A note: Substack formatting can be a little wonky with stanza breaks, so to read the poem with its original stanza breaks, click this link.
Ode to the Hotel Near the Children’s Hospital
Praise the restless beds
Praise the beds that do not adjust
that won't lift the head to feed
or lower for shots
or blood
or raise to watch the tinny TV
Praise the hotel TV that won't quit
its murmur & holler
Praise the room service
that doesn't exist
just the slow delivery to the front desk
of cooling pizzas
& brown bags leaky
greasy & clear
Praise the vending machines
Praise the change
Praise the hot water
& the heat
or the loud cool
that helps the helpless sleep.
Praise the front desk
who knows to wake
Rm 120 when the hospital rings
Praise the silent phone
Praise the dark drawn
by thick daytime curtains
after long nights of waiting,
awake.
Praise the waiting & then praise the nothing
that's better than bad news
Praise the wakeup call
at 6 am
Praise the sleeping in
Praise the card hung on the door
like a whisper
lips pressed silent
Praise the stranger's hands
that change the sweat of sheets
Praise the checking out
Praise the going home
to beds unmade
for days
Beds that won't resurrect
or rise
that lie there like a child should
sleeping, tubeless
Praise this mess
that can be left
from Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008)
I am thinking of this poem tonight because I spent almost the entirety of a week of school teaching it (two weeks ago, I think). My high school students are doing some critical reading and creative writing of poetry this year, and we began by reading and writing some odes (poems of praise). I wanted to give them an ode that showed that praise can be a messy thing, that what can be praised and what is a result of praise and what comes from praise, and maybe more importantly, why we praise — well, all of these things are complicated and full of many truths. And today’s poem by Kevin Young is such a beautiful testament to that, and one of the reasons, I imagine, so many English teachers teach it. Or at least I hope they do.
So, needless to say, after leading multiple close-readings of this poem, I’ve found myself pacing around and whispering “praise this mess that can be left” over and over again, looking at various objects in various rooms, various dirty clothes, lost and found things, my own body, this life. And, needless to say, despite the fact that I’ve read and re-read and walked through and doubled-back through this poem countless times recently, I don’t know if I have any extraordinary opinion to offer about how it works, other than that it’s beautiful, and that the poem itself speaks to something so wildly ordinary and wonderfully compassionate at once.
I think what I am most struck by about this poem is its ordinariness. It’s one thing we discussed in my class. So many of the objects praised are ordinary objects, caught up in the mundanity of a mundane hotel. Beds, brown bags, pizza, vending machines, hot water. The poem does what so many beautiful poems do: it charges objects with meaning by placing them in relationship to other things endowed with meaning. In this case, every object becomes some sort of symbol of loss or of a relief of loss, even if such an object feels so wholly unrelated to loss. The poem — an ode, yes, — shows the way grief elevates even the most ordinary things.
And few poets write about grief like Kevin Young does. Here’s his short, two-line poem, titled “Grief”:
In the night I brush
my teeth with a razor.
That’s it. That’s all. And that is grief, isn’t it? The way each ordinary object, each ordinary action — a toothbrush, a nighttime ritual — becomes full-to-the-brim with the relational meaning of what has been lost. The way everything that is has the capacity to remind you of everything that once was. The way life seems to go on in a staccato rhythm, punctuated sharply by pain.
I think grief is hard work. I think praise is, too. And I think today’s poem shows the difficult work of both. The work of grief seems, to me, to be in both the witnessing and the carrying on. What is witnessed is shown in the opposite of what is praised here:
Praise the beds that do not adjust
that won't lift the head to feed
or lower for shots
or blood
or raise to watch the tinny TV
This is detail by way of omission. In this room of mundanities, of non-adjusting beds, the speaker alludes to a room of pain and tests and feeding and so much else. In praising what he does not have to endure, the speaker is reminding us of what he has endured. And this is the first enduring work of grief: witness. To witness the head rising, the shots, the blood. To witness, even, the attempt at leisure in the aftermath of all of that. That is, perhaps, the first work of grief. It’s the work that makes you say: I wish it was me instead. Or, simply: why.
