Danusha Laméris's "Night Bird"

Thoughts on distance and relation.

Night Bird

Hear me: sometimes thunder is just thunder.
The dog barking is only a dog. Leaves fall
from the trees because the days are getting shorter,
by which I mean not the days we have left,
but the actual length of time, given the tilt of earth
and distance from the sun. My nephew used to see
a therapist who mentioned that, at play,
he sank a toy ship and tried to save the captain.
Not, he said, that we want to read anything into that.
Who can read the world? Its paragraphs
of cloud and alphabets of dust. Just now
a night bird outside my window made a single,
plaintive cry that wafted up between the trees.
Not, I’m sure, that it was meant for me.


from Poetry (May 2023)

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I wrote about Danusha Laméris’s work over three years ago (wow…what a journey it’s been). All those years ago, I wrote about a poem that captured “a joy that defines, yes, what it means to be human.” I notice that joy throughout Laméris’s work, which I return to frequently.

I love today’s poem because it is a kind of anti-poem. It refuses meaning, and yet, in such refusal, it still makes meaning possible. I think that’s one of the catches of being alive. We make meaning possible just by breathing. And looking. It’s also one of the catches of being a poet, I think. You look at the world and find, in what you argue towards and what you resist, in what you love and in what makes you rage, something that gestures away from the easily accepted and gestures toward a different perception. To be a poet is to play with light. It is, too, to make meaning possible — in the said and unsaid, the seen and unseen, the world as it is and as it could be.

I also love today’s poem because it is, I believe, a sonnet. Fuck yeah. It’s got the fourteen lines and a couplet at the end, but most of all, it turns a bit as it nears its conclusion:

Who can read the world? 

Here, Laméris switches from the initial call — Hear me — and all that followed, that long list of all that is just what it is:

sometimes thunder is just thunder.
The dog barking is only a dog. Leaves fall
from the trees because the days are getting shorter

The early lines of this poem today set up the poem’s main argument — that we don’t have to make meaning out of everything. That we can resist metaphor at times. That, in such resistance, there can be a kind of allowance for things to be exactly what they are. Which is its own kind of meaning, isn’t it? It’s a meaning that offers us the chance to be relational to what we see and experience, rather than insertional, people who insert our own perspective into such things — living or not — and make out of them a kind of sublimation of who we are, as if we are in all things. It reminds me of a line from Leslie Jamison’s essay, “52 Blue,” when she asserts that:

We offer animals and mountains as ritual sacrifices at the altar of metaphor.

It’s a gorgeous essay, about a blue whale — solitary and vocal — calling out at a frequency higher than any other whale. It’s about, too, those who find affinity in the whale, who hear about its seeming-loneliness and the sound it makes from such a place, a sound that is entirely its own, and who, in hearing about such a thing, extend themselves into the small space that they know, and fill the mystery that surrounds such a space with themselves. Jamison writes of someone who relates to the whale:

because she’s always felt “on a different wave length to other people … like I don’t fit no where.” The feeling grew particularly acute after her brother was killed when she was 13: “I felt I couldn’t talk to no one. That no one understood or cared enough.”

Jamison continues:

Years later, learning about 52 gave her a way to understand the isolation of that time—a sense that her grief was nothing anyone else could understand. Her family didn’t want to talk about it; no one at school understood. Therapists were telling her what she should feel. The whale never told her what to feel; it just gave a shape to what she’d already felt: “I felt withdrawn and it made it worse along with the pain of his death.” She felt she couldn’t connect with anyone.

The essay complicates metaphor, even echoing the language of today’s poem at one point, when Jamison writes that the “whale is just a whale,” only to continue:

What if we grant the whale his whale-ness, grant him furlough from our metaphoric employ, but still grant the contours of his second self—the one we’ve made—and admit what he’s done for us?

Reading this, I can’t help but think of the volta-like question toward the end of today’s poem, and the line that follows it:

Who can read the world? Its paragraphs
of cloud and alphabets of dust.

Here, Laméris writes about the existence of mystery. The poem admits to it. It questions the possibility of knowing everything, and names the cloudy complexity at the heart of what we live amongst. Such mystery doesn’t always require metaphor; sometimes, it seems to require distance. If we acknowledge what we observe as something that is just what it is, then we are, at the same time, also acknowledging our distance from such a thing. I think of the poem’s final lines:

Just now
a night bird outside my window made a single,
plaintive cry that wafted up between the trees.
Not, I’m sure, that it was meant for me.

Such lines are an acknowledgment of distance. They hear the night bird’s cry and don’t attempt to move into the cry. They let the cry exist as what it is. This is a kind of positioning, isn’t it? Rather than moving into the cry and inhabiting it, imbuing it with meaning, the poem allows distance to remain. Meaning still happens in this space, I think. It is not the meaning of relation but rather the meaning of observation. The meaning of the space between. The meaning that mystery makes.

