Meditation at Callicoon
More and more night pretends it isn't spring. What to make of the daffodils then? Hyacinth here and there, wind and rain? So many birds. Of course they won't stay long. None of this will. Not the night, the cold, the city full of swallows. Not the bridges and rivers. Not the sea, no god born of the sea foam. Not even mothers and sons this would be unbearable without. from The Certain Body (Four Way Books, 2022)
I wrote about a poem by Julia Guez almost two years ago, and have been so excited to finally spend some time with her latest book, The Certain Body, which came out last year. Here’s the poem — “This, Winter” — that I wrote about back in 2021:
Busy the hands with backgammon,
tell me about the year.The wifely chamomile and Klonopin
no help, have a saltine.This is to say, I understand.
Once submersible, I am now a buoy.Fatigue is the new normal.
I remember reading this poem in the early pandemic days and feeling so struck by it. Reading it again, I notice how the poem immediately offers the intimacy of invitation: tell me about the year. There’s a kindness in such a moment that I feel so deserving of attention. When I read this poem back in 2021, I focused so much on its final line and the inherent truth at the heart of it. Fatigue is the new normal. Yes. Yes. Still true, right? But now, reading it again, I find myself relaxing into the poem’s opening couplet. I feel the poet across from me at a table, a game of backgammon between us, or a deck of cards, the reopening of a years long ongoing game of gin rummy, and I feel myself sitting down and being immediately understood. What greater thing do we desire than that? And what greater thing can be offered? Here, have a saltine — I understand.
It’s that voice I am drawn to in Julia Guez’s work. I read her poems to feel — as a result of their immense vulnerability and ongoing attempt to love or criticize or simply ask — understood. I feel understood as someone searching, always, and wondering, always, and feeling lonely sometimes as a result of such searching and wondering, and feeling in that loneliness an immensity of sorrow that I cannot place but must simply live with until I encounter language that quells that sorrow, and, in such quelling, reminds me how much more beautiful it is to feel less alone as a result of longing, rather than more alone.
All that to say: Julia Guez is a remarkable poet. And it was a joy to open this book and encounter today’s poem as the book’s first. And though I want to write about what this poem speaks toward and reminds me of, I would be remiss not to mention the craft of this poem’s opening:
More and more night pretends it isn't spring.
That more and more does such lovely work. Double work, you might say! It is both accumulative and temporal. It can mean, simultaneously, more and more in the sense of lately, and more and more in the sense of addition. As in: lately, night pretends / it isn’t spring. As in: more times than not, night pretends / it isn’t spring. It might seem a slight difference, but it’s there. There is a sense of gentleness in the former and a sense of doom in the latter. An observational tenderness in the former and a pending despair in the latter.
That duality, that breadth and width of feeling and attention — it feels so much a part of Guez’s work. And what I love, too, is how, after the immensity of the poem’s opening lines, Guez turns immediately to questions:
What to make of the daffodils then? Hyacinth here and there, wind and rain? So many birds.
There is an inherent curiosity that these lines enact, a turn away from the perhaps-despair of a night that pretends it isn’t spring, and a turn towards the world. Every question we ask is the result of attention. This must be a certain truth. Sometimes our questions are the result of missed-attention (what did you say?), but perhaps the best questions we ask — if such things exist — are the result of something observed and then wondered about. Did you notice that? What to / make of the daffodils then?
The question, too, is a kind of holding. It is the opposite of ignorance. To ask a question is to allow whatever you are questioning to linger in the mind a little longer. It is to place a hand on a doorknob and ready oneself to open a door. It is to be okay with the possibility of expansion, or strangeness, or oddity, or difference, or more. It is to look at the world and to refuse the idea that you know all of it. To ask a question is to make yourself a generous kind of small. It is to allow for more.
Such smallness-in-the-face-of-largeness is present in so much of Guez’s work. It’s there in her poem “On the Occasion of My Half-Birthday,” which begins:
Thyme out in the window box, wildness and splay of what has always survived winter here, fasting only to re-emerge greener in the spring. All I want is the sun on my face.
Pause for a second and think of the extraordinary loveliness that is the largeness of any one of us — human beings, we are — noticing a sprig of thyme. Even just that moment, that act of noticing, is a lovely thing, a kindness. And then linger a second longer and think about the extraordinary loveliness that is the largeness of any one of us — blustered and bungled as we are by distraction — finding in such small-thyme-noticing a recognition of that sprig of thyme’s resilience and survival. And then linger just one more second and think about the extraordinary loveliness that is the largeness of any of us — consuming, as we so often do, so much more than we should — turning our cheeks toward the sun for warmth. I never thought of light on my face as a recognition of my humility, but I will think of it in this way now. The light owes nothing to me, and yet I am allowed to receive it. All I want is this reception, again and again. It is a small want of a large thing I am grateful to be a part of.
I just finished Vasily Grossman’s The People Immortal (translated by Elizabeth and Robert Chandler), and was struck, as I always am by Grossman — who you should read right now — of the way he holds the duality of the wonder of this earth and the immense and stubborn pain of humankind within the confines of a single book. But I was struck, too, by the love and attention offered toward the natural world in this book that is so much about violence. Consider, for example, the following sentences:
There was only the occasional flash of a shooting star—which to the soldiers seemed like a plane being shot down.
A delicate fragrance had suddenly spread through the clouds of smoke—a perfumery had caught fire.
Searchlight beams crept cautiously across the sky, as if afraid their thin pale-blue bodies might tear against a star.
There’s nothing in the world that hasn’t been turned upside down by this war. Think of the torment we inflict on our horses.
