Jane Wong's "Daily Calamity"

Thoughts on carrying each other amidst it all.

Daily Calamity

Would you like some sugar in your tea?
Can I lift this tea bag out for you, lay it
in the sink, little satchel of my heart,
sopped? Your hands, can I wash them?
Stir the soup along your knuckles
like clean, white clouds? Outside,
can you see the sediment seesawing?
True or true: all the bees are leaving,
wings loosening a lullaby? Will there be
honey enough to laugh in? Our fault
lines, wrinkled in what wonder?
The muscles of flowers, missing what
petaled tendon? How can we carry each
other in the sweet yearsafter? In a sky
cradled in sour sun, in smoke sludge?
How to carry, how to uncovet this
calamity in our blood?


first published in Orion (link here)

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I spent a day not long ago reading what felt like every poem published in the last few years by Orion Magazine, which has become, in this age of near-ceaseless information, a grounding presence for me, a place that I know I can turn to for writing that moves or astounds or does something to me, and even for me.

Anyways, it was during that day that I came across this poem by Jane Wong, which went immediately into this giant note pad I have of poems that I return to and think about and sometimes even wonder my way toward an essay in consideration of. (Did that sentence I just wrote work? It sounds awkward, ending a sentence with the phrase in consideration of, but it also sounds jarringly lovely. Let me know). Wong also has a memoir that just came out — Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City — that I am excited to read, not just for the title (which I adore, Springsteen fan that I am), but also for these sentences that appeared in an essay I imagine excerpted from the memoir:

These days, if I close my eyes, I can hear Bruce Springsteen playing in Tony’s Baltimore Grill, a surviving Atlantic City pizzeria, or maybe in our old Chinese American take-out amid the hiss of the wok firing: Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact. Maybe everything that dies someday comes back. The hope for resurrection, for return. Sometimes I imagine my father in the future: in his nineties, strolling along an empty boardwalk with me. We walk, and he points out how the waves sound just like they do in the South China Sea. What kind of luck do I need for this to come true?

That noticing — the “waves [that] sound just like they do in the South China Sea,” the “hiss of the wok firing” — coupled with the question at the end — “What kind of luck do I need for this to come true?” — feels in such companionship with today’s poem, a poem that seems to want and linger and stretch curiously toward a more compassionate world. I think I felt drawn to write about today’s poem because of its litany of questions, which begin, as I just mentioned, from a wellspring of compassion:

Would you like some sugar in your tea?
Can I lift this tea bag out for you, lay it
in the sink, little satchel of my heart,
sopped? Your hands, can I wash them?
Stir the soup along your knuckles
like clean, white clouds?

All of these questions are questions of offering. Sugar in the tea. A tea bag removed. Hands washed in soup rather than soap — a little moment of poetic could-be-a-typo slant-ness that hints at what is possible when you play even slightly with a word, how soap hints toward cleanliness and soup hints toward comfort, and how both meanings come to mind when you expect the word soap but get soup instead. It’s a lovely little delight, a way of holding multiple words within a word, even when just one word appears. I think often of one of my favorite examples of this, from Jamaal May’s “Macrophobia (Fear of Waiting)” — a poem I’ve written about and mentioned in this newsletter before:

This is stupid, but I was afraid to tell you

I kept fiddling with my phone through dinner
because I was fascinated
that every time I tried to type love,
I miss the o and hit i instead.
I live you is a mistake I make so often,
I wonder if it’s not
what I’ve been really meaning to say.

What I love, too, about this poem is the way in which it almost-sneakily begins to merge the natural world with the human world until the two are nearly inseparable. I notice it in these two questions:

Our fault
lines, wrinkled in what wonder?
The muscles of flowers, missing what
petaled tendon?

Here, the wrinkles that line a human face are compared to fault lines, to the geologic fragments and fractures that give the world we live in on a sense of shape and forever-uncertainty. And here, too, the flowers are made up of muscles and tendons. In these moments, Wong subtly merges human life into natural life — not, I believe, so that they become the same thing, but so that they are seen as inseparable from one another, part of an ongoing relationship, where each effects the other.

