from Music for Landing Planes By (Milkweed Editions, 2007)
This is the first poem in Éireann Lorsung’s gorgeous book, Music for Landing Planes By. I love any poem that mentions holiness. This is less because I believe in any semblance of the holy, as messaged to me by a childhood spent believing in one deeply Catholic view of the holy. Rather, it’s because I love being turned toward new (to me) definitions of the holy. New imaginings.
Larry Levis’ poem, “There Are Two Worlds,” begins with the line:
Perhaps the ankle of a horse is holy.
Kwame Opoku-Duku’s poem, “i: ghosts,” contains the lines:
My definition of the holy
changes with each loss.
In the poem, “Holy,” Abdul Ali plays on the sonic quality and dual meaning of the acoustic, sounded-out word that is holy, and writes:
Each name is
a body craving
wholeness.
I hate to do the etymology thing, so common among us writers, but that word — holy — is a particularly beautiful word, as it owes its origins to the wholeness that it sounds out. Quite literally, holy does mean wholly. It signals toward something so part-of-this-world that it must be taken entirely, without fragmentation. To redefine holy away from the typically religious and into a new identity — one that includes more and more — is a generous thing. It is to believe in a world that must be witnessed as it is, rather than as someone says it should be.
And so I love this poem by Éireann Lorsung not just because of what it attempts to include, but because of how it attempts to un-center the human at the center of this poem. What is holy at the start of this poem is not the human, but “a letter,” is not the human, but “a story,” is not the human, but is what the human “can’t conceive.” What to do with unknowing? What to do with awe? I think previous humans believed — in the moment of awe — that the cause of such awe, so incomprehensible, had to be comprehensible, and, by virtue of that, had to be human. But here, in today’s poem, we see a resistance to that. The human on the outside of what is holy, of what cannot be comprehended.
In the aforementioned Levis poem, he writes:
perhaps all that he left out is holy
I think of that line when I read the remarkable turn in Éireann Lorsung’s poem today, the one that goes:
What belongs
to me? I leave the world
all the time.
I adore this moment. The first time I read this poem, these lines stunned me, in the way lines do when they tap into something so specifically attuned to the self of the person reading the poem that they must, perhaps, be true for so many selves. For a long time, I grew up Catholic, deeply devout, attending mass each morning as a sixteen year old of my own volition. As such, I believed in the holy as something awe-striking but also attainable. I thought, sometimes, that I must be holy, and I ascribed to holiness certain values that centered my humanness. I thought, in other words, that people could achieve holiness by being better versions of themselves, and I thought that better meant that we, as humans, had to value our improvement toward some ascribed goal.
In other words, I never asked what belongs to me? Rather, I assumed everything did. So, when Lorsung writes the question “What belongs / to me,” it performs something radical. It un-centers the speaker of the poem. Because the answer, we know, is nothing. Or, at least, very little. And yet — it seems the poem is saying — the answer is such a thing not because humans are forever trying to belong to the world. Rather, it’s the opposite. It’s because, as Lorsung writes, we “leave the world / all the time.” How can we be whole, the poem asks, if we can turn off our awareness of all that exists wholly, with or without us?
This is why I also love that Levis line I mentioned. Sometimes I am so focused on what I have to include — which so often centers myself, my awareness, and my presence in the world — that I don’t realize that my attempt at inclusion is actually a performance of fragmentation. It’s a tricky thing, to be alive. Sometimes, as Lorsung writes, we throw away our love letters “without noticing.” Sometimes what we invest ourselves so wholly become bits of broken things, little scatterings, wholly unknown to us. Sometimes we don’t understand. Sometimes we are shattered. So often, I believe.
In many ways, today’s poem is part of a long line of poems that attempts to say, simply, hey, it’s not all about us. It’s no longer a warning, is it? Whether the us applies to your privilege, your consumption, your humanness in a world that is warming and dying because of your (our) humanness — sometimes it can feel like a cliche. And yet, as Martin Hägglund writes in his book, This Life:
Being a person is not a goal that can be achieved but a purpose that must be sustained.
These poems, these words, that remind us of our wholeness as fragments and our lack of wholeness as people who make it an end goal to pursue wholeness — they do the slow, careful work of forcing us to ask well, what now? Lorsung writes I will live inside whatever flies. When Kwame writes that his definition of the holy / changes with each loss, it should point us toward a world that does not continually need loss to remind each person of what was lost, and what should not have been lost. We keep leaving so much out, and what we leave out, as Levis writes, is so often its own whole, fully formed thing. To lose so much and so often is to lose not bits of the world, but whole, very real lives and wants and desires and actions and loves. We are not sustainable right now. How can we make ourselves so?