Hua Xi's "Heaven"

Thoughts on what is enough.

Heaven

Apricots woolly by the hospital bed,
a meal of light. The light falls
on my mother’s hands.
So much sunlight falls
and does not get up
but its hands
pick up the dark and go on.
Things are heavy because
we try to carry them.
My mother said, “in this lifetime,
learn to be alone.” I cut
my hair in the mirror,
attempt poems about the breakfast table
with cereal and figs.
Good enough.
I pour milk,
falling
through a shitty apartment,
a brief depression. I fall in love,
mirrored in satsumas, perfumes and midnight.
Not enough. I turn the page but I’m still
reading the novel my mother wrote me.
The room with the view.
The wide sargasso sea.
A pair of hands tends me.
Loneliness is an imaginary thing,
but so is the entire country.
You try. There are ceilings
you hold up
like heavens.

first published in The Nation, 2021

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One downside of spending a little less time on Twitter than I used to is that I’m far less aware of all the wonderful poets writing wonderful poems and sending them out into the world. But thankfully, by some luck, I came across a poem by Hua Xi earlier this year, and, remembering it not long ago, wound up reading today’s poem, which was published last year. And what a poem. I mean, who could not be astounded by these four lines:

So much sunlight falls
and does not get up
but its hands
pick up the dark and go on.

So much sunlight falls / and does not get up. Wow. Like actually, wow. That is one of those images made into language that absolutely alters one’s perception of the world. It’s an attention-changing event, this moment in this poem. There’s a before and after. As in: I will never look at sunlight in the same way again. Never! Never ever!

Now, as I write this, it is night, and I’m thinking of all the day’s sunlight that has fallen and has not gotten up. I’m thinking of it there, lingering in the dark, buried by the weight of such darkness, waiting for more light to rescue it from — well, what is it? Death? Loneliness? A kind of failure to make of the world a constant light? I don’t know. But I’m thinking of it still — all of the sunlight that has fallen and has not been able to rise. Which is all of it. All of it. I’m thinking of light, and what we do with it, and how it lingers and how it is lost.

Any moment that mentions light reminds me of a poem by Larry Levis — “In the City of Light” — and how, in it, he writes:

A body wishes to be held, & held, & what
Can you do about that?

Substitute body with light, and the question still remains. What do we do with light? How do we hold it? Cherish it? What do we do with the knowledge that it, every day, seems to go away?

I am reminded, too, of a poem by E.C. Belli, where she writes:

The light isn’t made of angels, you fool

It’s made of heartbreak

If light is not just what illuminates, but what falls, if light is not just what warms, but what is also cooled — later — by the dark, then so much of light is heartbreak. That is echoed throughout today’s poem in such a remarkable way — a testament to Hua Xi’s craft. Notice the repetition of “falls” and “falling,” how the speaker of the poem falls, just as light does. And as the poem moves, it too falls down the page. So much of life, the poem seems to say, is light. I want to hold on to that, even — and especially — as I fall.

What I also love about this poem today are those seemingly simple lines that follow such a generous depiction of light:

Things are heavy because
we try to carry them.

I’ve been thinking about this lately, on a craft level: how we convey truth. In one of my high school classes, I’ve been talking with students about their critical essays, and how, at the end of a paragraph, to do the work of extension. So much of standardized writing is formulaic, and this is obviously a fault of such exams, and any exam with an objectively decided-upon aim in general. But the end of a paragraph offers an opportunity — after the evidence, after the analysis (remember those words?) — to extend the thinking of the paragraph into some deeper connection that goes after the truth of what you’ve previously described. Within the constrained rulebook of standardized-test-essays, this is the fun part. It’s where you can flex a bit of your personality — where you can make the reader care not just about your words, but about your insight and personality as a thinker.

I used this poem as an example of such a thing in my class the other day. I wanted my students to notice how truth can arrive in a way that astounds for both its concision and complexity. Notice how the first seven lines offer such a litany of rich and generous imagery. The “Apricots,” the “meal of light,” the “mother’s hands.” As such, when those two lines of truth — "Things are heavy because / we try to carry them” — arrive, they arrive with such a weight attached to them. They are so powerful in their attempt towards truth because they come from a place of such active, concerned noticing. I love them for such an attempt. As readers, we are neck deep in a moment when we read these lines. We feel the sorrow of sickness, the generosity of care. We feel the deep and lonely heft of humanness. In other words, we are made, as readers, vulnerable. And when we are vulnerable, I think, we are ready to receive truth in its barest form.

Without the poem to cushion their fall, such lines might seem simpler than they are. But the truth is, the idea of things being heavy because we try to carry them is such a complex, loaded idea. It reminds me of our limitations as humans. It reminds me of our expectations, too. What are we expected to carry that means nothing? What added weight do we hold — and carry — into our daily lives? What is worth carrying, and what is not? When I first read this poem, I had to stop at these lines and think. I almost couldn’t continue. I found myself nodding. Yes, yes, you’re right. It is that simple. And I didn’t know what to do. There was so much I wanted to let go. And so much I wanted to pick up.

And, as the poem continues, it moves through the sorrow of a vulnerable and honest life:

I cut
my hair in the mirror,
attempt poems about the breakfast table
with cereal and figs.
Good enough.

