Jim Moore's "Fear and Love"

Thoughts on the lateness of our lives.

Fear and Love

I wish I could make the argument that a river
and a sunset plus a calm disregard of the ego
are enough. But whatever comes next must include
tents in the parking lot, that homeless camp
on the way to the airport,
and the hole in your cheek
from the cancer removed yesterday.
I said last night,
in the few seconds before I fell asleep,
You do realize, don’t you, everything
is falling apart? You said, OK,
I’ll try to keep that in mind. And now it is
starting to be late again, just like every other night
for the last seventy-five years. Fear and love,
a friend said in an impromptu speech
at his surprise birthday party,
we all live caught between fear and love.
He tried to smile as he spoke, then sat down.
Yesterday you saw the moon
from the operating table
where they were about to cut you.
Look! you demanded, and the surgeon bent and turned
to see it from your angle,
knife in hand.



from Prognosis (Graywolf, 2021)

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One great joy of the past month has been reading — for the first time — the work of Jim Moore. I stumbled upon his book, Prognosis, while in the poetry section of a bookstore, and flipped to a poem titled “By the Light of Two Underlying Conditions,” which begins:

It helps, if you are seventy-seven, to feel shorn,
as an animal might feel shorn, unburdened
of its too-muchness. It helps
if you carry with you, like two candles to light the way,
two underlying conditions by which to see day passing
into darkness.

So yeah, you can see why I immediately purchased it. Reading and re-reading Moore’s book over the past few weeks, I’ve dog-eared nearly every other page. I feel like I’m reading Gerald Stern, Jim Harrison, and Linda Gregg bottled up and shaken and stirred into the one and only Jim Moore.

Standing in the bookstore, reading the poem I just mentioned above, I thought of my father, who was in his mid-70s when he needed a double-hip replacement. I remember it all. It was August of 2018, and I took off from work to take care of him, bought a bus ticket from the city to the other city. When I saw him at the hospital, he had already started shuffling around on his walker — just hours after the surgery. His body was bent at an odd angle, almost unnatural, and I held his arm and moved with him to a room filled with various renderings and imaginings of domestic life. There was half of a car to practice getting in and out of, a toilet seat to practice sitting on and standing up from. From some strange haze, I watched my father practice being alive, and then we went home, where I helped him take off his socks and scratched the dead, scaly skin from his feet.

I couldn’t have articulated it then; I was too close to the moment, but my father felt, as Jim Moore writes, “shorn.” He seemed all at once and suddenly passive. There were moments when he didn’t seem to accept that passivity, moments of frustration, moments when he pushed too hard against his newfound limits. But the tenderest moments borne out of that frustration were when he took Moore’s advice. When he allowed himself to feel “unburdened / of [his] too-muchness.” It was in those moments — when he let me guide his legs over the bedside in the morning, or bring him food, or usher him toward the bathroom, or gently knock to ask if he was alright — that I felt our love was an expansive thing, not just limited to behaviors of the past or to the sometimes harsh definitions of fathers and sons.

Reading today’s poem, I’m struck by these lines at its heart:

And now it is
starting to be late again, just like every other night
for the last seventy-five years

I know that Moore intends these lines literally — because they work literally — but these lines also tend toward metaphor, toward some idea of life as a place where lateness occurs again and again. In fact, it occurs with fidelity. And what does it mean, for it to be starting to be late again? In today’s poem, that awareness of lateness seems to be an awareness of death, or fragility, or frailty, or the fact of our perishability. It’s a lateness that applies not just to our bodies, but to our world. A lateness best described in the juxtaposition here:

that homeless camp
on the way to the airport,
and the hole in your cheek
from the cancer removed yesterday.

I think we live in this lateness everyday, and we can choose to be aware of it or not. Though sometimes, I think, we don’t have a choice, and our collective lateness — our fragile structures of society, our constant proximity to loss — makes itself known to us. I think we deny these moments of awareness all the time. We do it in relation to the climate, to the needs of our earth and the ways we continue to compromise our relationship to it. In these moments, we resist the awareness of our lateness. Out of what? I’m not sure. Fear, maybe. Or shame. Whatever it is; we realize it, and then it feels too late.

