Laura Van Prooyen's "What Will Be Left"

Thoughts on what we leave behind.

What Will Be Left

If you visit your mother, take off your shoes.
If she offers you tea, accept. When she says
she wants to lie down, try not to think about dying.
Go downstairs. Pass the washing machine,
your crayoned drawing of the White House.
Pass the exercise bike. Make your way through
suitcases, stacks of afghans, toys, boxes of spaghetti,
to the square dance dresses hanging from the pipes.
Take the yearbooks out of the rafters. Try not to think
about the cost of a dumpster. On good days,
she still sings. She doesn't feel bad about losing teeth.
Remember her silver fillings. Remember, standing together
at the mirror, your mother tonguing gaps in her open mouth.


from Frances of the Wider Field (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021)

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The final poem of the book today’s poem is from opens with these lines:

Mother, forget the way things look now—
for we both know

that when whatever it is
lifts the veil
there will be no astro-turfed yard, no neighbors

not the split-trunk
of your father's maple
grown through the chain-link.

Frances of the Wider Field, the book which contains both of these poems, offers this consistently powerful meditation on grief and holding and letting go in the midst of loss — of memory first, and then the body. Both the poem above and today’s poem remind me, almost immediately and viscerally, of the sometimes-hard-to-manage impermanence of, well, quite literally everything. It’s there in the lines just above — no astro-turfed yard, no neighbors — and it’s there, though less explicitly, through the entirety of today’s poem.

I’m struck by the craft that opens today’s poem. I’m struck by the way it begins with two if-then statements, two conditional statements that situate the poem in a kind of indeterminacy:

If you visit your mother, take off your shoes.
If she offers you tea, accept.

What’s so striking about this opening is that it offers the only sense of indeterminacy in the entirety of the poem. It is the only uncertain aspect of the poem. Everything that follows holds a degree of certainty or necessity. The middle of today’s poem takes on an imperative quality:

Go downstairs. Pass the washing machine,
your crayoned drawing of the White House.
Pass the exercise bike. Make your way through
suitcases, stacks of afghans, toys, boxes of spaghetti,
to the square dance dresses hanging from the pipes.

It’s that same imperative quality that begins the poem above:

Mother, forget the way things look now—

I think I find myself so struck by this certainty because of the way such certainty is not a certainty about certainty itself, but is rather a certainty about uncertainty. Does that make sense? I said the word certainty a lot right there, didn’t I? But hopefully that made sense. What I mean is that Van Prooyen’s poem today reminds me that one of the few certainties of this life is our very indeterminacy and our frailty, our passing-through-ness and our vulnerability, our delicacy and our limitation.

And yet, what also moves me about this poem is the deep, frustrating sadness (and still joy, perhaps, maybe sometimes) about what does seem to persist in the face of all those words above, in the face of our limitation and frailty and so much more. In the face and in the aftermath. While we pass through, we leave so much behind.

In today’s poem, the speaker is face to face with the reality of a mother’s memory loss and death:

When she says
she wants to lie down, try not to think about dying.

And yet while the speaker holds the enormity of that possible (and sadly certain) loss, they move through what remains:

• the washing machine

• your crayoned drawing of the White House

• the exercise bike

• suitcases

• stacks of afghans

• toys

• boxes of spaghetti

• square dance dresses

• yearbooks

This is such a moving, haunting juxtaposition of the trivial and the universal, of the accumulated objects of a life placed right next to that same life itself. There is something strange and jarring about trying to process the fact of loss while moving through what persists in spite of loss. Human life is marked by these moments, and sometimes they are inconsequential and sometimes they are vast and painful and filled with grief. Inevitably, every time I have moved from one apartment to the next, I find myself sitting on the floor, looking through notes I didn’t know I’d kept or holding a shirt I didn’t know I had, and sometimes these moments make me laugh and sometimes they make me smile and sometimes they render me absolutely immobile, a bucket of tears on the floor of a now-empty room.

I have been reading Masuji Ibuse’s seminal novel, Black Rain (translated by John Bester) — an account of the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, and have been consistently moved beyond belief in the face of Ibuse’s depiction of the ordinary noticing that makes it clear how much life was present, and how much life was lost. There are objects everywhere in the novel, and they become so precious through Ibuse’s descriptions. Consider this paragraph, when one of the narrators within the text returns to a train station in the moments after the blast:

There was not a soul inside the station. Around the ticket barrier and along the platform was strewn a miscellany of objects—shoes, wooden clogs, sandals, canvas slippers, parasols, air raid hoods, jackets, baskets, bundles in wrapping cloths, lunch-boxes—something of everything, like the dressing-room during school theatricals on graduation day. The lunch-boxes were particularly numerous, and I was oddly shocked—no wonder, perhaps, when the food shortage made eating loom so large in one’s mind—at the way their contents were all upset. The rice-balls were not good plain rice, but rice mixed with barley, rice mixed with soybeans from which all the oil had already been extracted, rice mixed with vegetables of a kind, rice mixed with the pressed-out leftovers from making bean curd. To go with the rice, pickled giant radish, and nothing else. Everything testified to the mad scramble that had occurred a while ago.

From this paragraph, one could make the case that the “miscellany of objects” littering the station testified to their own unimportance. As people rushed to save their lives, they left behind these unimportant things. And yet — one could also make the opposite case, that these remaining objects testified not to their own unimportance, but rather to the very vitality of life itself. These objects, by their very presence, tell us about the fact of a life. They tell us that life was where it had been. Life — filled with baskets and bundles and lunch-boxes — had been here, had been lived and had been lost. The tragedy of such objects, and their permanence in the face of loss, is that they remind us of the impermanence of life. And they remind us, I hope, that such impermanence is part of our secular sacredness. Such impermanence demands our need for care.

