Danusha Laméris' "Glass"

Thoughts on fragility.

Glass

It's the small things that haunt: Oranges,
because my mother used to peel them for me,
slip the rough sections in my mouth. Luckies,
because of the wayward boy who lit my first,
leaning against the railing of the pier. "O sole mio"
wafts up from the downstairs apartment.
Now it means all those summers.
Can't they just turn it off? I walk through
Queen Anne's lace in late September,
down to the cove where I used to meet
a man who was dying, that flower now
in my own vocabulary of loss. What doesn't
in time enter grief's lexicon? When I think of 
our house after the fire, all I see are pools
of pink glass—once our ice-cream bowls—
melted on the ruins.


from Blade by Blade (Copper Canyon, 2024)

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I know this is not the first time I’ve written about Danusha Laméris’ work, and I know, too, that I mentioned one of her poems in my newsletter last week, but I won’t apologize for any of that! I have been carrying around Blade by Blade — Laméris’ most recent book — in my bag for the better part of the past few weeks, and her work has been, as it has been ever since I first read it, a real touchstone and lodestar for me.

I turned to Laméris’ work this week in particular because I have been thinking about fragility. I turned, also, to the work of another poet I love, whose work I have also written about — Jim Moore — and these lines of his from his poem “Fear and Love”:

I wish I could make the argument that a river
and a sunset plus a calm disregard of the ego
are enough.

Later, in that same poem, are these lines:

I said last night,
in the few seconds before I fell asleep,
You do realize, don’t you, everything
is falling apart? You said, OK,
I’ll try to keep that in mind.

These moments of Moore’s sit in conversation with this question at the heart of today’s poem:

What doesn't
in time enter grief's lexicon? 

I think — no, I know — that I wanted to turn to these poets and poems today because I found myself thinking about fragility over the course of this past week. And it is fragility that sits at the heart of Laméris’ poem today — this difficult, painful, humbling realization that loss sits always, and sometimes a sooner kind of always, after the next breath, and the next one, and the next one. It’s a realization that comes with real hardship: objects lose their shape, and people become memories. We hold on, in such hardship, to what we can, even when such holding feels impossible, and even when there feels like there is nothing worth holding onto at all.

The final lines of today’s poem capture that humbling, hurting realization:

When I think of 
our house after the fire, all I see are pools
of pink glass—once our ice-cream bowls—
melted on the ruins.

Even the poem’s final line cuts itself off about halfway before any of the other lines in the poem. It’s as if the poem wants to go on, but cannot. Melted on the ruins. Right there: loss itself, hard-stopped and enacted. But even if the words don’t continue, the poem does continue in that empty space, giving us room to process what once was and now isn’t, giving us the time to sit with grief before we turn the page. Loss isn’t always neat. It doesn’t always arrive perfectly, at the end of a line, exactly where you’d expect. No — sometimes it arrives suddenly, exactly in the middle of something, where nothing else has ended before.

I think I have been thinking of fragility because, for the better part of the last few weeks, my wife and I have spent many of our nighttime minutes together watching the news, most of which has been centered on and based out of Los Angeles, where so much fire has devastated so many people.

These past few days and weeks, I’ve thought of a scene from the movie Prince Avalanche, where Paul Rudd’s character comes upon a woman — Joyce Payne — who is sorting through the rubble of her house after it, too, was destroyed in a fire. Not an actor originally cast for the movie, Payne had actually lost her home to a fire, and was actually sorting through it when the cast and crew of the movie arrived in her vicinity to film. And so, for a brief moment in this soft, whimsical movie about highway painters, there is the briefest and most poignant portrait of a life.

In that moment, Paul Rudd’s character sifts through the debris with Payne. “This is your house,” he says. And then, Payne says:

Was. Everything’s past tense now.

The quickness with which the present becomes the past is one of the parts of loss that renders itself almost inaccessible to any kind of vocabulary of grief or coping. The devastation of fire — so vast, so sudden, and so complete — makes that divide between the present and the past so sharp. There is something so acutely sorrow-filled about it.