I think this merging is perhaps why I am turning to this poem today. As I begin to write this, it is mid-week. It is not long — only a few hours — after the sky looked so much like these lines from today’s poem:

In a sky
cradled in sour sun, in smoke sludge?

The first picture in this group of photos was taken from inside a classroom in my high school, located in New York City, just after we cancelled after school activities and asked students to leave for the day. The second two photos were taken from the platform of a 6 train stop in the Bronx, as I waited for the subway home just a few minutes after the first photo was taken. As much of the country knows — since anything that happens in New York City almost immediately becomes national news — New York City was overcome this week by smoky, polluted air, emanating from wildfires in Canada.

I was teaching on Wednesday, and wondering — as I was teaching — if it was just me, or if everyone noticed how the light emanating through the classroom window’s hazy glass was slowly reddening, moving from a more familiar dull yellow to a strange and eerie orange. In an all-staff email, we were told to turn the air purifiers in our classrooms — which we have had since the return to in-person learning during the pandemic — all the way up. Walking to the subway after leaving work, I couldn’t help but think of that strange, can’t-be-real feeling of just over three years ago, when schools were closing in those early pandemic days and reassurances were made without real certainty, when I prepped a few online lessons for my students and stocked up on Miller High Life and books, not knowing when whatever might happen would happen. It was always the when, somewhere not quite now, always a little further off. It took me a long time to realize that we are constantly amidst it all.

I think that we live in the midst of various “Daily Calamities,” as today’s title reminds us. I’m struck by these lines at the heart of Wong’s poem:

True or true: all the bees are leaving,
wings loosening a lullaby? Will there be
honey enough to laugh in? Our fault
lines, wrinkled in what wonder?

I’m struck, especially, by the phrase True or true. I’m struck by the certainty with which the poem gestures toward all that is leaving, and all that has left. That certainty is refreshing. It’s refreshing, especially, because it is paired not with nihilism, but with wonderment. With honey enough to laugh in. With fault / lines…wrinkled in what wonder. There is the certainty of loss, but also a gesture toward the imaginative — a belief that the imaginative might still be possible, that there might still be possibilities, even in a world of near-ceaseless calamities. I return to poetry often because of this gesture, one that is not naive but rather honest, one that expands and opens and is inherently curious about the wide breadth of what we are capable of holding, like loss and wonder at the same time.

Last week, I mentioned a passage I recently read in Jenny Odell’s Saving Time, where she talks about the dangers of “declinism,” a belief in the unstoppable decline of human life and society as we know it, brought upon by the ravages of capitalism that have led to such things as climate change, and a refusal — borne from such belief — to acknowledge hope or other possibilities of imagining existence. There’s a paragraph in Saving Time that I highlighted a million times over. It reads:

It is important to grieve, especially to grieve in common. I’ll take wailing sorrow over denial or unrealistic optimism any day. But dangling there, unattached to anything else, the sentiment felt similar to my nightmare and what it had come to represent—a non-future where people’s beliefs and behaviors are as determined as the earth seems inert and helpless. Without suppressing grief, there has to be a different way of thinking about time than the one in which we’re simply strapped in all the way to the end. One way, which I’ve tried to outline so far, is to recover the contingencies of the past and the present. Another is to shift your temporal center of gravity by looking to those whose worlds have already ended many times over.

I’m thinking of this moment in Odell’s book because, not long after I took those orange-saturated photos, I ventured onto social media to find a whole world of similarly-tinged photos. Not long after this, I was home in my apartment, reading and watching news clips with my wife, listening to person after person relate the issue — rightly — of climate change to this orange, smoggy haze. All the while, I knew intuitively that, somewhere else, on some other news channel, people were being paid to make the absolute opposite connection, and that other people in homes or in cars or wherever were listening to that. Meanwhile, on social media, people posted more pictures of an orange-tinted New York City and people said something about the apocalypse and people critiqued those people for being apocalyptic and people critiqued people for caring about things only when they happen in New York City, for not recognizing that such polluted smog is a daily occurrence in other countries. And people reveled in the haze, and grew anxious in the haze, and grew mean in the haze, and posted in the haze.

