Elemental
I brought what I knew about the world to my daily life
and it failed me. I brought senseless accidents
and a depravity sprung inside the jaw.
Also I brought what I had learned of love,
an air of swift entrance and exit, a belief in trouble
and desire. It will amount to something
I was told, and I was told to hold fast to decency,
to be spotlit and confident. I was told
next year’s words await another voice.
But you are a hard mouth to speak to
and if I write the list it will be free of constancy.
It will include fierce birds, false springs,
a few oil lamps that need quickly to be lit.
Also dusk and weeds and a sleep that permits
utter oblivion from our stranded century.
This is not a natural world, and if there are
recoveries from confusion, they pass like rains.
I don’t look to the robins for solace; neither do I trust
that to make an end is to make a beginning.
If we are not capable of company, we can at least
both touch the quartet inside evening,
the snow inside the willow, the bewildering kinship
of ice and sky. But as I walked
I saw crows ripping at shapes on the street,
a square of sunlight flare on the roof.
Take my hand, if only here and not in the time
that remains for us to spend together.
We will stand and watch the most delicate weathers
move, second by second, through the grim neighborhood.
I will lean into you, who have loved me in your way,
knowing where you are and what you care for.
from Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy (Penguin, 2015)
I don’t know if I’ve ever been as struck by a poem’s opening lines as I am by the opening lines of this poem:
I brought what I knew about the world to my daily life
and it failed me.
I think so often of the expectation of hope in poems, of the un-excavation of failure as a germinating idea. It makes me think of the work of Linda Gregg, and how she so often opens poems from a place of pure emptiness or sorrow. In one, “God’s Places,” she writes:
Does the soul care about the mightiness
of this love? No.
In another, “We Manage Most When We Manage Small,” she begins:
What things are steadfast? Not the birds.
Not the bride and groom who hurry
in their brevity to reach one another.
The stars do not blow away as we do.
The thought or desire to grow something out of failure is, I think, an extension of capitalist thinking — this notion that failure is only worthwhile if something can be learned or earned or gained from it. It’s a dangerous way of thinking, because it positions failure firstly as a word with a great deal of weight, and secondly as a place that must be exited as quickly as possible, a well scratched along its inner wall by some terrified fingernails. To dwell in what does not need to be escaped, to recenter the myriad fault-making and love-making and sense-making of life as, well, life itself — what happens then?
I don’t think today’s poem — or any of the Linda Gregg poems — seeks that aforementioned kind of resolution or epiphany, that kind of capitalist escape from the confines of failure. The “no’s” that these poems begin with do not desire to become “yes,” they do not actively seek to subvert their own beginnings, to make a mistake of honesty. Rather, just as revelation is its own kind of surprise — think of walking outside only to be stunned by the play of light on some ancient brick — so too is acceptance. To say: I did what you told me and it fucking sucked. To say: I looked for beauty and found none. To say, as Klink does: “I was told, and I was told.”
What, this poem seems to ask, is elemental about this world, this life? What is at the heart of it? What can be related back to nature? What cannot? What moves me about this poem is the way in which its desire for the essentials of life is portrayed through a series of negations. It is a poem of reductions. It asks: what is left when so much is not? Love is both “entrance and exit.” Klink’s speaker “was told to hold fast to decency.” For what, she seems to ask. And why?
There is a turn in this poem, but I don’t think it’s toward some making-something-of-it-all. I think, rather explicitly, that this poem turns away from sense making. Klink writes of some world “free of constancy,” which is a world full of complexity, contradiction, a world no longer dependable by any easily assessed metric. “This is not a natural world,” Klink writes, not a world where birds offer “solace,” and most certainly a world of “false springs.” It is a world where the common axioms no longer hold meaning, where there is no trust “that to make an end is to make a beginning.”
This world sounds familiar, doesn’t it? A world where what is expected does not always happen, a world that has begun to cultivate a sense of harbored distrust, uneasiness. A world where what things are true are not always accepted as true, and a world where the weight of such things grows even heavier by the day. This, in some or even many ways, has always been the world. That is what power does: it cultivates its own truth. It is our world now, not for better or worse, but most certainly — and this is true — for worse.
I don’t think Klink offers an answer, nor do I think it is the job of a poet to offer an answer. Rather, Klink gestures toward bewilderment (“bewildered kinship,” she writes). And perhaps that is a job of a poet — to gesture toward bewilderment and wonder what lives there, or how to live there. And Klink does assert something about how to live here, where bewilderment is. She writes:
Take my hand, if only here and not in the time
that remains for us to spend together.
For Klink, what is elemental is the present tense. It is not the time remaining or the time past but the time now. It is to be with the ones you love in the moment that you love them. It is to know at least that certainty — “where you are and what you care for” — while so much else is uncertain. That is the elemental, the essential.
I think so often that we — myself included in that vast collective we — have a desire to classify poems (and other writing) in terms of what they offer us. We say poems are hopeful, or necessary, or vital. I will switch to the “I” to say that — when I do this — this is because I am seeking a way out. I am seeking sense made for me. I understand this impulse in myself and also do not like this impulse in myself. So often it feels like one must be either hopeful or cynical, as if one cannot be both, as if one cannot live in between — with both and with so much more. Today’s poem is an example of this complexity. It is both cynical and awash with love. It is a student of emptiness and fullness. This is to say: it lives.
Perhaps my favorite example of this kind of complexity is in another Linda Gregg poem, “New York Address.” In it, she writes:
Yes I hate dark. No I love light. Yes I won’t speak.
No I will write. Yes I will breed. No I won’t love.
Yes I will bless. No I won’t close. Yes I won’t give.
There is our world, full of yes and no, full of decisions we make that move with and turn against decisions we also make, and have made, and will make. There is no answer, I think, for complexity, for bewilderment. To look at all of it and attempt to solve it, to render it easy, is so utterly human and so understandable and yet will almost certainly render some false positive. The world often trains us to solve our lives. To use whole numbers. To round up. But what if what is essential leaves you speechless? Even in math, some numbers are irrational. I am learning to love them.