I.S. Jones's "Between Grace and Mercy"

Thoughts on mercy and humanity.

Between Grace and Mercy

we learned mercy so young: a beetle with its hind legs crushed.

a dog impaled by a rusty fence. a rabbit thinking it was clever enough

to reach the other side of the road. a veil of light drapes each moment—

red, tangerine, azure, lavender, each waiting to reimagine the sky.

the beetle frantic to undo what sudden brute force divided it from legs

still moving towards a song. with the beetle, it was simple.

Cain crushed the small creature with the heel of her foot, splayed open like a wish.

people think suffering is meant to be purposeful, otherwise why name it.

maybe i am nostalgic for what wounds best. the rabbit & tire & the asphalt.

the asphalt gowned in viscera makes a new animal. a dog leaps too low &

yelps all evening for Baba into the orange-pink sky.

all day blood weeps into the rust. rust twisted deep into the animal.

i take the dog’s face in my hands. touch is the body’s first language.

blood is the body’s first covenant. kill it, says a sister.

you kill animals all the time. i kiss the animal’s eyes closed.

from Poetry Online (2021)

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It’s been a long time since I first read this poem, and I still cannot get that first line out of my head:

we learned mercy so young: a beetle with its hind legs crushed.

We learned mercy so young. What a potent, meaningful, even painful truth — particularly when I think of the way that so much of life can feel like it is lived in absence of mercy. And what I love about today’s poem by I.S. Jones (whose chapbook recently was published by Newfound) is the way she dwells in the hard truth of that statement. The next few lines function as a list to prove the power of the statement that begins the poem:

a beetle with its hind legs crushed.

a dog impaled by a rusty fence. a rabbit thinking it was clever enough

to reach the other side of the road. a veil of light drapes each moment—

red, tangerine, azure, lavender, each waiting to reimagine the sky.

the beetle frantic to undo what sudden brute force divided it from legs

still moving towards a song.

I’ve been reading and delighting in Brian Dillon’s Essayism, a book of little vignettes that examine, question, criticize, and empathize with the essay as a form. In it, he writes about lists — why essayists utilize them, what their effect is, and so on. And, in doing so, he writes about William Gass, the novelist and essayist, author of On Being Blue (and many more books). But it’s not that chapter that makes me think of this aforementioned list by Jones. It’s later, when Dillon brings up Gass again, and writes that Gass:

wants us to consider the ways words and bodies connect and come apart.

I think that desire is at the heart of today’s poem by I.S. Jones. So many of those opening lines have to do with connection. A dog impaled by a rusty fence. The rabbit, thinking it was clever enough to reach the other side of the road, which means it didn’t, which means its body connected — sadly, tragically — with the force of a vehicle. A veil of light. And what does light do? It illuminates. And what is illumination but also a kind of connection — between light and what it touches, between the eye and what it sees, between what is seen and what is felt?

These moments of connection at the onset of today’s poem are moments that remind us of the way in which so much of connection is a kind of violence. So much of the world is violent. Things strike. Things are struck. Things hurt. Things are hurt. Connection can be the “sudden brute force,” as Jones writes, that moves us away from “a song.” Such connection-obsessive insight is at the heart of so much of Jones’s work — which, I’ve found, interrogates our constant coming together and tearing away, our love and our loss twirled up in the same matter. I think of these lines from her poem “Bloodmercy”:

I wanted to deliver you
from cruelty & gave you my own instead. Beneath your long skirt,
a tapestry of rubies. I rinse your legs with the backyard spicket.
My life made sense when we were of one mind & two bodies.
Now, you keep secrets from me. Your diary says as much.
The seasons turn and we stop knowing each other.

Maybe then — Jones's poems make me wonder — the very idea of mercy has to do with how we interpret connection. How we react to it. What we do as a result of it. And maybe mercy, then, can sometimes seem impossible — the way, in today’s poem, the only way to undo the “sudden brute force” that crushed the beetle is to crush the beetle itself. There, that repetition. Crushed and crushed. But maybe, too, mercy is difficult because it can’t always be this way. Maybe mercy is difficult because it must always consider the moment. What is needed. Who is speaking. What they are saying. How we listen, and why, and what we do as a result of such listening. Maybe mercy, yes, is in the listening.