One other work of grief — amidst so much else — is the work of carrying on. It’s detailed throughout the poem. It’s in the “long nights of waiting,” and the “cooling pizzas” that cool, I imagine, while anxiety un-hungers hunger until, at some point, that reverses, and eating feels like a balm. It’s in each metaphor and simile of this poem. Part of the carrying on is the way every second has the potential to be related to a memory in the past. It’s the way the beds “lie there like a child should.” It’s in that image: how a child should be resting, and it’s in the way that image, in the mind of the speaker, which is also a mind of grief, must come up so often. Carrying on does not just mean carrying on. It means enduring all that one must carry on: the memories, the unexpected image throwing itself on the ordinary object you see, the way one must hold that image in one’s head, and then let it go, and then hold it again, and again, and again, and again.
I think I am drawn to this poem today not just because I spent so much time teaching it, but also because of the way it models a way of living in and looking at the world that feels so apt for now. I hesitate to say that poems teach us things. It’s not that I don’t think they do. They surely do. Instead, I think poems can serve as various models for viewing and making sense of and language-ing the world, and one beauty of a poem is not when you unpack its meaning (whatever that means) and say aha!, but rather when you read a poem and sit with it, and then read it again, and then sit with it again, and then look up and say: yeah, I’ve felt that or goddamn, that’s the way I felt but never had words to say or I see it now or when you get angry or sad or throw your book across the room or take out your own pen or underline or scratch out or do whatever it is you do when you feel moved or surprised or awed or hummed back into the earth or all the way out of it.
All that to say, I am drawn to Young’s poem today because of what I said earlier about the hard work of grief and the hard work of praise. So much of being alive today feels like work. And whether that has always been true feels, to me, beside the point. Because it is true now. So much of being alive today feels like work because it is work. This past year has exacerbated our collective sense of loss. It has made the act of daily life partly an act of ignorance as a means of self-preservation. To look too close is to grieve so much. And that is only if you have the privilege to ignore. If you don’t, then I imagine daily life is riddled with loss, anxiety, debt, worry, grief. To think about the future is even a kind of loss. It is the loss of certainty, and the loss of knowing who you might not get to share that uncertainty with.
And so life these days feels at once like witnessing and carrying on, a never ending litany. Sometimes at the same time. Sometimes we bear witness as we carry on. Sometimes we are asked to carry on — to keep working, to send that email, to pay rent, to buy groceries, to cook, to sleep, to show up on time, to log in, to log on, to log off, to lift, to carry, to take care — when we just want to stop, to look, to not look, to sit down. How to continue? How to carry on? I don’t know. Even making time to take time feels like a kind of work.
I think of the first few lines of Ada Limón’s poem, “Work”:
All day’s been a cut above even keel.
The laundry bag broke, the shoe’s
cheap heel stuck in the pavement’s
backbreaker, and the news made its awful
jaw-talk but, somehow, I’m upright.
Rolling the big stone up the hill.
God forgive the panting persistence
of life’s pull.
That’s part of what poetry does. Not tell us how to carry on, but to remind us, simply, that we are carrying on, so that the next time worry strikes, maybe it can be reframed, offered a new language. Or maybe it can just be sat with. The big stone rolled up the hill. Another day. In another poem, Limón writes:
Funny thing about grief, its hold
is so bright and determined like a flame,
like something almost worth living for.
I love the almost there. It would be too much to say we live for grief. It would be untrue. But the almost finds that in-between. It says we shouldn’t have to, but we must. It says, maybe, at some point there might be another way.
We are at a point, I think, where the line between ode and elegy no longer exists. Where we have to find something to praise while we mourn, because otherwise, it would all be too much. It’s why today’s poem is so remarkable. The most repeated word is praise. And it isn’t hard to imagine the work of that. It isn’t hard to imagine that the most repeated word in the speaker’s mind might be the opposite of praise, might be fuck this, might be why me, might be why us, might be please god.
It should not be the work of people in a society that continues to fail them to find beauty while loss ravages the ordinary daily-ness of their lives. But people do this work. This poem is an example of that work. It’s why I don’t believe that we have to drastically reimagine society to find a better way through. I think we just have to look at the ways people are living their lives despite so much, in spite of so much, carrying on amidst so much. There are models of community and care there, just like poems. There are answers.
I’ll leave you with more Kevin Young, and these lines of hope, work, and praise from his poem “Elegy for Heaney”:
What’s left now
to praise? Everything.