This is true of our various individual latenesses, which is what I think of when Moore writes OK, / I’ll try to keep that in mind. There is so much to keep in mind — so much to remember in the midst of so much to feel. Months ago, I passed out in the middle of a funeral service and then again in an ambulance. I was whisked to the emergency room and hooked up to monitors. For a long time, I didn’t know how to feel about how I felt. What a strange, surreal thing. I wrote about this experience in a recent essay for Longreads. Sitting in the hospital for almost two days, moving through test after test after test, what I thought about with near constant anxiety was the way my lateness — my frailty, my brief moment of life — had appeared to me more quickly than I imagined. And I spent the hours trying to come to terms with what I didn’t know. I imagined the worst — that my lateness had arrived, and that my ending was soon — and tried to be okay with that. But the truth is that we are always near our lateness, that, simply put, our lives are these ongoing and deeply fragile things until they are no longer. To acknowledge this is not to disregard fear, but it might allow it to be easier to recenter love.

Moore writes about this in his poem, “Also Known As,” which I’ll place in full below:

If you are more close to the dying
than you would like to be, then it is time for the sky
to grow larger than the earth, than the sea even.
You need to go to that place where your story
is seriously quiet. Nothing in it counts
compared to the things the sky
calls out to: birds, clouds, the occasional cypress
that has reached beyond itself.
You could call it a kind of waiting
and that would be fair. There is a green bench
— a corner of heaven, you could say —
and there you can sit in the shade
and watch the grandfather and grandson walk by,
hand in hand. The little one makes the older one laugh
again and again, and that is the way it works
in heaven. Also known as going home.
Also known as getting over yourself.

This is the kind of poem that reminds me of Jim Harrison, with its beauty and also its playful, tough-in-the-heart ending. One of Harrison’s last poems, “Bridge,” begins:

Most of my life was spent
building a bridge out over the sea
though the sea was too wide.
I’m proud of the bridge
hanging in the pure sea air. 

I imagine Harrison’s bridge is like Moore’s “green bench.” A place of infinite incompletion, full of all that incompletion is full of — which is to say, all that life is full of, since we are these frail and fractured things, always flecking off bits of ourselves into the air as we move, incomplete and longing, through this life. And incompletion, frailty, fragility — well, it’s still full of so much. The little child making the older man laugh. Two legs swinging over an unfinished bridge. A sea to look at. A sky. Yes, a hole in the cheek is part of the incompleteness of this life. But so, too: “a river / and a sunset plus a calm disregard of the ego.” It’s all contained as part of this uncontainable thing. None of it is enough.

And maybe that’s why I feel myself so struck by today’s poem. The ending, especially — the way the person on the operating table is still searching for wonder, not just looking at the moon but also asking for someone else to look with them, to share in wonder. And the way the surgeon does look, but does so with this lingering potential for violence in their hand. That moment: the moon, the look!, the knife, and the light I imagine glinting off the blade — all of that, all at once: life.

Moore holds that for us in today’s poem, describes it as fear and love. In one of the aforementioned poems, he names his two “underlying conditions” as joy and suffering. It reminds me of Jane Hirshfield’s “Vinegar and Oil,” how she writes about how “fragile we are, between the few good moments.” This duality feels true to me. We hold it all at once. Our fragility amidst the goodness. Our fear amidst the love. Our suffering amidst the joy. Our laugher amidst all that feels unable to bring us joy. And yet we laugh. And yet, still, we smile. We hold — and how beautiful that such a thing is possible — it all. We can and we do hold it all at once.

I think I need these reminders that this is my life. That it cannot be reduced to something simply called one thing. That it is the bus ride to see the father, the taking off the socks, the gentle scratch, the little joy amidst the pain. That it is also the anxiety of not knowing, the hospital room, the hours between the tests, but even still, the little bag of goldfish shared in the little bed. The way love has yet to cure me of anything but has told me and shown me, time and time again, something about the light. And just as the person in today’s poem demands us to look, I think I want to demand the same thing of myself. To remember to acknowledge wonder, to look at the moon when it hangs there and then ask whoever is around me to do the same. It’s that which breaks my heart. When I look but forget to ask others to. What good is light if it goes unshared?

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Some Notes

1. As mentioned above, I was grateful to have an essay come out in Longreads earlier this week — about fragility, presentness, anxiety, and love. Give it a read if you’d like!

2. A recurring note: If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.