Each of these moments illustrates an act of attention that is offered simultaneously to the world of care and to the consequences of violence. In doing so, Grossman names exactly what we lose and what we injure when our attention toward the world is borne out of a desire for violence or power. It is this sense of violence that alters the beauty of a shooting star and morphs such beauty into the loss of life. It is that violence that then injures the language of delicacy, that makes Grossman craft a simile that worries its way into tearing a star. And it is that same violence that turns into the torment we inflict on our horses.
Such an illustration — of the complexity of attention, and how it can just as readily be offered toward care as it can be turned toward violence — is depicted in a recent essay in The Yale Review by Daegan Miller, whose work I have admired for a long time. In that essay, he quotes a passage from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, when Tolstoy describes the sense of joy that Konstantin Levin feels in working in the fields amongst the peasants who work for him:
The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments of oblivion during which it was no longer his arms that swung the scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious of itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and neatly done on its own. These were the most blissful moments.
In Miller’s essay, a response to Caleb Smith’s Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture, Miller writes of “attention’s ambidextrousness—its dual capacity to subordinate and liberate.” He writes, too, of peening a scythe, readying it to “whisper through whatever needs trimming.” Of that process, Miller writes:
Peening is a finicky job; it takes discipline and close attention so that you neither smash your fingers nor crumple the blade’s edge while bringing your hammer down, centimeter by centimeter, along the length of the blade as it lies atop the vertex of your anvil.
But then, in the essay’s conclusion, Miller outlines the complexity of attention, of its “ambidextrousness” at work:
No tool is simple, neither discipline nor scythe. I had all sorts of reasons to begin mowing my lawn with an antiquated hand tool—economic and environmental and ideological—but there is nothing inherently good in any of this work. For all the therapeutic feeling Levin received when he mowed with his peasants, he remained, at the end of the day, their lord whose comfort depended on their sweat.
Duality. Ambidextrousness. Complexity. These are powerful words with which to describe attention, and they remind me of what is lost or harmed when something like attention is generalized — something I’ve certainly done before, and often. The danger of generalizing attention is the danger of generalizing anything: the action begins to live in the realm of vague possibility, where anything can define it, even violence, and where anything can co-opt it, even and especially power. The act of generalizing attention — of speaking about it in un-nuanced terms — is, ironically, an act of inattention. It fails the word itself.
And so I think of what Guez’s poem today teaches me. I think of these final lines:
So many birds. Of course they won't stay long. None of this will. Not the night, the cold, the city full of swallows. Not the bridges and rivers. Not the sea, no god born of the sea foam. Not even mothers and sons this would be unbearable without.
I think of how this poem moves across various spheres of attention — the natural world, our climate, the present moment of crisis. But then I think of how it ends with an attention toward care in the midst of so much:
Not even mothers and sons this would be unbearable without.
In other words, this poem holds so much in its gaze. It holds its curiosity, which is borne out of a love for a world that is present in the midst of violence. And it holds a recognition of that violence and the oddity of such violence emerging from people who are so temporal and so fragile. All of that holding is an attention that seeks not to end, but to remain imaginative instead.
And perhaps that is some sort of key. We live in a world full of ends, where our imagination is blunted by the limitations placed on people because of the way their time is co-opted by various forms of unsupported labor, and where, at the same time, we are told to be unlimited and endless in our desire for something different, or some better version of ourselves. We are never taught to hold out of care rather than possession, to hold still and offer our attention not for the sake of reprogramming ourselves toward efficiency, but rather for the opposite. To give our anxiety its due time.
I like that word — holds — to describe Guez’s work. Not holds in the sense of the possessive. But holds in the sense of care. The way a child is passed from loving, intimate hands to loving, intimate hands, as one was this week when a fellow teacher brought their infant son into school, and so many — teachers and students alike — took turns doing the holding. The way, in such a moment, labor is shared. And care, too. Attention must be like that. Our attention must be like that. It must be like that care.
As Jenny Odell writes in Saving Time, perhaps part of the responsibility of our attention and perspective is “open[ing] the door to an important recognition: not of shared consequences, but of a shared cause,” rather than “fortifying a walled garden of slowness” that “actually deepens the status quo.” When I read a poem by Guez that says “fatigue is the new normal,” I find in such a moment a kind of solidarity that might help you build even more solidarity, to open the door of a garden or walk into the open door of a garden in order to hold someone who is feeling a similar kind of worry, a similar kind of sorrow.
That compassionate, expansive-rather-than-possessive holding is there in Guez’s poem “As We Consider Another Child,” which ends:
The rent is due at the end of each month. At the end of each month the same question then, sleeplessness—and yes, novenas, TV, nausea.
It’s there, too, in “A More Onerous Citizenship,” when Guez writes:
If we write, we owe. This debt transverses all writing; it shapes it. It gives it life. This debt is connected to bodies at work: gendered bodies, material bodies, bodies in conflict.
These poems — and Guez’s work — remind me of the way that poetry can not just give us life, but can turn us back toward it. That turning is difficult because it is not always joyful. It’s difficult, too, because any turning involves a turning away, just as any holding almost always involves a letting go. But life, as Guez reminds me, would be “unbearable” without the care of others. It would be unbearable, too, without this world, and without its light. Impossible, even. That is my difficulty with the contemporary language of the unlimited. Of progress made exponential. What, exactly, are we reaching toward if we cannot turn toward each other, if we cannot hold the all-ness of one another? I would rather hold and be held.
Some Notes:
I had a poem published in Had, a journal I love, the other day — it is part of a manuscript centered around light. Here is the link. Thank you for reading!
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Holding and not possessing. Yes. That is the difference between love and fear. And the last two lines of the poem really get me, as a mom of sons. Thank you for your wonderful words and Guez' work.
"Make do, little friend I call myself. Walk
backward out of the room you have made out
of your wanting into the room of where you are."
Make tea, little friend, the leaves uncurling
in the vast hot liquid.