Tender Parts
You are the most tender part
of our father and the softest
part this side of the grave.
I greeted your arrival
with sweet eyes and spread
fingers, a choir of barrettes
clapping in unison as I pressed
my 5 year-old head to your grown
man chest. If you were supposed to be
the holiest thing I’ve met,
the accidental conjuring
of something, or the beautiful
darkness considered
betrayal: the baby that did not break
my mother’s womb, the product
of two lovers hungrily
embracing, calling it harmless,
as innocent as a man holding
another man from the back
of a motorcycle. If our meeting was
an attempt to anoint our father’s
mistake, you have failed.
Originally published as “For My Brother” in Wildness
(I’m grateful to Karisma for sending me a newer version of this poem, with the title changed from “For My Brother” to “Tender Parts.”)
I think you should read this poem slowly, if you’d like to read it again. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Karisma read before, and her voice is a voice you don’t forget. The cadence of the poem comes through when Karisma reads, yes, but also, and perhaps most importantly, the intentionality. Each word is a brick placed on the poem’s frame with care.
I think you should also read this poem slowly because of the degree of complexity with which this poem is operating. It is short, yes, and reads beautifully. It meditates on tenderness, and moral complexity, and masculinity, and more. But underneath this poem, there is also something the speaker is articulating about the unanswerable — that deep mystery we, as people, are caught between when we are told we have to mean something, when we are told we are supposed to be something. And there is something so deeply tender about the speaker’s navigation of this. When I first read this poem, I was utterly floored by the last line. I’m writing this because I want to find out why.
The first half of this poem offers the poem’s only declarations of certainty — at least, until that final line. When you read the poem again, notice what is certain. Tender. Softest. Sweet eyes. A choir of barrettes. Isn’t that wild? Isn’t that beautiful, grace-filled? When we enter this poem, we enter a literal litany of tenderness. We enter the acknowledgement of softness. Meditating on this, I think of how, so often, my own work begins with the acknowledgement of pain. It begins in a moment of certain sorrow. I wonder what would happen if I made a more conscious effort to begin with softness. I think there is an idea that beginning in such a way might limit the direction a poem might take. But look at this poem, and what complexity such an opening offers. Yes, a beginning is an opening. I forget that sometimes. Do you? How do we limit what is explored by thinking the door we enter a poem through must look a certain way? How do we limit ourselves? Our readers?
It’s hard, too, for me to move past those first three lines, because I adore them so much. They absolutely stun me with their ability to capture love, pure love. Imagine if someone greeted you in such a way. I would collapse into myself. I would die, just a little bit. I’m particularly drawn to depictions of sweetness in men and toward men. This is not because I think men are profoundly misunderstood or under-served, but rather because I value sweetness: honest sweetness, before-the-mistake sweetness, before-the-forgiving sweetness, sweetness as pure greeting before life hollows us into flutes that play no songs. I think not just of the last sentence of Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Song” — “The heart dies of this sweetness” — but of what comes just a few lines before: “The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother's call.” That low song. That lost boy. That mother’s call. To begin with such openness here, in Karisma’s poem, to begin with such kindness — it is to tell that lost boy that he is soft, and that such softness is not just beautiful, but valued. It is to sing the sweet song first so the low song never has to be sung.
I am talking about that openness and generosity in Karisma’s poem because it extends and deepens what follows. The first eight-and-a-half lines are pure image, pure certainty of depiction. They express a moment that happened, and express such a moment with clarity and light. But then there is that If — and I fucking love that If. That “if” introduces possibility, it introduces the cause and effect, and it introduces confusion, complexity, and pain. In the door of softness that this poem walks through, the “if” heralds the arrival, even in its uncertainty, of a kind of truth.
And, beyond that, or with that, or however you want to put it — the “if” also marks the arrival of a craft choice that Karisma makes that is so subtle and so remarkable at once. Notice how that first litany of if’s — the “holiest thing,” the “accidental conjuring,” the “beautiful / darkness” (okay line break, fuck me up!) — just goes unanswered. Unresolved. It feels maddening at first, doesn’t it? It did for me. The poem resisted a kind of easily digestible grammar. I was waiting for the then. I have been fine-tuned to wait for the then. I want — yes, sometimes, I’ll admit — the easy answer, the easy math of certainty. But there is no then. Not yet.
When I read the poem now, I notice the hard-stopped pause that resists the then in the third-to-last line as a moment of deep sorrow. I notice what came before that pause. Holiness. Darkness. Betrayal. Breakage. Innocence. Hunger. Harmlessness. So much is there, all at once. If you are supposed to be all these things, the speaker seems to say, then what? I read that pause, that refusal to supply the “then,” as the speaker gathering herself. I read it as an accumulation of contradictions, an accumulation of pain that has no easy answer, no easy then. What am I supposed to do with this, the speaker seems to say. All of that weighing, accumulation, uncertainty — it buoys up and makes more powerful the final certainty:
If our meeting was
an attempt to anoint our father’s
mistake, you have failed.
That last line wrecked me and still does. How sudden it is, how sharp, how etched in deep contrast with the litany of if’s that came before it. This taut, simple, powerful: “you have failed.” It hits and hurts deep because it feels, at first, like an attack. It feels like a sharpness levied against the speaker’s brother. This failure. What a heavy word. But then consider the certainties we know of the brother. The softness. The tenderness. The simple, basic fact that he is not the father. And notice what the brother is failing at — the attempt “to anoint our father’s / mistake.” To give what seems so traumatic, so complex, a kind of blessing. An offering of holiness. To be, all at once, all those qualities listed above. Who could do that? Instead, the brother is succeeding at being just two:
the most tender part
of our father and the softest
part this side of the grave
There is love here in this poem, I believe. And grace. And gentleness. There is an acknowledgement of all that is unanswerable, and, perhaps just as important, all that does not need answering. And there is a reminder of the ways in which, beyond the poem, someone is asking someone to be something that they cannot be. I hope, if that happens to you, in your life, you offer yourself grace. This poem is, I think, a love poem. Notice how it ends with failure and still holds space for love. There is a lesson in such grace. I am holding that lesson close.
I return to this poem because it relates how we are so much. How we are expected to be a different kind of so much, a less complex kind, and how we are told to be easy answers for difficult problems. Sometimes there are things we fail at that we never asked to be considered for. And sometimes there are other failures that only a poem’s dwelling can discover through the wreckage the mind makes of memory and the wreckage the present makes of the past and the wreckage other people’s failures make of those they leave behind. I think maybe part of a poem’s job is, at times, to resist easiness, to put off the then for as long as it can. To sit for a long time. To breathe. What good is resolving something easily in the face of the world’s contradictions? Where does the poem exist in a world without mystery? Perhaps it just goes away. I’m glad, and grateful, that Karisma’s poem is here to stay.