All of this made me sad. It made me sad because I was breathing polluted air. It made me sad because a horrible fire was burning somewhere else. It made me sad because I understood — by the privilege of not having to frequently live in such a moment — that others live in such a fraught and fragile moment every single day, one more fraught and fragile than the moment I live in. But it made me especially sad because, bathed in orange and breathing smoke, I felt so immediately part of an interconnected world — one in which each of us share, as Jenny Odell writes, “common roots” to our moments of anxiety and vulnerability — and yet so indescribably alone in my experience of it. I felt atomized and small, witnessing other people share their own atomized experiences, ingesting a near-constant language of fear and anxiety and meanness, wishing we could move toward a more collective understanding of the way in which the scope of a day like this — when a fire burning somewhere else pollutes a city somewhere else — shows how much we must reach toward one another, and not away.

This sadness, vast and complex and wide-ranging and forever interconnected — is a part of the daily calamity of this life. It must be. It has come to be. It is sad that it is. And yet I wonder how often we recognize it. I wonder how often we recognize that even our awareness of our sadness — especially in our hyper-aware world — is part of our daily calamity. I wonder how often we wrestle with this awareness — and its sadness — every day. I know I often turn away from it. I wait for the next bright, blue day, and I try to forget about the smoky haze of the past, knowing — surely, yes — that the haze has only moved, not dissipated, that what I once experienced in fear and strangeness is someone else’s experience of fear and strangeness right now, and now, and now.

This is why I am drawn to this question in Wong’s poem:

How can we carry each
other in the sweet yearsafter?

So often, in the face of collective trauma — a fire burning through miles, a city polluted by smoke — it feels as if the recognition and wonder about how we might “carry each / other” is replaced by a more rampant individualism, or an even more rampant nihilism. I am scared of how familiar it has become to suffer what we have come to call the apocalypse in the closed-off boxes of our rented apartments, windows shut, browsing targeted advertisements, denying “those whose worlds have already ended many times over” and the various imagined possibilities that grew out of such things. We center ourselves. I know I do. So often, it feels as if the assumption is that we cannot carry each other. Or that we will not. Or that the years we might carry one another into might not be sweet, might not be pleasant at all. Such assumptions worry and sadden me.

I’m trying to ground myself in a more deliberate language of expansion, of growth not centered in capital, like how — in another poem, “Overgrown” — Jane Wong writes:

the garden in which we let grow that which grows taller than us
the garden in which I carry the soft intestines of our survival
the garden in which the spiders telephone again, spinning stay, stay

Here, allowance: let grow. Here, gentleness: the soft intestines of our survival. Here, too, help: the garden in which I carry. It’s hard to turn from this language and encounter the world, in all of its harshness. A world that turns moments of suffering into moments where our individualism is monetized and our collective worth is neglected, where it is less about carrying each other than it is about carrying one’s single self. Turning back toward the garden of Wong’s poem is a kind of daily work: turning and encountering, turning and encountering even more, trying to remain expansive and generous amidst it all.

Just the other day, I was struck, while reading Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind — just an absolute fucking gem of a book — of a single sentence written among a long, gorgeous story about a single mackerel’s life from birth to death:

It was indeed a strange world in which to set adrift anything so fragile as a mackerel egg.

It is a strange world, isn’t it? But look what becomes luminous when we pay attention to our fragility rather than turn away from it, when we let grow that which grows taller than us, when we wonder how we might carry each other in years that are sweet even as they are tenuous, fraught, and scary. It is a strange world, yes. It is even stranger when we are lonely in our experience of it.

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Some Notes:

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