean a language of peace, and, as Doctors Without Borders stated, it certainly does not mean that help is not needed. Consider donating to Doctors Without Borders here as they continue their work in Gaza. And please consider following and supporting the work of The Sameer Project (link here) and The Gaza Sunbirds (link here) as they provide on the ground support for Palestinians in Gaza.

5. 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.