And when I think of listening, I think of sound, and I think of the final lines of Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “All Wild Animals Were Once Called Deer”:

O sound rising

Like an echo from the water. Grief sound. Sound of the horn.

The same ghostly sound the deer makes when it runs

Through the woods at night, white lightning through the trees,

Through the coldest moments, when it feels as if the earth

Will never again grow warm, lover running toward lover,

The branches tearing back, the mouth and eyes wide,

The heart flying into the arms of the one that will kill her.

I think of the way Kelly moves fluidly through that poem, and, in doing so, illuminates the way in which we are each capable of violence. I think of that final line — The heart flying into the arms of the one that will kill her — and what that says about mercy. How it says mercy might not exist at all if we are unwilling to hear the sounds of grief, those ghostly sounds that Kelly reimagines — the ones that tell us that what is living is in pain, and might need comfort. To listen, then, must be the first step of mercy. To really hear hurt as a part of the self, not as something extraneous or unworthy.

And I think, too, of the way I.S. Jones — by virtue of the line length of today’s poem — asks us to listen. These are long lines, each one vibrant with images and sometimes struck through with pauses, these moments of added complexity. This one, in particular, stands out:

all day blood weeps into the rust. rust twisted deep into the animal.

What a visceral line, one that turns on itself and — in doing so — turns inward into the reader’s gut. It is a long line, but one that says far more than its length implies. There is an image here, yes — a callback to the dog “impaled by a rusty fence.” But there is also a portrait of the ongoingness of pain. The blood weeping “into the rust.” This moment reminds us that the dog is still living. But then there is the second moment from the same line — a kind of reversal, the rust “twisted deep into the animal.” This moment takes as its subject the rust, which is no longer the object. It reminds us not only that the dog is living, but that it is also on its way to becoming rust — inanimate, gone, no longer alive. All of this is contained within one line that balances on the knife’s edge of mortality — a line that reminds each of us how temporal we are, how close are, at any moment, to no longer being. A line that operates like a life does.

These lines are acts of sustained attention, and, if attention is a kind of listening, and listening is a kind of mercy, then these lines must also be acts of mercy. They are acts of mercy not just for their length, but for what they ask us to reimagine and remember. Jones writes:

people think suffering is meant to be purposeful, otherwise why name it.

Later, she writes:

touch is the body’s first language.

The first line above is a call to reimagine, to wonder again about the purpose of suffering, if it is meant to have a purpose, and if the very idea of suffering having a purpose is a useful idea at all. What violence has such an idea beckoned? What relentless acts of pain? The second line is a call to remember, to think again about our relationship to intimacy. If touch is our body’s first language, then perhaps it is one of our most important forms of communication. Perhaps our most important. In what ways has touch been commodified by violence? In what ways have we lost our ability for compassion because of the way we have lost our ability to touch?

I find myself thinking about such things while reading I.S. Jones’ work because of the way today’s poem feels so full — full of mercy, yes, but full of the complexity of life. Full of our loss, our longing, our inadequacies, our misgivings, our attempts, our failures, our loves.

And perhaps I’m thinking of such things because I only just finished Barry Lopez’s posthumous collection, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World. The end of his essay, “On Location,” reads:

To survive what’s headed our way — global climate disruption, a new pandemic, additional authoritarian governments — and to endure, we will have to stretch our imaginations. We will need to trust each other, because today, it’s as if every safe place has melted into the sameness of water. We are searching for the boats we forgot to build.

It’s a beautiful, tender, potent warning that comes — quite literally — from the grave, as Lopez passed away in December of 2020. In his collection, he writes viscerally and honestly about nature, climate destruction, spirituality, and the abuse he suffered as a child. Toward the end of an essay about that latter subject, he moves toward compassion, an outstretched arm. He writes that “we need others to bring us back into the comity of human life.” I paused at that moment. I was reading the book on the subway. I stared outward, toward nothing, as the lights in the tunnel underground darted past the field of my vision. I didn’t know how to believe in someone being capable of Lopez’s mercy. I was astounded by his grace.