That good enough. Gosh. It does so much. Just as the aforementioned lines about heaviness remind us of the ways in which our attempt at shouldering our burdens create the very idea of weight, that simple good enough standing alone on its line reminds us of the joy and sorrow of creating art in the midst of our feelings of pain, loneliness, and so much more. Good enough is perhaps the best way to describe literally anything that can get us through the day — whether that’s art, or breathing, or anything that involves a pulse.

And yet, later, Xi writes:

I fall in love,
mirrored in satsumas, perfumes and midnight.
Not enough.

That phrase — Not enough — serves as an echo to the good enough that comes before. It feels like a critique couched within this poem, a critique of the ways in which that phrase — good enough — has come to be commodified by our society. Though so much — like art, like breath — is good enough, especially within the world we find ourselves within, we are often told — within the framework of a society that does not model any real attempt at communality — to embrace our individual ethos, to not just embrace, but buy into, our body, our life, and our time. To make ourselves, individually, into what we individually want to be. We are told that such an effort will be “good enough,” but, as this poem suggests, any moment of attention or awareness will reveal that such an effort is “not enough.”

If you want to feel a little depressed, look at this McKinsey article about the future of the 1.5 trillion dollar wellness industry, and the way in which it presents “opportunity” — how words like health, sleep, and nutrition have become categories worthy of exploration by corporations, and, almost certainly, exploitation. It is lonely for me to think about this. It’s lonely to think about how far we have come from honest value, and how non-imaginary our society is now. If you want to know what I mean, those lines earlier — things are heavy because we try to carry them — are imaginary. They are imaginary because they take the risk of looking again at what we have taken for granted, and re-wondering our relationship toward such things. It’s not surprising, in other words, that society does not do this, that the meeting of basic needs might become a capitalist market worth trillions of dollars. In fact, it makes perfect sense. But I miss the value of love, of touch, of simple tenderness. As Xi writes:

A pair of hands tends me.

What is more beautiful than this gentle image? To be tended to, to be loved in such a way.

When I think of our contemporary moment, I think of how we cannot escape, what Xi writes immediately after this image of the hands — the way that:

Loneliness is an imaginary thing,
but so is the entire country.

Though loneliness is an “imaginary thing,” and though a country is the same, they are still real things with real consequences of feeling. And one great pain of the world is that, though a country is imaginary (a border is simply an imagined thing), such imaginations have real and desperate repercussions. In other words, though a country is imaginary, and though loneliness might be an imaginary feeling, the pain of such a feeling is real. Very real.

I am struck by how often I — and we — live within this fact. This fact of feeling. This fact of feeling brought on by loneliness. Each morning, I board the same Parkchester-bound 6 train that arrives at my subway station around 7:40, and each morning, I enter almost always the same car and see — so often — the same people. I am sure that they see me. And some mornings — not all — I wonder about this life, and the way in which we accept our passage together without recognition. I never recognize the same people I see. By that I mean, though I see them, I never greet them, or wish them well. I simply exist alongside them, over and over again. And then we get off at our stops, before or after one another, and repeat the same process day after day after day. There is an endlessness of loneliness, is what I am trying to say. A way in which our world seems to prohibit any attempt at communality, even when we are aware of communality’s possibility.

In another poem, Xi points toward this thought when they write:

Somehow, you grow lonelier
than the world that contains you.
That is why you so
want to be touched.

One great paradox of being alive is that, the more you are aware of the world, the more it grows, and the more the world grows, the smaller you feel inside of it. To be aware — to pay attention — is, almost always, to feel a little bit more alone.

Is there an answer to this? I don’t know. Today’s poem becomes almost heartbreaking with two words caught in a line that extends beyond them:

You try.

I love that Xi allows these words to sit in a line with other words. In some ways, such a choice enacts the kind of life we live — the way in which our trying exists among so much else. And yet, we still try, knowing, too — as Xi writes:

Things are heavy because
we try to carry them.

The poem has come full circle. It has reminded us of all that pushes against our trying, and it has reminded us, too, of all that allows us to try — our love, our mothers, our family, our devotion, our simple and yet complex longing for something better.

Reading this poem left me with a weight somewhere between my stomach and my throat. It filled me with despair and hope at the same time. And though I am no longer searching for reasons why I read poems — at this point I just read them, forever bewildered — I sometimes try to articulate why it is I am drawn to them. This poem is a perfect example. It offers a language for feeling within the constraints of a society that causes such feeling. It’s like reading directions for life in a world you were dropped into without assistance. I do not know what it would be like to live in a society that allows for feeling to be permissible and rampant, a society based on feeling and the multiplicity of complex truth alone. Rather, I — and probably you — live in a society that is based on imaginary borders, a society that commodifies and weaponizes feeling rather than honors it. A society where trying is the norm, and suffering is the result.

A trying that is based in feeling and attention is perhaps one antidote to a society that seems forever hellbent to minimize feeling as something unworthy of attention. I’d argue, as this poem does beautifully, that feeling is worth our attention. That feeling is what allows us to live, is what allows us to create our own heaven on this earth — this earth, so often ugly and so often sad, but so full of beauty that, when we see it, we cannot look away. Yes, things are heavy because we carry them. Yes, some things are good enough. Yes, some things are not enough. But there must be a world, too, where what we carry is forever light, and where what is good enough is beautiful, and where those words — not enough — are no longer what we have to say.