Evan Robinson's "Meditation Beside a Sewer Beside a Road"

Thoughts on the chorus of voices that exist inside a soul.

Meditation Beside a Sewer Beside a Road

Someone made this ground, but they didn’t
make this water. Someone moved the water
from a place it lived to a place where it then
had to go. Someone is responsible for this. It’s
not me. It’s not God. But someone. Just like
where this road goes. Someone stood between
here and there, and then they built it—
The Between. All we see, everywhere, is desire.
An avoidance of stillness. A fake complexity
to escape the complexity of people. There is
no place now that is not The Between, and
the world is all Point A and Point B, filled
with people trying to get somewhere. The water
was once only where it was. And then,
someone had to make it go everywhere.



from Pilgrims (Great Place Books, 2025)

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Evan Robinson is not a real person. He is a character in my novel, Pilgrims, which is coming out on Tuesday. He is the third-to-last character you meet in the novel, someone not much older than a kid, en route across the country in search of some better version of the world. He obsesses over the world as it is and the world as it could be, his body destroyed by an accident that left him sprawled out on some highway long before we ever meet him. He is, in other words, a poet. He is by turns angry and ecstatic, quirky and joyful, and forever-insistent on his own sometimes-too-rigid belief that the world must be different than it is, sometimes to the point of ignoring whatever small beauty he might overlook along the way to the larger beauty he imagines must be out there somewhere.

And, on page 175 of this book of mine, Evan Robinson reads this poem of his to one of my novel’s narrators. Can I read you something, he asks. And then he does. He reads this poem that he wrote.

I love Evan Robinson. I find him endearing and idealistic, stubborn and strange, maniacal and wise. He reminds me of people I have met along the way. My friend who quoted Adorno in the backyard of a bar that had an air conditioning unit that would drip some obscure and murky liquid into a forever-growing puddle upon the concrete. A teacher who breezed through a Sunday crossword projected onto the board while her students read in class. A high school classmate, hair a honeycomb of curls, who spent his senior year making up his own language in the back of an ethics class taught by a man whose hands could palm a state fair’s pumpkin.

Yeah. When Evan Robinson writes this, I feel him in these people I know and have known:

All we see, everywhere, is desire.
An avoidance of stillness. A fake complexity
to escape the complexity of people.

I feel his youth, and I feel the intelligence that exists alongside his youth, and sometimes, even, because of it. I feel his demand, and I feel the urgency of his demand, the way he speaks in declarations, and the way such declarations inform his way of looking at the world. And I feel, too, the way he believes in the poem as a place to put such demands and declarations—a poem as the map of a dream world, a poem as the first draft of a manifesto, a poem as why is this, and a poem aswhy isn’t this so?

I think Evan would agree with John Berger when Berger writes, in And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos:

Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.

Such a way of seeing the world—and using the poem as a place to author that seeing—is reinforced when Evan Robinson writes:

The water
was once only where it was. And then,
someone had to make it go everywhere.

It’s true, isn’t it? He surprised me with that one. It is true. The water was once only where it was. That’s the beauty of a declaration. It’s the beauty of a stubborn insistence. When it is right, it is right with a kind of wondrous aplomb—one truth changing the whole truth of the world. It is not anesthesia or easy reassurance, this declaration, this attempt at honesty. It’s a recognition of the world as it is.

I love Evan Robinson for this bravery. For being the person in the room who is trying to say what is true. He reminded me, while I wrote of him, of how much I value people who insist. That friend who quoted Adorno in the back of that bar? Get him talking long enough and he’d go off—five wonderful, spirited minutes about the idiocy of some powerful man’s plan, some backwards-ass system in this wannabe-forward society, and I’d sit there smiling, trying to lock one truth into memory—that it’s okay to demand a better world.

I’m spending a little time with Evan Robinson because, well, it’s almost time for Evan Robinson to go hang out in the world and see what people think of him. And I’m thinking of him one last time before he does go out into the world, where people will think what they will.