The other day, still holding Lopez’s work in my heart, I scrolled through Finn Rock, Oregon on Google Maps’s Street View. Lopez lived there for decades in a house he wrote lovingly about, until it was burned in a fire that swept through Oregon only months before he died. I wanted to see some small element of his world, even if it was just a screenshot of a highway that ran alongside it.

Here is a screenshot — from 2019 — of the highway running through Finn Rock.

And here is a screenshot — from 2021 — from exactly the same location.

In the space between both photos is fire. Flipping between the two archived photos on my laptop, I felt ravaged — ravaged by the documented desolation of our world, by the loss of such verdant, natural expanse that had come, almost certainly, as a result of human action. I felt ravaged by the opposite of mercy, which is cruelty. I felt ravaged by pain, by the bitter reality that faces all of us in this moment, and the specific and terrible thought of someone like Barry Lopez — a tender and generous writer who begged us just to feel the pulse of the earth, to live with something approaching curiosity and the gentleness that comes with such a desire — seeing the consequences of such destruction reach his home only months before he died.

Some dictionaries list “inhumanity” as an opposite of mercy, but perhaps that should be revised. Perhaps humanity is a more apt opposite of mercy, since, as it stands, we enact more violence than we might like to admit, even if that “we” is a “we” that pertains mostly to those with the power to enact such violence relentlessly, again and again and again. I think of the final line from today’s poem — another example of Jones’s ability to hold so much in a single extended moment:

you kill animals all the time. i kiss the animal’s eyes closed.

Kill and kiss. They mirror one another here. They stand as opposite poles, it seems, of human capability. And the real testament to Jones’ work as a poet is that both of these sentences offer different proposed acts of mercy. But the way Jones chooses to end the poem — with the verb kiss instead of kill — made me feel the same way I felt when I encountered Barry Lopez’s desire for others to help him — and us — through the burdens of human life. I felt a deep wellspring of compassion. A gentleness. Something approaching mercy.

I felt tenderness, too. And I long for such tenderness now. It’s not some ethereal, unrealized thing — tenderness. No. It can be real. I think of that first statement in today’s poem: we learned mercy so young. We do learn mercy at a young age. In fact, maybe we grow up with it. I think we grow up with grace, too. In the wake of these past few days and weeks, my girlfriend keeps watching and rewatching this video her friend sent her of her young child holding a bar of soap my girlfriend sent as a gift. It’s a little handmade thing, the soap surrounding a tiny toy dinosaur. The child can’t get enough of it. He loves it. He keeps saying thank you. It’s adorable. And earlier today, I guest-taught a summer high school class where the students said more wildly generous and kind things about my writing than maybe any adult has. I’m playing the memory back in my mind and holding it close.

Maybe these things might not seem like acts of mercy, but I believe they are. I believe any act of gentleness in today’s world — any wide-eyed wonder, any childlike laugh — is an act of mercy. To encounter joy or kindness or love that does not ask for anything in return, that does not perform or demand — that’s an act of mercy. A child laughing and loving a simple bar of soap. That’s wonder, right? And as that child ages, I worry that we come to call that wonder different things, that we regulate it or monitor it or check it so that we no longer experience something that is simply what it is. To be who we are — to love and be loved from such a place — that’s mercy, too.

I guess what I mean is that we know what mercy is. And kindness. And grace. We must. And one sorrow of living in this world is the knowledge that maybe, aging into our lives, we unlearn such things. We adopt the violence and ruthlessness of others and then carry it as our own. We learn to kill the animal instead of kissing its eyes closed. Why is that? I don’t know. I don’t like that it feels true, that the work of mercy and grace has become harder than it should be. Because it doesn’t have to be. It can be the voice before the dog leaps toward the fence, before the fire touches the tree. What do you want? What do you need? I forgive you. I love you. I’m here.