Katie Ford's "A Woman Wipes the Face of Jesus"

Thoughts on tenderness.

A Woman Wipes the Face of Jesus

This comes out of folklore.
Invented because tenderness at times
must be written in. There was a woman.
There was a cross. But in fact
they have hung him too high
to be touched.


from Deposition (Graywolf, 2002)

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I keep a big stack of my poetry books on top of an even bigger bookshelf that requires me to stand on a kind of small chair in order to reach its top.

Earlier this morning, I went looking through that stack. I stood on the chair and picked books off the top of the bookshelf, thumbing through the pages, reading what I had dog-eared years before. I am grateful for this past self that dog-ears pages, not knowing when or if I will return in the future, which is where I am now in the present, searching for something and not knowing what I will find until I am reminded, all because of some small action years ago, the creasing of the corner of a page.

And so I picked up Katie Ford’s Deposition, a book I must have purchased ten years ago, and I flipped to the first poem I had dog-eared in the book, and I remembered, almost immediately, with the kind of clarity that slices through the fog of memory, these lines:

tenderness at times
must be written in

(As a side note, I watched Sean Baker’s film Anora recently, and felt it as a kind of testament to Ford’s lines about tenderness. This film that aches with ferocity and violence and the consequences of power achieves that ache because of the tenderness that exists within it, the tenderness of eyes seeing someone’s fragility from across the room, the tenderness of silence, the tenderness of tears that come after they have been held back for so long.)

These lines of Ford’s, too, call to mind a few lines I quote often in these essays. Like this one, by Aracelis Girmay:

& so to tenderness I add my action.

And these, from Raymond Carver:

It’s the tenderness I care about. That’s the gift
this morning that moves and holds me.

And today’s poem, taken as a whole, calls to mind a short poem by Marie Howe, “Calvary,” which could sit alongside this poem today by Katie Ford in a little book of little poems that make a million meanings out of this single, biblical moment.

Here’s that poem:

Someone hanging clothes on a line between buildings,
someone shaking out a rug from an open window
might have heard hammering, one or two blocks away 
and thought little or nothing of it.

And here’s another catch. This poem by Howe calls to mind Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” which begins with four lines that echo through Howe’s:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

It gives me something — maybe solace, maybe hope — to see these threads of connection sewn through the work of different people, how so many people are caught up in similar kinds of longing and various acts of witness that speak to each other across the years, reminding us that this work of living is truly a work of mystery. Companionship, I think, and solidarity, I think, are caught up less in the work of sense-making than in the work of sensing. We feel each other when we feel together, I think. And these poems, speaking to one another across the years, remind me of that. They feel together, about some of the same mysteries.

Today, I find myself thinking of Ford’s lines — because tenderness at times / must be written in — because, in this moment, so much is being written in (to law, to the discourse of our culture, to news alerts, to more) that feels like the absence of tenderness, whether that means the slashing of federal aid or the policing of immigrants or the regulating of gender and sexuality. Sadly, in this world, in this moment, I think the absence of tenderness is intentional. And that, I think, is one of the great sorrows of this world.

It exists in this poem today:

There was a woman.
There was a cross. But in fact
they have hung him too high
to be touched.

When I think of those final lines, how they have hung him too high / to be touched, I feel how they spiral outward with, as Nick Ripatrazone says in an interview in The Millions, “a hundred variations and vibrations.” It’s a fascinating moment in this poem, too, as it situates the story this poem is from — the sixth station of the cross — in a different place, as if it happened while Christ was already hanging from the cross. And so it opens up the poem to those hundred variations, which I love.

Here’s one variation I’ll consider when it comes to these lines. This one is murky and dark. In this variation, the lines they have hung him too high / to be touched exist on a figurative level, and not a literal one. In this variation, this man in power, though hanging on the cross, though dead, though gone, is rendered untouchable as a result of his authority — not necessarily the authority he had in life, but the authority he is bound to have in death. He is beyond the reach of tenderness because his power makes him beyond the reach of humanity. This is a variation that meditates on the consequences of power — the way that power, by default, places those with power at a remove from those they have power over, a distance so great it renders people untouchable, not just from tenderness, but also from justice.

But the variation I think of the most is the notion that such a height was intentional on the part of those in power. This small detail that Ford offers, clouded in mystery as it is, makes this notion one of this poem’s possible meanings — that, maybe, he was hung too high to be touched on purpose. And so there is the longing to offer tenderness, but the impossibility of tenderness’s access. This variation takes the power out of Christ and into the hands of those who killed him. They operate at a remove from those they claim to serve, and they bring this man they killed into that distance, too — this place where tenderness no longer exists.

