Emily Skillings's "Bay"

Thoughts on our condition.

Bay

I feel a nessness
and it grows
in color and size
until I can no longer sit
obediently at my tulip
table in my boiled shirt
and my bursting polish
counting my blanks and fews
until I leap up in eight
thousand uncalculated motions
one more jagged than the next
like a fistful of weapons aimed
at getting nothing done
in a subject clouding over
and come to a momentary sill

I feel a nessness
and something is ready
towards the core of it
to be drawn out and placed
into vials and a network of paper strips
marked with fine tip instruments
and presented before a court
that is tasked with determining
the weight we beat upon each other
and the burden on the air and small
creatures that must be, copper ounce
by ounce, lifted by the uptick
of our sternums, mid-haul
the troubling
vapors filling a repository
ordinary sound embalms us inside

I feel a nessness
but what to do with the exchange
of funds required to numb our
erosion, the late-night fidget of numbers
hemorrhaging into a surrounding white
I went into the woods with some friends
we built a fire with nutritional pamphlets
I came out a movement of bright spots
pressed to a retreating shadow
the light on the little bush
at the edge of the property
made it look or seem to shake
witnessing the feelings of others
in the heat’s color, a jealousy
developed bluely—toxic little center

I feel a nessness
I never arrive and nobody 
tells me a thing
as if I could be more arc than stamp
a platter with scented branches
smudge at the tip of thought
the creaking dock from which
the boats of me sail off
fine folk, ghosts, friends,
I ask for delicate activation
I need it to live and breathe, to go on
to leave. How do you know you know,
you know? I have no more room
to lay down in this life. This light 
on my hand becomes my hand

from Fort Not (Song Cave, 2017)

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What an opening line, and what a refrain to continue throughout a poem:

I feel a nessness

It’s the kind of line that only a poet, I think, could come up with. To turn a suffix upon itself, to create a word that means, quite literally: the state of being in a state, or the condition of feeling a condition. It reminds me of a forever-favorite song by Bright Eyes, “Something Vague,” which begins with these verses:

Now and again it seems worse than it is
But mostly the view is accurate
You see your breath in the air
As you climb up the stairs
To that coffin you call your apartment

and ends with these:

No, no, I think it's more like a ghost
That's been following us both
Something vague that we're not seeing
Something more like a feeling

I love Emily Skillings’s poetry. Something vague is at the heart of it — which doesn’t mean that the poetry itself is vague. No, the poetry is sharp, full of real witness. The vagueness is the world, and ourselves figuring out how to move within it, and what we are to make of both. Skillings has such a skill for carving the mundanity of the everyday into her lines and then, as if by some invisible accumulation, adding weight to them. In another poem, “Garden of Slow Forms,” she writes, almost simply:

In the middle of your life it is a Sunday

For some reason, that line captures, with an almost casual nature, the unanswerable and unknowable. It’s like Richard Wright’s final line in “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”: I have wasted my life. But it’s also not. It doesn’t contain the judgement. It just contains the noticing. And how often have you noticed something like that, something purely ordinary but also full of meaning? How often have you woken up on a Sunday or a Saturday or any day and just noticed it, and sat with it, and moved through the day with this odd, almost-aching unease that time has passed and is passing and will pass and that, because of that simple fact, so much has arrived in front of you and so much has slipped away? There’s a sadness there, isn’t there? To find yourself, without any real warning, in what feels like the middle of your life?

Skillings’s poem today does that same work. It starts with that word — “nessness” — and continues throughout each stanza. That first stanza captures the nagging unease of wanting to do something but not knowing what:

I leap up in eight
thousand uncalculated motions
one more jagged than the next
like a fistful of weapons aimed
at getting nothing done

These lines remind me of two back-to-back statistics I read in the February Harper’s Index:

Average number of times people switch between screens or tabs per day: 566

Average number of minutes it takes to get back on task after checking a cell phone notification: 25

I like the placement of these statistics back-to-back because they illustrate both how intensely overloaded we are with information these days — echoed by Skillings’s phrase eight / thousand uncalculated motions / one more jagged than the next — and also how expected we are, at nearly every second of our day, to be “on task.” To perform. To do our work. To complete our job, our form, our email, our checklist, our [insert here]. To do all this, even if it feels incomprehensibly meaningless, or not worth the pain. That overarching language of performance has seeped into our collective consciousness, so that, when Skillings’s speaker laments “getting nothing done,” it feels like a moment of deep shame — shame that is felt and then turned back on the body.

That shame of the body echoes into the next stanza:

I feel a nessness
and something is ready
towards the core of it
to be drawn out and placed
into vials and a network of paper strips

I love these lines as a form of critique, a way of prodding at our society’s obsession with wrongness, which might as well be the “nessness” of today’s poem. Here, in this stanza, the “nessness” of the speaker — their sense of instability, longing, their desire to make something, to do, to change, to simply live — is something that must be examined. It must be sent off into the world of bureaucracy — “a network of paper strips” — where things are determined and answers are given and problems are solved. I think of the way an ache someone can’t afford to get checked out becomes something searched online, and then becomes bigger, full of terrible possibility. This moment in today’s poem is an apt, biting, sharp criticism of the way in which the narrative of progress offered to us by society — never give up, you can do it — is internalized by individuals, but never by those who seem to offer the mantras themselves: the rich, the corporate, the employers, the bosses. When individuals feel their own “nessness” in a way that doesn’t fit in with an easy narrative of success, then it manifests itself as shame, something in need of fixing, something to be sent off for a better answer, a better way.