And I have been thinking of fragility, too, because of something else. For the entirety of this school year, one of the classes I have been teaching has been what is called a retake class. It is a class full of high school seniors who failed their ELA state exam in the previous year, and are sitting for the class again to try and pass the exam so that they can graduate. I teach every senior at my high school. I teach students in an AP class. I teach others in a Journalism class. I teach still more, and more. I teach over one hundred. And I teach this class, small and mighty, filled with a couple dozen students who need to pass an exam that they have failed (for some, more than once) in order to graduate high school.

I love this class. We meet after lunch, and sometimes some of my students come up before lunch ends to help me better my fledgling Spanish. I love this class, in particular, because of the students — how they are still here, and still working. I love how particular they are, and I love the journey of trying to know them. I love, especially, how, in an age that easily generalizes so much, this class of students resists generalization. They are each in that room for different reasons. This class is not some made-for-Hollywood movie of resilience in the face of adversity. It is, instead, a group of kids, working within a system that has not figured out — and perhaps never will, unless something changes in a deeply progressive way — a way to measure student aptitude equitably, still working to find a way to prove that they are apt within a set of standards that don’t particularly suit them in the particular moment of their lives they find themselves living.

(If, by the way, you are interested in depictions of such classrooms that really resemble the kind of intellectual and experiential diversity that exists within such classrooms, I’d recommend the documentaries Paper Tigers and Herr Bachmann und seine Klasse, the latter of which is an endearing, nearly-four-hour masterpiece of fly-on-the-wall documentary filmmaking. Both films detail the at times challenging, at times hilarious, at times lovely experiences of teachers and staff members trying to understand — and then teach — their specific students.)

The other day, I stayed after class to go over a passage from a previous Regents exam with one of my students in that class. I was reading the passage aloud while he annotated, prepping him to answer some multiple choice questions. The passage — a nonfiction one titled “Learning to Love Volatility” — was from a 2012 edition of The Wall Street Journal. In short, the passage can essentially be summed up by this one statement within it:

We should try to create institutions that won’t fall apart when we encounter black swans—or that might even gain from these unexpected events.

“Black swans,” according to the passage’s author, are “large events that are both unexpected and highly consequential.” In other words, moments like 9/11, or the Covid pandemic, or the current wildfires in Los Angeles.

In other words: moments that reveal, truly, how fragile and fractured our world really is.

And so, I found myself reading this passage aloud to a student, using it as a way — as a 2018 version of the state exam did — to assess their understanding of central ideas and vocabulary and more, while also digesting sentences such as:

To deal with black swans, we instead need things that gain from volatility, variability, stress and disorder. My (admittedly inelegant) term for this crucial quality is “antifragile.” The only existing expression remotely close to the concept of antifragility is what we derivatives traders call “long gamma,” to describe financial packages that benefit from market volatility. Crucially, both fragility and antifragility are measurable.

Even after I left school that day, I couldn’t stop thinking about this passage. In the article’s final paragraph, the author writes that “things that are antifragile only grow and improve under adversity.” I was angry. I was angry because this resilience-lauding article that desired a world that monetarily benefitted from moments of difficulty, pain, and exploitation (which is, sadly, the world we live in) somehow found itself on a state exam that works in service of a system that has the ability to label students as failures and then has the authority to say, while they are down, that they should be more resilient, that such resilience, which the author of this article might call antifragility, is their “way out.” And by “way out,” I mean a “way in” to a world where winning and losing are monetized, where people gain from other people’s losses. A way in to what hurt them in the first place. A way in to a world that causes a world where people need ways out. Do you see what I mean? How glaringly painful it is for an article to laud antifragility in a world that profits off some people’s fragility? I call bullshit. I still do.

This is one reason why so much of this world suffers, because we say that resilience is a better answer than compassion, because we think of something like endurance as pushing one’s limits rather than knowing them.

