John Wieners's "Loss"
Thoughts on the suddenness of endings.
Loss
To live without the one you love an empty dream never known true happiness except as such youth watching snow at window listening to old music through morning. Riding down that deserted street by evening in a lonely cab past a blighted theatre oh god yes, I missed the chance of my life when I gasped, when I got up and rushed out the room away from you. from Supplication: The Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Poetry, 2015)
I think I mentioned this poem in a previous, recent newsletter, but I’ve been meaning to write about it ever since I first read it. Wieners’s thoughts are beautiful things. His poem, “au rive,” reads in full:
What kind of poem would one write if one could? What would one do with some money, if he had it, perhaps to travel; but to where? To experience Wednesday twilight, immediately after dark: is that a promise to be kept Naturally one can’t be sure until any of these things don’t come true?
Naturally one can’t be sure until any of these things don’t come true? — that’s what I mean when I say a thought is beautiful. I don’t know how else to describe it. Stylistically, it wraps itself around itself with a kind of grace. But it also holds something difficult — uncertainty, I think, and promise — with an almost-ease. It reverses and subverts. It doubles back. It does something I can’t quite grasp, and, in doing that un-grasp-able thing, it captures with exactitude the sensation of mystery, which is an impossible sort of capturing, the kind of thing poetry makes an attempt at, which is sometimes — maybe always — the only thing one can do.
So, well, that’s John Wieners’s poetry.
But what I can’t stop thinking about in relation to today’s poem is the ending. The poem begins with a metaphorical statement, broad and with loneliness and love at its heart:
To live without the one you love an empty dream never known true happiness except as such youth
Here, Wieners employs these unpunctuated lines that seem to dance between pure point-of-fact statement and a kind of confusion. That true happiness — where does it come from? Or is it the empty dream never known? Is living without love an empty dream? Yes, perhaps it is. You know what it could be — you can imagine — but you cannot know. These lines are a tangle of feeling, a web of things broken and put back together. And what comes through is that sense of loss. That loneliness that stems from living without the one you love.
From here, Wieners moves into a litany of descriptions that capture such loneliness:
watching snow at window listening to old music through morning. Riding down that deserted street by evening in a lonely cab past a blighted theatre
There’s beauty here, isn’t there? It feels like I’m living in a photograph, something soft-focused, reminded of the presence of others in this life without feeling completely part of it. It’s this that is important in what I’m trying to get at here. It’s the way the poem gets into the world, the way it allows you, reading it, to get into the world, too. There’s something spell-like, almost magical that happens, however simply it seems to happen.
Because then it happens, this ending:
oh god yes, I missed the chance of my life when I gasped, when I got up and rushed out the room away from you.
Happens is the word that comes to mind when I think of this ending. It just appears, almost suddenly. It turns out of the poem. It arrives. It does end, yes. But it begins something else — almost another poem, brought out of the poem. It’s there in that phrase: oh god yes.
And it’s that I want to talk about. It’s the way this ending — the sheer weight of it — seems to appear out of nowhere. To turn out of nowhere. To arrive out of nowhere. To happen out of nowhere. In that phrase — oh god yes — and in its suddenness, is something about the human condition, our memory, our feeling and emotion. The way it arises out of experience — the window looked out of, the cab rolling down the dark street — and reminds us of everything that sits within us.
There’s a poem by Kaveh Akbar, “Orchids Are Sprouting from the Floorboards,” that does this same kind of work. The poem, a litany of repeating observations and metaphors, places the reader within a world in which nearly everything — teenagers, infants, sunlight, and teapots — is an orchid. It’s jarring and gorgeous, strange and lovely at once. Akbar writes:
Orchids are sprouting from the floorboards. Orchids are gushing out from the faucets. The cat mews orchids from his mouth. His whiskers are also orchids. The grass is sprouting orchids. It is becoming mostly orchids. The trees are filled with orchids.
It continues like this, orchids and orchids and orchids. I am remembering what I said above, about Wieners’s poem. How it lives in the world, allows the world to come into the poem, allows us to be in the world with it. This does that similar work, doesn’t it? Orchids and orchids and orchids. We are in the world of the poem, a world messy with color and scent. And then the ending — just a line and a half — comes out of it, surprising us:
Oh, Lydia, we miss you terribly.
And how about one more? There’s a poem by James L. White, “Making Love to Myself,” one of my favorite poems. It begins absolutely gorgeously:
When I do it, I remember how it was with us. Then my hands remember too, and you're with me again, just the way it was. After work when you'd come in and turn the TV off and sit on the edge of the bed, filling the room with gasoline smell from your overalls, trying not to wake me which you always did.
There’s a tenderness here, a real tenderness, one borne out of vulnerability. The poem opens with such intimacy; we, as readers, sit within that intimacy and wonder how deep it will go. We live in the world that intimacy allows for us. And the poem dwells in this description, in this memory. It goes and goes and goes. It ends up extending deeper into itself. White reminds us of the “sweet gift” of language and memory.
