Jason Shinder's "At Sunset"

Thoughts on life, death, and attention.

At Sunset

Your death must be loved this much.

You have to know the grief—now.
Standing by the water’s edge,

looking down at the wave

touching you. You have to lie,
stiff, arms folded, on a heap of earth

and see how far the darkness

will take you. I mean it, this, now—
before the ghost the cold leaves

in your breath, rises;

before the toes are put together
inside the shoes. There it is—the goddamn

orange-going-into-rose descending

circle of beauty and time.
You have nothing to be sad about.

from Stupid Hope (Graywolf Press, 2009)

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The book this poem is from — Stupid Hope — is one of those books I’d carry with me everywhere if I could. It feels utterly singular and remarkable. Full of poems written after Shinder’s diagnosis with lymphoma and leukemia, and published posthumously (after being compiled and edited by his dear friends and fellow poets), the book itself is a testament to the first line of today’s poem:

Your death must be loved this much.

It’s heartbreaking and filled with grace. It’s luminous even in its despair. It’s full of contradiction. It is like life — Shinder’s final book is — even as it is about death.

The book’s title falls at the end of Shinder’s poem “Living,” which bears witness to his mother’s final illness. The final lines of that poem read:

Thank you, she said. As for me,
I didn’t care how her voice suddenly seemed low
and kind, or what failures and triumphs
of the body and spirit brought her to that point—
just that it sounded like hope, stupid hope.

I love that last line, as it rewards re-reading and reconsidering. At first read, that phrase “stupid hope” seems pejorative, a kind of frustrated annoyance at hope itself. Maybe even the judgment of those who believe in it. But on a second read — or third, or fourth, or tenth — I’ve found a wry almost-wonder. Yes, annoyance still. But also the idea of hope as some sort of pesky friend who won’t let you go. Who keeps coming back around. Who is so very human in that way. And so inseparable from who we are as humans. Even at the moment of death, the poem seems to say, there is hope. Hope for what? I don’t know. Maybe just the fact of hope is the point.

I’ve wanted to write about Jason Shinder’s poetry for a long time, but have always put it off. Maybe that is because it feels — especially the poems in Stupid Hope — almost untouchable. Like changing a lightbulb while the power is still on. How, when the bulb is screwed in, you know it will so quickly become too hot to touch. Though I use the word “breathless” to sometimes describe the effect of reading a poem, very few poems have literally left me breathless. Many of Shinder’s poems do. Consider his poem, “Afterwards,” which begins:

I remember the shame I felt after the news

of the illness that I was not as lovable
as I thought. I must have done something

wrong. And then

I was content in my disappointment
which kept me alone.

The honesty and immense vulnerability of these lines — “I must have done something // wrong” — coupled with the sparse lineation, the overt and not-so-subtle use of white space, create a real palpable sense of pause: of someone trying, and stopping, and starting again to say something real in the midst of something harrowing. Such trying reminds me of a few lines from Galway Kinnell’s “Dear Stranger Extant in Memory by the Blue Juniata”:

the dream

of all poems

and the text

of all loves—‘Tenderness toward Existence.’

That very idea — tenderness toward existence — lives within Shinder’s Stupid Hope and at the heart of today’s poem. It’s there in the poem’s first two lines:

Your death must be loved this much.

You have to know the grief—now.

How can you ignore a poem that begins with such lines? A poem that speaks of death — a subject at the center of so many poems, nearly every one — in such a way? I have often made death into a metaphor in my own work. I have referenced it and then skirted it. I have floated along the tangents of it, trying to use it as a path toward other connections. I have imagined death and felt death and have been scared of death and have avoided it. But here, Shinder speaks of it head-on. Not only that, he does it almost casually, utilizing two words so often utilized in our vocabulary: know, and love. And he speaks of it directly. He speaks to you, to each of us as we each read. Perhaps the question is not: how can you ignore a poem that begins this way? Perhaps the question is: how can you ignore a life, any life at all, if this is part of life?

I love the choice of the second person in today’s poem not just for the intimacy it essentially forces upon the reader, for the way it takes the speaker’s attempt to process their situation and asks the reader to make the same attempt, too. It does do that. It illustrates a speaker trying to make himself believe what he is trying to say, and places that moment within the reader’s experience as well.

But the second person also does something else. It allows the poem to become exactly what it is trying to say. So many poems obfuscate meaning for so many immensely generous reasons — for pleasure or joy or critique or more. But this poem knows exactly what it is trying to say — that you must love your death — and knows, too, that what it is trying to say is immensely hard. Is so hard, in fact, that it proves one purpose of poetry: to act as an offering, to place something upon and within us that is not hard to carry, that maybe makes the act of carrying that so many of us experience in life just a little bit lighter. This poem models a way to surrender ourselves to death so that we might be able to live.