I’ve been reading Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport — a sprawling, basically-single-sentence-long epic novel that spans a thousand pages (don’t forget — it’s my year of only big books!). It’s been a real joy to read so far: momentous, mundane, critical, tangential. While reading Skillings’s poem today, I thought back to two moments from Ellman’s novel:

…the fact that my life is just one continual embarrassment to me…the fact that maybe everybody feels the same…

…the fact that just because you work part-time doesn’t mean you have a body part-time…

The second moment captures the same notion as Skillings’s second stanza — the way bodies are continually made to be victims of our society’s exploitation of labor, and the way, as Skillings writes later, it often feels insurmountable, especially economically, for each individual to deal with this on their own:

what to do with the exchange
of funds required to numb our
erosion

There is so much happening on the individual level in our world. Individual pain. Individual shame. Individual internalizations of various ways of being in the world. Individual thought. Individual want. Individual desire. Individual headspace. Individual dream. Individual solitude. Individual loneliness. When I feel at my worst, I feel alone in each of these moments — alone for my pain, alone for my way of trying to un-think my pain, make it less real, compare it to others, shame myself for thinking I am in pain, then shame myself for shaming myself. Oh, it’s a sad and lonely and terrifying thing to be inside a mind, isn’t it?

And maybe that’s why I love the first moment from Ellman’s novel — that generous statement that maybe everybody feels the same. It might be written off as something corny and cliché, something not worth considering because of how general or even pathetic it feels. But such criticisms feel ungenerous. They don’t seem to acknowledge the possibility that yes, maybe — on some level, perhaps small, perhaps large — everybody feels a little embarrassed by their life. Or a little saddened. Or alone. Or caught up in their own nessness. That doesn’t mean that everyone has the exact same feeling of nessness, but it might mean that people feel the sorrow of such a feeling, or the shame, or the anxiety. And if that exists on the collective scale, then maybe it points toward something that it could be beautiful — some kind of solidarity, if only we were generous enough to allow ourselves to consider such a thing.

Such solidarity comes at the end of Skillings’ poem, when her speaker asks a gathering of “fine folk, ghosts, friends,” for “delicate activation.” There’s a reaching outward in such a moment that feels beautiful and precious. It feels, in some way, maybe hopeful. And then there’s an even broader display of solidarity that ends the poem:

I have no more room
to lay down in this life. This light 
on my hand becomes my hand

Though caught, though alone, though trapped in a kind of anxiety and world that feels like it has closed, there is a kind of solidarity and communality here: the light becoming the body, the body becoming the light. No period. Just endlessness. It feels beautiful to me, even in its sorrow.

I think I’ve found myself reading this poem of late because of the way it does not offer an answer to the state of being that it illustrates. Instead, as the poem moves, the speaker becomes caught up in the way the world treats and mishandles their nessness, and, in the end, the final line isn’t even a choice. Light becomes the body. It just does.

Such a moment is a sublime testament to the act of noticing. I think sometimes people — myself included — turn to poetry for answers, but often resist the way that poetry can offer not an answer — which is a kind of capitalist, even oppressive idea in this word — but instead just a different way of seeing. And a different way of seeing is important. It truly is. It can prompt different questions. And different questions can remind us of the purpose of the imaginary.

This reminds me of a line from a poem from Valzhyna Mort’s Music for the Dead and Resurrected:

How could it be that I’m from this Earth,

yet trees are also from this Earth?

It’s a question without an answer, and that’s beautiful, because it’s a question that prods at the imaginary. It calls us to direct our attention to what we might not have considered. To the way our actions do not resemble the actions of the life with which we share this world. To the way the actions of something like a tree might present a way of being that we haven’t imagined yet, or have imagined but have since colonized or destroyed with our brutishness and selfishness. To be caught up in our own nessness in this world is seen as a wrong. It is seen as unproductive or senseless. But I think it is thoughtful. I think it shows that your attention is so sharply directed at this world that it longs for elsewhere, an imagined life, something easier and better and kinder and more gentle. Where we don’t have to be forced into the conclusion that we are the same as light. Where we simply know we are, and act in such a way.

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As a postscript, I want to acknowledge a very small list of resources I have found helpful to both keep abreast of the terrifying and absolutely condemnable Russian invasion of Ukraine, and to support trans youth in Texas:

• Adrian Chen’s Twitter list has aggregated a lot of information and sources about the war, and I have turned to it often.

• This Google doc shared by Katria Tomko, which compiles a list of ways to support those affected by the war in Ukraine.

• Consider reading this poem by the Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zadan (translated by Valzhyna Mort) and becoming aware of the work of people translating and interpreting the work of Ukrainian writers via this open letter published in the LA Review of Books.

• The Trans Justice Funding Project supports community-led and grassroots organizations fighting for trans justice

• This thread by Scalawag Mag — a black-led Southern magazine — which provides ways to show solidarity against anti-trans measures