And then, right at the end, White writes:
You could remember me at my worktable or in the all-night diners, though we'd never call or write. I just have to stop here Jess. I just have to stop.
Oh god yes.
Oh, / Lydia.
I just have to stop here.
These moments are examples of endings that happen with a real suddenness and surprise, endings that enact the kind of daily out-of-the-blue-ness that I have certainly encountered so, so frequently in my life. Haven’t you? The news that seems to come out of nowhere. The memory that floors you. The grief that arises, almost instantly, out of light. Because doesn’t everything — even the worst — arise, in its own way, out of light?
And maybe that’s what I am wondering about, as I read these poems, with their endings — jarring and even blunt — that do seem to come out of nowhere. But they don’t, do they? Because nothing really does, even when it seems to. I am thinking of how each of these poems allows the world in. I am thinking of Wieners’s description of watching snow fall outside a window, of Akbar’s orchids that burst and bloom and scatter out of everything, of White’s hands, of the smell of gasoline, burnt leaves, woodsmoke. In other words, or in many words — I am thinking of the world. And it’s from each of these worlds offered by each of these poets that such endings arise from. They arise suddenly, yes. They stun, even, and startle. They enact how it feels to be struck by a memory, to feel the shot-put weight of grief, the jolt of realization that you cannot go on, that you have to stop, that you missed a chance, that you miss someone, that what was gone is back in the world with you, in the form of memory or pain or regret or so much more and so much else.
I am reminded, as I sift through lesson plans and various curricula while planning my upcoming year of teaching, that so many of our popular notions of endings are taught to us as versions of sense-making. Make it make sense, we say. And so we are taught about endings that resolve, or that connect back. We are taught about endings that offer closure, that teach a lesson. Endings that perform a kind of de-cluttering, that tie knots, wrap bows. I don’t know, really, how much I agree with the idea or need for such sense-making. When I think of Wieners’s speaker overcome with a sudden sense of regret, or Akbar’s speaker feeling this bursting sensation of grief, or White’s speaker simply putting the pen down (and taking his hand away from himself), I think of how such moments enact how it feels when the world does not make sense, when we are overcome by mystery and memory. To resist such sense-making, to end a poem — god I love it — by saying I just have to stop, there’s a real beauty to such a thing. A real generosity. It does more for me than sense-making. It gives me permission to feel, to not have to make sense, to sit with my missing and grieving and stopping and living.
Perhaps we should be thinking more about what poems like these offer us — not about what to do with our confusion and our bewilderment, but about how to accept such states and moments of living.
I have been reading Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet (not in the correct order, I have realized — I just wanted to read a book called Summer in summer), and there’s a moment in her novel Spring when Smith writes:
She went for the train.
She sat and stared out its window. Her eyes went from what was outside the window to the marks and smudges on the surface of the window, the ones on the inside, the ones on the outside, back to the world beyond the marks on the window.
I was reminded, through these sentences, of being a kid in the backseat of my dad’s car, nose pressed against the glass. I was reminded of how I still do that on trains, cheek to the window, breath dampening the space in front of my face. It’s like how it feels to read a poem, I think. To look out the window, and then to notice the window for what it is — to really notice it. To notice the marks of language left on it, the human face that once was there, pressed against the poem as you are, in the act of writing what you now read. And then, back within the poem itself: a whole world.
Such an act of noticing: it’s a reminder that, as Smith puts it (in her own idiosyncratic way) in her novel Summer:
Outside the day is happening regardless, full of birds doing things in the air etc.
I love that. The day is happening regardless. Looking through the smudgy-windowpane of a poem teaches me that again and again. But more so than that, when a poem reminds itself that the day is happening regardless, when it offers that strange and ever-so-human gap between feeling and experience, the orchids that blossom in the midst of grief, the world that just cannot stop carrying on, then it gives me permission to not have to make such sense out of my own life. I don’t have to spin it into something it is not. I can say, as often as I’d like: I just have to stop.
I want to work on that, in my own writing. The ending that is more honest to feeling. The ending that honors surprise, in whatever form it comes. I saw The National the other day, and they sang “Pink Rabbits,” an all-time favorite of theirs, a song that contains within it two distinct lines: I didn’t ask for this pain it just came over me, and I’m so surprised you want to dance with me now, I was just getting used to living life without you around. Surprise at the heart of both. Surprise of pain; surprise of gratitude; surprise of life. A narrative structure that centers sense-making does not always feel like a way to depict the wide breadth of a life. Sometimes I am holding onto a string I didn’t know I had. Sometimes I am dropping what I hold. We are always revising, stunning, and being stunned. It’s an act of grace, to move between feeling and experience. Everyone does it. It hurts sometimes and shatters sometimes and then sometimes it’s a fucking mess of joy. I’d like to write endings like that, which are not really endings at all, just allowances of light, which is the kind of thing that goes on, even as we stumble through it.
A Note:
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“They enact how it feels to be struck by a memory, to feel the shot-put weight of grief, the jolt of realization that you cannot go on...” Just loving the poetry here.