Jane Kenyon's "What It's Like"

Thoughts on the details.

What It’s Like

And once, for no special reason,
I rode in the back of the pickup, 
leaning against the cab.
Everything familiar was receding
fast—the mountain,
the motel, Huldah Currier's
house, and the two stately maples....

Mr. Perkins was having a barn sale,
and cars from New Jersey and Ohio
were parked along the sandy shoulder
of Route 4. Whatever I saw
I had already passed....
(This must be what life is like
at the moment of leaving it.)


from Collected Poems (Graywolf, 2005)

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Perhaps it is because the leaves are starting to fall that I’m thinking of Jane Kenyon, whose work feels autumnal to me — if not only for one theme of today’s poem, that idea of being so near death even as you are alive. But there’s something about fall — the brilliant blue of a clear sky, the precise and clear light that defines, with such a high degree of contrast, the shadows such light creates — that makes it feel like a season of attention. And maybe that fact of attention is because of what dies seasonally. Maybe that is part of it. But I think I feel more in October and November than I do in any other month. I feel the burn of coffee on the back of my throat. I feel the little piercing fingerprint of a breeze through my clothes, especially at dawn, leaving my apartment in the dark. I feel my own ability to feel, too, my great privilege to feel, whether to taste or to smell or to see. I understand, in these months, why people say I feel alive. And I understand more deeply, why that matters, and why it’s beautiful.

And so I think of Jane Kenyon in these months. And today I am thinking of the poem above. I also am thinking of a lot of her work. And maybe, too, that is because I still have Jay Hopler on my mind, the poet of last week, who died young, as Jane Kenyon did — her death occurring at the age of 47. And maybe, too, I am thinking of such intimate tragedies as a way to process global ones, the way that it is the ordinary that is first forgotten, the mundane, the person in the midst of it all, tying a shoe, looking out a window, sitting, as Kenyon’s speaker is, in the back of a car, looking outward. I am thinking of what such a perspective allows me to be critical of, to empathize with, to understand. I am thinking of Jane Kenyon at her desk, diagnosed too young — as anyone is — writing about this life she is living as she is leaving it.

I’m thinking of one of Kenyon’s poems, “Three Songs at the End of Summer,” and how, at the end, her speaker considers herself as a child, waiting for the bus to take her to school. Kenyon writes:

I had the new books—words, numbers,   
and operations with numbers I did not   
comprehend—and crayons, unspoiled   
by use, in a blue canvas satchel
with red leather straps.

Spruce, inadequate, and alien   
I stood at the side of the road.   
It was the only life I had.

Funny, huh? The last line of this poem and the last two lines of today’s poem. Funny how they sing to one another. And how surprising and lovely and wild, this definition of a self:

Spruce, inadequate, and alien   

It took me more than one reading of this poem to convince myself that Kenyon wasn’t writing about a tree here, that she was using spruce as an adjective, describing the tidy nature of a child’s appearance, a tidiness that pairs with inadequacy, a sense of not belonging. It’s such a surprising line. And so apt. And it reminds me of why I love Jane Kenyon’s work.

And I love, too, the great privilege of being able to write about poets and poetry, because it is the kind of thing — this act of reading and writing that I am doing now — that allows me to see, in Kenyon’s work, a poet who once wrote — about this very life — “It was the only life I had,” and then later wrote — about leaving this very life — “This must be what life is like / at the moment of leaving it.” What a gift, to be able to read the wide breadth of such a thing, and whatever sits in between, and to know such perspective came from the same person, the same someone grappling with the strange and joyful sometimes-tragedy of this life.

And what happens in between? Think of Kenyon’s poem, “Happiness,” which begins:

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?

(Here, an echo of Carver: Happiness. It comes on / unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really, / any early morning talk about it.)

So yes, in between and among and within that child, tidy and uncomfortable, waiting for school and feeling inadequate, and that adult — facing the grief of diagnosis — sitting in the back of a pickup truck, is the same person, forgiving the arrival of happiness. Which means holding happiness. Which means embracing it. Which means loving it.

(I think again of that ordinary person, so often forgotten, whose life is a thing of allowance so often limited or neglected by the world, and how they, too, can forgive happiness in the midst of sorrow. What a beautiful thing, to be a person. Don’t let me forget it.)

But now, about today’s poem. I am thinking of two things. I am thinking of the specificity of what is noticed. And I am thinking of the two ellipses, these dotted things that go on even though the poem (and the life) ends. Actually, I think I am thinking of another thing, too. I am thinking of the parenthetical at the end of the poem. How it feels like the mind (or heart) speaking to us out of the poem, how it arrives like a different voice, a real voice, coming from within the poem to speak to us. I was stunned the first time I read the ending:

Whatever I saw
I had already passed....
(This must be what life is like
at the moment of leaving it.)