And what’s funny, really, is that it is a joy to think—to really think—about who this person (who is not real) is, and where he comes from. To think, especially, about how he comes from more than one person. It is easy, I imagine, to say that a novel stems from the mind of a single person, but that would be like looking at yourself in a mirror and saying that you are, simply and unequivocally, yourself. That you are not, in some way, a little bit of who you have met along the way, and who you have come from, and who you have chosen to be or not to be. In this air we breathe float a billion particles, invisible and everywhere, of everyone else breathing this air. Maybe you, reading this, are wearing a borrowed scarf, and maybe you, reading this, are cloaked in the memory of someone who you have willed yourself never to forget, and maybe you, reading this, are so in love with someone that, even when they are gone, you fall asleep with your hand curled into the shape of theirs. We are so much each other it is by turns heartbreaking and by turns magnificent.

I look at this poem today and I don’t remember or even think of having written it. No. It feels to me like something Evan wrote, somewhere along the road. And then I read Evan’s poem and I remember the voices that come back to me of people I have met. And I hear them now and I say ah, fuck, and I cannot believe the way that writing, sometimes, is like holding a megaphone to the invisible chorus you keep inside the tape recorder of your soul.

The more I think about writing, the more I think it has to do with a notion of expansion. This novel of mine that is coming out is peppered with poems. There is a mother who writes poems. And there are lists of items left behind by a father — and these things read like poems. And there is Evan. I think that I have been blessed with generous teachers, teachers who allowed me to write in this way that felt as expansive as I wanted to feel, teachers who let me write stories that were bracketed by poems. Funny, how I felt I had to be allowed to do such a thing. But such is the case sometimes. We look to others to give ourselves the permission we wanted all along.

And I think what I feel now, as I sit here with an early copy of Pilgrims in my lap, is a wellspring of gratitude, that I have had access to this form of art making and that I have had, especially, teachers and friends and fellow readers and writers who showed me that the art we make never has to be one thing and one thing only. I have, the longer I’ve lived and the longer I’ve written, expanded my conception of what a poem or a novel or any thing put on the blank page can be. That’s a wild grace, isn’t it? Where else do we sit that kind of expansion modeled for us in this world, other than in the relationships we are most grateful for and in the words we return to so often and in the CDs we had to buy second copies of because of the scratching all of our re-listening caused and in the dark theater we linger in, hoping for a second showing of what we just watched? The one painting a woman stands in front of at the museum while the world moves around her? I didn’t know, she says, I didn’t know it could be like this.

That’s how it felt, writing this. Sitting down each night a few years ago, brain foggy from teaching classes where five kids would be sitting in front of me and twenty-five more would be on a laptop screen just to my right, trying to will myself to spend time with just a little story. And then that time became precious. And then, I kid you not, it felt like I had grown a third ear and a third eye, and let me tell you, because it was magic, there was Evan talking to me, and Billy standing there, and Bobby and Patti and Oslo and all these other people. They were there, in the walk between the subway and the school. They were in the books I read. I listened, and they were talking. And what I wouldn’t give to feel that again, in this world that sometimes seems like it is closing in on all of us, that sometimes feels wrong for all the walls it has erected—to feel someone saying hey, over here, look—there’s a door.

This is why reading, I think, is so profound. You think you’re reading one person, but really you’re reading a whole room of them. This Evan kid—he’s not real. But in him, I hear so many real voices. I am grateful for them all.

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1. My novel, Pilgrims, comes out on Tuesday (you can read the first chapter here), and, if you live in or around New York City, I’ll be doing a few events there: a book launch on November 18th where I’ll in conversation with the wonderful Maya C. Popa (with guest appearances by Bud Smith and George Kovalenko), and a big party with a bunch of readers on November 21st. Come through; I’d love to see you. Both events are free. Details below.

2. 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.

3. 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.