I think both metaphor and its opposite (by which I mean allowing space to remain between two beings or things) are human impulses. It is like saying I know instead of I don’t know. Or I don’t know instead of I know. Or I want to know instead of I cannot know. Or I cannot know instead of I want to know. But I think metaphor — or, to use Jamison’s phrase, the creation of a “second self” out of what we see — comes more easily to us. It comes more easily to me. And it comes easily, I think, for good reason. For understandable reason. It comes easily because of our desire for connectedness and it comes easily because of our loneliness, which seems to occur when we are deeply aware of our lack of connection. In metaphor I feel a reaching toward, sometimes playful and sometimes full of longing. And what a beautiful thing — this capacity to make selves emerge and extend out of ourselves. When I first started writing, it was because of this loneliness. I felt my life to be a giant misunderstanding, a dark space to be figured out. Poetry was like throwing a glow stick into a well, to see how deep the hole was.

And what a beautiful moment, when one says “I know.” It can be abused these days, can be taken too far. But remember that childhood joy at realizing that it was even possible, to know anything. A fact, a bird, the moon, another. Even when the well of sadness is deep — it can save a life to know how deep it is.

But the other impulse — the willingness to allow space to remain between things, to allow what we experience to simply be just what it is — I find this occurs less easily, and it is why I am so drawn to today’s poem. It feels, as I said, anti-poetic to resist metaphor, to belie, as Shakespeare writes, in a similar sonnet, the things that we experience with “false compare.” But it is not anti-poetic, is it? Our distance from what we experience is a fact of the human experience; it is unchangeable. We are distant even from ourselves. And though we live in a world that, through constant development and wearable technology, tells us the ways in which we can know more and more about ourselves, a world that can even assign scores and percentages to our quality of sleep and quality of life, such distance — even from ourselves — still remains. And if such distance exists in our relationship to ourselves, it is impossible not to believe it exists in our relationship — or lack of relationship — to the rest of the world.

And how about that? Everything I just wrote — a kind of meaning, borne out of a poem that resists meaning. How did Laméris do it? Through mystery, I think. And through acknowledging it. Through letting things be just as they are, and letting us sit with such space.

It doesn’t have to be one or the other, though. Metaphor or its absence. It’s funny —there is another poem of Laméris’s, “Nothing Wants to Suffer,” that does the same work of acknowledging distance, but performs the work through metaphor, or through a kind of inhabiting. In it, Laméris writes:

Nothing wants to suffer. Not the wind
as it scrapes itself against the cliff. Not the cliff

being eaten, slowly, by the sea. The earth does not want
to suffer the rough tread of those who do not notice it.

The trees do not want to suffer the axe, nor see
their sisters felled by root rot, mildew, rust.

The poem ends:

We know this, though we forget.

Not the shark nor the tiger, fanged as they are.
Nor the worm, content in its windowless world

of soil and stone. Not the stone, resting in its riverbed.
The riverbed, gazing up at the stars.

Least of all, the stars, ensconced in their canopy,
looking down at all of us— their offspring—

scattered so far beyond reach.

Though this poem seems, perhaps, to do work antithetical to today’s, in that it gestures toward trees and leaves and animals and wonders toward some potential meaning, I think it actually exists in conversation with today’s poem. It takes almost the entirety of the poem before Laméris uses the plural we, and it is in a volta-like way, stunning the poem out of observation and into our experience of knowledge and mystery: We know this, though we forget. And then within the conceit of the poem, humans — we ordinary things — aren’t brought up until the end, as the “offspring” of the stars. Relational, right? Intimate, even. And yet full of distance. So much distance.

Mystery and metaphor. Distance and relation. All of such things perform the work of acknowledging a vast and complex interiority, a wellspring of maybe-I-might-call-it-the-soul that we share with one another and share, too, with what we experience. In that interiority are reasons for our love and our loneliness, our longing and our desire, that I have no idea about. And still we search. And sometimes our searching take us into the trees and mountains and birds and bodies of other things, and sometimes our searching places us at a remove from such things. Instead of becoming the mountain — or making the mountain become us, I should say — we observe the mountain. It means separately from us. We let things be as they are. All of this, I think, this fascinating politics of relation, is part of the strange and beautiful joy of being human.

What I really think about, though, is the end of Jamison’s question above. I think about how, when we use metaphor, when we inhabit things apart from ourselves, we don’t often admit what such things have done for us. Because it is a kind of use, isn’t it? We use such things to make our metaphors. We use the birds, or the trees, or the moon, or a whale; we use them and make them mean something with our own intentions, rather than their own. That seems human, too, doesn’t it? All this taking; all this using.

What to do with all of this? I’m unsure. But I’m thinking. If I ever speak again for the birds — and I probably will — I should probably think about what they would say if they could speak for me. These flying things, feather-light, closer to the sun than me — how would they make a metaphor out of me? Or a whale, lonely or not, gorgeous and gentle in the water — would such a thing even think to compare me to anything? I don’t know. I have made so many second selves in my poetry. If a whale could make a metaphor (oh, here I am again, extending that self into another), I wonder: would it even be meant for me?

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