Such a thing is so difficult that Shinder has to remind us, constantly, throughout the poem. It’s there when he writes:

I mean it, this, now—

Or when he simply points out:

There it is—

In such a way, Shinder is also reminding us that life will never not be full of wild contradiction. A New York Times Magazine article by Melanie Thernstrom cites an entry from Shinder’s journal that reads:

The hours are left for vanishing and also for joy and for blessing and gratitude.

This is the intersection at which so much of the poetry I am drawn to makes its home. It is a messy intersection, because it offers no answer, no world that is full of joy but is not vanishing, and no vanishing world that is not full of joy. What is left is only the world as it is, which is, I think, for each of us, simply (though not so simply) the world we are willing to pay attention to. And that is one way to think of life: a series of attentions paid and returned to and renewed and unfound and re-found. So often, our exponentially-increasing-technological society asks us what to make of our attention. What to do with it. What to answer from it. But Shinder reminds us that life is:

the goddamn

orange-going-into-rose descending

circle of beauty and time.

Paradoxically, perhaps, it is actually the fault of our dependence on answers and progress that might break such a circle, that might make it so that much of our world does not live to see the sun descend in a glimmer of orange-going-into-rose and then rise again in that beautiful and soft parade of purple and pink. What a tragedy, that we cannot simply be in this circle together. That progress is not always as liberating as it seems.

This reminds me of an entry from Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals:

I need to remind myself of the joy, the lightness, the laughter so vital to my living and my health. Otherwise, the other will always be waiting to eat me up into despair again. And that means destruction. I don't know how, but it does.

This inner prioritization of joy runs up against the harsh reality of a world that ruins joy’s possibility. You notice that later, when Lorde writes:

The acceptance of illusion and appearance as reality is another symptom of this same refusal to examine the realities of our lives. Let us seek 'joy' rather than real food and clean air and a saner future on a liveable earth! As if happiness alone can protect us from the results of profit-madness.

Such a moment might seem in direct contradiction with Shinder’s final line from today’s poem — You have nothing to be sad about — but I don’t think it is. In fact, I think the two moments complement one another. Shinder’s poem, written in the face of death, is a moment of real clarity. It is almost as if it is written from another world to remind us of the one we are collectively living within. It speaks to us directly but kindly, with something like reassurance. It wants us to live with a little less fear. When read alongside Lorde’s entry — which was written from a similar vantage point — I am reminded of all that obscures our potential to live with less fear, with less anxiety. I am reminded of how unprotected we are to seek joy, to be vulnerably generous, to try to be less sad. And I am saddened, then, that a poem as beautiful as today’s might offer a way of viewing the world that is so unattainable because we cannot feel safe enough to seek peace in our grief, or beauty in our continual circle of arrival and departure.

The final poem of Stupid Hope begins with these two lines:

If there is no cure, I still want to correct a few things

and think mostly of people, and have them all alive.

If there is something resembling an answer to whatever resembles a question, then it is probably here, in these lines. It is in the fact that, at the moment of almost-departure, Shinder wants to “think mostly of people.” Here is a kind of looking-back. A desire for forgiveness, or generosity, which is also a desire for grace. At its heart, this is an understanding of both finitude and fragility. An awareness that, as life approaches its limit, it is still full of other lives, each with their own limits. The poem ends with this line:

Let me keep on describing things to be sure they happened.

Such a line connects with a poem earlier in the book, which describes a woman who, while reading a poem:

finds the experience of living in that moment
so clearly described as to make her feel finally known

by someone…

What a gift it is that we are able to pay attention and then offer that attention by whatever means we can to someone else. It is that gift that enacts some sort of unending circle of life that mirrors the same circle we find ourselves living among, a circle of arrival and departure and joy and sorrow and beauty. I can’t believe, somedays, that the sun goes down and then rises again hours later. I can’t believe, too, that every day of my life so far I have woken up to see such a thing despite whatever fear or anxiety lingers at the end of the day that came before. Yes, it is stupid, this hope. It pries its way into my being. But so much of my being is uncertain, and that is where hope lives.

One reason I make an effort to read as generously as I can is because of this gift of attention. Regardless of my sometimes-inclination to make some sort of judgment about the quality of a poem, I try to view each serious attempt at poetry as a serious act of attention. And that is a gift to read. Whatever, maybe it sounds sentimental, but I don’t think it is. It is through attention that we are known, and it is in being known that we find some kind of salve for the loneliness of having something resembling a soul at all. Think of today’s poem. Someone facing the hard and honest reality of their own futility, and they decide to write a poem. Why do we deserve that? Why do we deserve so many conscious acts of attention? I don’t think we do. We simply are offered them, and in receiving such an offering, maybe we feel a little less alone, a little more known. It’s one of the messy byproducts of academia that we so often judge before we appreciate, and that appreciation is somehow uncritical. Why can’t I say a gift, a gift, a gift as I read? Like Shinder’s wry and wonderful phrase stupid hope, there is something beautiful about all this trying that keeps on happening, all this attention attempted toward something — maybe even one another.