In today’s poem, on the other side of those persisting, seemingly-constant objects the speaker notices, is this moment, which I find absolutely wrenching and shattering:

Try not to think
about the cost of a dumpster. 

These lines echo the earlier line: try not to think about dying. Together, they sit on either side of the miscellany that the poem’s speaker moves through. For me, these latter lines stick in my gut for their brutal examination of what occurs after loss in contemporary society. These lines remind me that one cycle of life progresses like this: accumulation, excavation, destruction. As we live, we gather around ourselves these objects of meaning and mundanity, objects that take on lives of their own, objects that become personified, objects that serve a sense of utility, objects that gain and lose and gain again that utility, objects of personal taste that no one understands, objects we have to defend to others, objects of strangeness and oddity and subjective loveliness. What happens to these objects when we are gone? Who goes through them? What grief is caused in this sorting? What grief is caused by the throwing out, the destructing? What do we do with what is left?

When I heard the other week that the famed editor Robert Gottlieb had passed away, my first thought (I could not control it; it just arrived in my head) was: his plastic purses, what will happen to his purses. I had just watched the lovely documentary Turn Every Page, which told the story of the working relationship between Gottlieb and Robert Caro, and in that documentary was a beautiful, funny, unforgettable scene that detailed Gottlieb’s fascination with plastic handbags — objects he had collected (and even written an obscure book about). Instantly, those handbags — precious and strange — affixed themselves to me whenever I thought of Gottlieb. They became a part of him. When life is lost, what happens to the objects of a life?

Today’s poem explores the complexity of such a question. Some of the objects named at the heart of today’s poem are perishable and unimportant. But, actually, let me correct myself. I wanted to go on and say that, yes, the boxes of spaghetti will get eaten, that they are mundane and not imbued with some specific, meaningful quality. But who I am to say that those boxes — De Cecco, Ronzoni, Barilla, some other classic big-box brand — do not call to mind a specific meal made, a moment in a life, the way, if and when I lose my father, I will not be able to see a can of Diet Coke without thinking of him, without thinking of the way he’d carry one in his pocket if we ever went to eat somewhere that served Pepsi. I was slightly embarrassed about this fact as a kid, but I’m not embarrassed now. I think it’s wonderful.

So no, the truth is — I don’t know if any of the objects named in this poem are perishable, unimportant. What I do know is that they might not be. That even the most mundane and ordinary and mass-produced thing could hold some wildly unreal magic for one specific person on earth, who, by virtue of loving that thing, then translates that love — the fact of it — into those who know about that love. We are linked in these ways. We are linked always like this: strangely, sometimes incoherently, sometimes by surprise and with frustration, thinking we were over loss only to be reminded by the books we forgot we kept in the rafters, by a box of something in a grocery store.

Maybe this is why Van Prooyen ends the poem with two final declarations. “Remember,” she writes. “Remember,” she writes again. And it’s not just remember. It’s remember…the gaps. That image, of a mother moving through the gaps of an open mouth, holds so much weight. Memory is an act of holding, an act of sifting through what remains. There can be some choice involved, but often there is none of it. Remember this, I find myself saying sometimes in the midst of a moment, as if willing the object of memory to remain in the room of my life for a long time. I don’t know if it will or if it won’t. I don’t know if it will become a gap in the space of my life, or if it will be an object in the light of it.

In the middle of another poem, “Blue Light at Night,” Van Prooyen writes:

Does the sandwich I made for you
still exist? The dull knife swiped with mayo

sits on the counter. For a minute
I believed you might chew again. I wish
I would have taken you to Red Lobster
that time you asked. What’s left now

but your teeth? 

Memory. Permanence. Impermanence. Passing through. When someone has gone, what is left but objects and memory, if we are lucky or unlucky enough to remember? What is left but our wishes for what would have been, as a body — doing what a body does — becomes something else through earth or fire? One strange sadness of our lives is that we are surrounded, in this long moment of mass production, by the litter that our lives make, by the excess of what is created and bought and sold and kept and trashed, and yet such litter is sometimes not litter at all; sometimes it is the one thing that seems to hold a memory, as if all that is contained within a body could be contained inside what anyone else might throw away. We are surrounded by so much, but never enough, it seems, to hold the fact of our impermanence. This is sad and beautiful at the same time, I think. This is part of the coping we make of life.

Always, there is that opening line from a W.S. Merwin poem in my head:

Would I love it this way if it could last

Big blossom love in my heart for this world: you exist because I know nothing lasts. And yet so strange what lasts a little longer. And so strange what doesn’t seem to last at all. So strange and beautiful, always, I think, what we leave behind. I am reminded of the stones left on the top of gravestones at the cemetery where I once worked. These small reminders that say I was here. Of all objects on earth, a stone feels right for this task. Thousands of years old. Chipped and changed and roughened and smoothed by time, maybe even filled with minor holes, little gaps, and yet still here, in whatever shape it offers for the moment. Like us, I’d say, for the short time we are here.

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Some Notes:

1. To mark the halfway point of the year, I wanted to let you know some of my favorite books I’ve read so far. I’ve read a little over forty books so far this year, quotes from which I keep in a green journal, and these are ones that have really stuck with me (and will, I imagine, for awhile to come):

2. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.