I love Ford’s poem today because it offers such a multiplicity of readings. But I love it, especially, because I can’t un-think myself away from the way the poem seeps into my conception of the everyday. It does this in the same way Howe’s poem does. Both poems make me wonder something about tenderness, or masculinity, or womanhood, or power, or suffering that I can’t stop wondering as I step out into the world, where I long for tenderness, and question power, and witness suffering.

And I think of those two readings as I think of this world right now, where a single man is weaponizing his power and operating at a distance from those who have less power than him. I think of how Trump — and Musk, as well — operates with this sense of untouchability, like a weird, heinous subversion of this poem, as if the cross were a throne, and suffering was directed outward from that throne. But I feel, in Trump’s actions, the kind of puppeteering actions that place things into that realm of untouchability. In every executive order and every statement, there is a sense that Trump is moving things from a place of intimacy to a place of distance. Immigrants, for example, those who live among us. There is a desire, on Trump’s part, to take them from a place of shared intimacy to a place of isolated distance.

Almost every conservative policy does this kind of work. Each claims to solve the problem of intimacy, as if intimacy were a problem. The truth is that the togetherness of shared realities can complicate our lives, yes. When we have to figure out the language we use to make people feel safe — that’s hard. When we have to figure out the structures we must create to make people feel at home — that’s hard. When we have to listen — that, too, can be hard. I get it. Yes, these things are hard. And they certainly are complicated. But they are not a problem, I don’t think. I don’t think the intimacy that togetherness brings is a problem that needs to be solved. I think it is one of the great arenas where we figure out how to navigate the most pressing questions of our livelihood. I think it is the place where we get to figure out how to write tenderness into the story of each other’s lives. What is the other option? The other option is to forget each other. That is what is happening in our country’s politics, now. People with power are telling us to forget one another. One way to fight this, I think, is to refuse to forget, to say I hear you and I see you, to say I am committed to this work of being together.

Before I close, I’d like to mention a little something. I started teaching a class for the Adirondack Center for Writers this week. It’s called You Do Not Have to Be Good, and it’s on reading and writing with generosity in mind, on moving away from a restrictive and prescriptive method of such things that can label things in ways that feel reductive rather than expansive.

Anyways, we had our first session, which I hope went well. Some of you, reading this, were probably there. And hey, I thought it was pretty awesome! I think! I had fun! I hope you did, too, if you were there. And if you didn’t…I’m sorry.

But yes, I’ve asked my students to, in the week between classes, engage in reading and writing prompts that feel, at least to me, like some small way to try to read a poem and then look at the world and then try to approach any of it — however hard — with generosity. I’d like to offer the prompts here, each week, as well — in case you, reading this, are interested. I don’t want to gate-keep every aspect of that class. And I’d like to answer them myself. Here’s this week’s prompt:

As a guide, read Jim Moore's poem, “I'd Like to Say This as Clearly as Possible.”

Then, write a short paragraph/little mini essay that uses Moore's poem as a guide or model to approach looking at the world. By that, I mean: consider the phrase "I live in a world in which" and then go from there. Maybe this looks like a piece of writing that reflects on something specific and beautiful about the world. Maybe it looks like you feeling moved — to joy or sorrow — about something you witnessed at the dog park. But the idea is still the same — what is it you notice about the world, this world, this world in which things happen?

And here’s that poem (notice the dog-ear; thank all that is holy for the dog-ear):

And so, for me?

I live in a world in which one of the bodegas near my school slips some cinnamon, I think, into the coffee they brew behind the counter. You don’t have to ask for it. I think they put it in the grounds themselves. The first time I ordered it, and by it, I mean a large coffee with cream and two sugars (my bodega order), the cinnamon was a surprise. And the second time I ordered it, I was hoping for the cinnamon. It was cold outside, and the cinnamon — and maybe some nutmeg, too — felt like something homemade, as if I had been poured a cup of coffee at a grandmother’s house, or by one of my best friends. It’s two blocks, that bodega is, from the door of my school in the Bronx, where we have heard, as teachers, that ICE is raiding neighborhoods nearby, looking for immigrants. There’s a cat in that bodega. And a man behind the counter who calls me boss, as I’m sure he calls so many people. There are Pop-Tarts for sale for a dollar. The world is held together, I think, by a million ordinary encounters that occur between the millions of people each second allows itself to hold. And the world is broken, I think, by whatever doesn’t understand or appreciate the ordinary, these hands of power coming down from on high to take the cinnamon out of the coffee, the cat out of the bodega, the person out from behind the counter, the immigrant out of the country. But I live in a world in which all that is here — the cinnamon, the cat, the person — is possible. To see it is to love it. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Some notes:

1. You can find a list of the work that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing to build solidarity among writers in support of Palestinian and against their consistent oppression here.

2. Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

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