The truth is, we don’t have a “vocabulary of loss,” as today’s poem offers. Instead, we have an economy based entirely on such loss, without giving people the language, the time, and the space to process what they lose, or how they are losing it. The truth is that a concept like antifragility is to blame for so much of the pain we witness in the world on a daily basis, for wildfires and for more, because such a desire for antifragility resists humility; it believes in an endless possibility for growth even as we witness the consequences of such growth. It believes in an idea that even the worst moment can be a moment of capitalization, which is an idea that chooses not to see loss itself. In such a world, loss becomes a metaphor for gain. In such a world, there is only gain, even as we are losing so much.

This is one reason, of many, why poetry is important. It allows you to identify the metaphors that hollow out the world, and it gives you the language to craft metaphors that build relationships and connections in that same world, un-hollowing it from those who seek to profit off the emptying of what is full.

I’d rather a world that acknowledges fragility rather than resists it. I’d rather a world that offers a language for loss. I’d rather a world that pauses, that rests. It is in this world that we might see our connection to one another, rather than our various possibilities to exploit and be exploited.

In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, he writes:

The more fragile a person was, the more dozens and hundreds of coincidences were needed to bring him closer to another. Each new coincidence can only fractionally increase this closeness, whereas a single discrepancy can destroy everything in a flash.

This is a brutal description of our fragile, fractured lives, but it’s worth noting how, in this description, people are always so, so close to breaking. At any time. By any thing. And by a different thing, too, for each person. I think it might be better to acknowledge this rather than to harbor and promote the wild, prideful belief that it is remotely possible to create a world where such fragility doesn’t exist. When we acknowledge this, we can be intentional about creating more coincidences to bring us closer to one another. When we acknowledge it, we can hold joy for such moments when we do not break, and we can offer love to help us through the moments when we do.

I’ve been thinking of this poem’s title: Glass. One more truth — glass is quite strong, but we shape it in ways that expose its fragility more than its strength. Think of how easy it might be to shatter the stem of a wine glass, and how hard it might be to shatter a glass pebble. We are strong, too, but we also have aspects of our bodies and our hearts and our minds that are easily broken. And yet, in the narrative of the world, we center glass’s fragility and our strength. Why is that? Why not our fragility alongside our strength?

When, years ago, I learned that I was missing a dime-sized piece of cartilage in my knee, and when I learned, too, that missing this tiny little thing might be the reason why I could not run the way I used to run ever again, I fought, for a long time, against what truly was a bright, flashing sign that read you are fragile. I have come, in time, to accept this fragility rather than fight it. It took years. Right now, I am training for my first ultramarathon in five years, the kind of race that changed my relationship to running and to myself, the kind of race that I used to run gleefully, without thinking. But I train differently now. I put limits on my mileage. I do little exercises with big rubber bands. I do many of my hardest sessions on a bike to reduce impact. And I hold, more than ever, an immense gratitude for this possibility. This allowance. I am limited, but joyful all the same.

I think now that I am as strong as glass and as fragile. Many days, I have to hold myself delicately, my fingers at the stem of my own body, careful not to let go. Crafted this way, I am beautiful and I am always on the verge of being broken. I am both ache and the kiss that comforts such ache. I am, as you are, my own glossary of loss, which is why I am shaped like this — a vessel that holds it all. It rests in me, and sometimes it wakes me as I try to rest. Sometimes it keeps me up at night. All this loss, held within the cup of my body. Sometimes it is hard and sometimes it is heavy, which is why you reach out to hold me, and why I reach out to hold you. It’s not just me. It’s not just you. It’s everything. And everyone.

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Some ongoing notes:

1. The Adirondack Center for Writers added a second section of my class on a more generous vocabulary for reading and writing poetry, but it immediately filled up with people from the wait list for the first. I will send more details for future classes if/when they happen. Thank you, those of you who signed up, for your interest. I’m really, really grateful.

2. The Mutual Aid LA Instagram page has a number of resources for people looking to offer help in whatever way in support of those affected by the wildfires in Los Angeles. Here is one of those resources.

3. You can find a list of the work that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing to build solidarity among writers in support of Palestinian and against their consistent oppression here.

4. Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

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.