I was stunned, not just by the surprise of truth, how a poem can offer you a new way of looking at a life, but also by the boldness of the voice. Say less, some people will tell you. Say more, others will tell you. But here, Kenyon seems to just speak. She tells us the truth of what is happening so that we can hold that truth with her. And I do, each time I read this poem. I put myself in the back of the truck, facing the road that carries me away from all I see. I see the yellow line moving out and away from under me, the scattered plants and foliage along the road, the leaves kicked up by the rolling tires, catching the breeze the car makes, and flying away. I see all of that. I see it all moving away from me as I am moving forward. I am on a train, back to the front, and watching the city become miniature. I am flying, as Bill Knott says, into myself, and away from the world. And I can feel it. This must be what life is like at the moment of leaving it.

It is a wildly beautiful gift, to hold a truth like that and feel around for its possibility. To put it in your pocket and carry it with you. To see the world in that way, like a litany of images that can be spoken about with poems. To have the poems handy, little snippets and fistfuls of truth you can put in conversation with the world as you are moving through it. And so I am grateful for that parenthetical. I am grateful for Kenyon putting us into her own realization.

And I’m grateful for all that comes before. Kenyon is a poet of such remarkable clarity and specificity. Here, in today’s poem, are some details:

Huldah Currier's
house, and the two stately maples....

Mr. Perkins was having a barn sale

the sandy shoulder
of Route 4

Or, too, think of these lines from Kenyon’s famous poem, “Having It Out with Melancholy”:

High on Nardil and June light 
I wake at four, 
waiting greedily for the first
note of the wood thrush. Easeful air 
presses through the screen 
with the wild, complex song 
of the bird, and I am overcome

by ordinary contentment. 

Here, the specificity of the antidepressant, the June light, the wood thrush.

What is detail other than a gift? A gift the writer’s attention offers the world, and a gift that we are in turn offered once the writer turns their attention to the page. When I read detail, I read care. I read care first and foremost.

I was talking about this to my students the other week, as we read the opening pages of Toni Morrison’s Sula. In those pages, Morrison describes the setting of the novel as it is being destroyed in present time:

They are going to raze the Time and a Half Pool Hall, where feet in long tan shoes once pointed down from chair rungs. A steel ball will knock to dust Irene’s Palace of Cosmetology, where women used to lean their heads back on sink trays and doze while Irene lathered Nu Nile into their hair. Men in khaki work clothes will pry loose the slats of Reba’s Grill, where the owner cooked in her hat because she couldn’t remember the ingredients without it.

In this passage, what is about to be destroyed is given space to exist. Is given recognition of humanity — the reality of humanity, the oil of it, the handiwork of it, the touch of it. Hands and clothes and dirt and naps and gossip. All of it recognized. What power wants to destroy, what it wants to say no to, Morrison says yes to.

This is care, isn’t it? It has to be. It is the care of a person understanding that the subject of their writing is not really subject to them, but has its own agency. Is a smell. Is a waft of something in the breeze. Is a person moving through it all, choosing and living and loving. When I read Morrison’s writing, I feel such compassionate love directed toward whatever she describes. I feel her loving the world, terrible thing it can often be, but beautiful, and full of beautiful people.

I think of that while reading Kenyon’s poem today, because the final parenthetical — about what what life must be like at the moment of leaving it — is not just about the physics of it all, the sensation of moving away from everything you just were among, of being carried backward while moving forward. It is also about awareness, right? It is about noticing. The stately maples, the person’s house. The road you know so well. It is about holding it all — impossible task, though we try — as you move away from it all. It is about looking, and looking with love. When I go, I want to go that way — looking, holding on with my eyes, even though I know it might be for nothing, though I also know that nothing is for nothing — something continues, something carries on. I want to look at what will carry on.

This is why attention matters, why it has to matter. When we refuse attention, we also refuse care. Maybe my favorite poem of Kenyon’s is a short one titled “Depression,” which reads, in almost-full:

The universe is dust. Who can bear it?
Christ comes. The women feed him, bathe his feet
with tears, bring spices, find the empty tomb,
burst out to tell the men, are not believed …

Notice the specificity of care, which is also the specificity of attention, the feeding, the bathing, the spices. And how that care promptly goes unacknowledged because it is not offered attention. A vicious cycle, with women, as Kenyon recognizes, so often neglected or ignored throughout that cycle.

You look because you care. You look again because you keep caring. You keep looking because you know that care is part of what life is, that a life without care is so much less than what life could possibly be. I read poems to be reminded of such care. In a world that often streamlines the most generalized way, that often offers news without attention, which is news without care, such details remind me of the possibility that can still exist. The way that it is possible to look, and keep looking, to look closer — to be reminded of who is neglected in any story, the life that keeps on living, the person in the window, looking, all that is ordinary that stoops to tie its shoe amidst it all.

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