Leon Stokesbury's "Unsent Message to My Brother in His Pain"

Thoughts on the new year.

Unsent Message to My Brother in His Pain

Please do not die now. Listen.
Yesterday, storm clouds rolled
out of the west like thick muscles.
Lightning bloomed. Such a sideshow
of colors. You should have seen it.
A woman watched with me, then we slept.
Then, when I woke first, I saw
in her face that rest is possible.
The sky, it suddenly seems
important to tell you, the sky
was pink as a shell. Listen
to me. People orbit the moon now.
They must look like flies around
Fatty Arbuckle's head, that new
and that strange. My fellow American,
I bought a French cookbook. In it
are hundreds and hundreds of recipes.
If you come to see me, I shit you not,
we will cook with wine. Listen
to me. Listen to me, my brother,
please don’t go. Take a later flight,
a later train. Another look around.

from The Drifting Away (U. of Arkansas Press, 1986)

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I first read this poem — though it was originally published decades ago — just a few years ago. It is, as I imagine it might be for you, a poem that lodges itself into your brain the moment you read it and then stays there. It will never leave you, I promise. Sometimes phrases from it leap into my mind while I am out walking in the world or sitting still or doing anything or nothing at all. It suddenly seems important to tell you. I shit you not, we will cook with wine. Take a later flight…another look around.

I don’t normally structure these posts around various holidays. At least, I don’t think I do. I don’t try to. But, seeing as this post is going to fall on January 2nd, and seeing as I am beginning the process of writing it on December 30th (it’s 10:50 pm and I do not have to teach for days, so I am eating a tiny bowl of blueberries and drinking a glass of absolutely disgusting almond-beverage egg nog), I thought about a poem that I wanted to hold close as we collectively passed through that invisible border of time that marks the end of one year and the beginning of another. And though this poem has no festive cheer or bundled coats or snow brushed from shoulders or voices erupting in “Auld Lang Syne,” it feels right.

And maybe the reason this poem feels right is because it is pure, visceral sentiment. That first line:

Please do not die now. Listen.

It’s hard to think of a first line that more honestly gets at some deep heart within the act of writing. I think all writing is a form of care: care for language itself, care for subject matter, care for feeling, care for experience, care for the possible, or even care for the impossible. And if all writing is, in some way or another, a form of care, then it is also a kind of life. A desire to live, or a desire to make of this living some kind of bearable sense, or a desire to respect the nonsense of life. And then there is that word: Listen. Perhaps some would disagree with me that any poem begs to be listened to, but I think it does, even if the person listening is the person doing the writing (so many poems I have written have surprised me with some knowledge I did not know about myself until I saw it — and felt it — on the page). And so, to see that word — Listen — there in the first line feels so profoundly moving. It feels emotional, and sensitive, and full of longing. The whole first line feels like something I would like to carry with me into the new year. It reminds me of the ending of maybe my favorite poem, Steve Scafidi’s “For the Last American Buffalo,” the last lines of which — I’ve probably mentioned — were the first and so far only lines of a poem I have tattooed on my body; I love them so much:

…so we continue on
somehow and today while the seismic quietness of
the earth spun beneath my feet and while the world
I guess carried on, that lumbering thing moved heavy
thick and dark through the dreams I believe we keep
having whether we sleep or not and when you see it
again say I’m sorry for things you didn’t do and
then offer it some sweet-grass and tell it stories
you remember from the star-chamber of the womb
or at least the latest joke, something good to keep it
company as otherwise it doesn’t know you are here
for love, and like the world tonight, doesn’t really
care whether we live or die. Tell it you do and why.

Please do not die now. Listen. Tell it you do and why. Such moments in Stokesbury’s and Scafidi’s poems feel in conversation with one another. And I think find myself turning to today’s poem now because of the two generous commands inherent within it:

1. Listen

2. Look

The word listen is repeated four times within this relatively short poem. Each time, it grows in desperation and importance. The first time, it is only listen, and then, each subsequent time, the word becomes the phrase listen to me. Obviously written from a place of pain (in an interview, Stokesbury describes the circumstances that led to the writing of this poem, circumstances involving the “considerable number of problems” Stokesbury’s brother was going through at the time), the phrase listen to me invokes a speaker who is losing the person they are speaking to, who wants so badly for the life that is indicated by attention.

In between each insistence toward listening are moments of pure beauty:

Yesterday, storm clouds rolled
out of the west like thick muscles.
Lightning bloomed. Such a sideshow
of colors.

The sky, it suddenly seems
important to tell you, the sky
was pink as a shell.

I bought a French cookbook. In it
are hundreds and hundreds of recipes.
If you come to see me, I shit you not,
we will cook with wine.

These are not just moments of beauty; they are also descriptions of life. They are testaments to what might happen if and when we allow ourselves to witness, to imagine, to play, to cook with wine. As such, they are reminders of poetry — which is one way of taking the world, as painful and nonsensical as it can be, and rendering in language how it also is. Poetry does not replace the truth of sorrow or pain or fear with the truth of beauty. Instead, poetry reminds us that beauty is one kind of truth that can exist at the same time as sorrow, if only we allow ourselves to hold both truths in our minds. Poetry reminds us of our own capability to hold (and, as such, bear) so much.

There is a moment in that aforementioned interview when Stokesbury is asked if today’s poem is fact or fiction. I love his answer. He says:

This poem is based on fact but is mostly fiction. My brother’s problems were real and large. However, I did not have a French cookbook, but I wanted one. I had seen storm clouds some time like the ones I describe, but not any time during or around the writing of the poem. And I, at that time, was seeing a young woman who one afternoon was asleep in her bed and did look peaceful. When I showed her the poem, she said that she never felt like that. She felt bad and sad almost all the time. Loomings. So I guess I was using my fictive imagination. She really did look so peaceful though. And pretty too.

I love this. I love that much of the poem is “mostly fiction,” and though some might be, I don’t know, a little bummed by this, I actually feel that this admission allows the poem to grow in beauty. Knowing that the story of this poem’s making is bound in both fact and fiction allows us to consider the poet himself as someone who is also desperate — desperate to find in the painful reality of life something worth imagining. I am desperate in that way so often. Maybe you are too. As such, the words of today’s poem are not just for the poet’s brother; they are also for the poet himself. Everyone in this poem is longing for more than they can see from life. Everyone is in need of the reminder, the insistence to take “another look around.”

I think my favorite lines in this poem — other than the obvious “I shit you not, / we will cook with wine” — are these:

it suddenly seems
important to tell you

Perhaps no lines feel more apt a summation of the blitz and bliss of the poetic imagination than these. As I was saying before, I think of this poem and these lines sometimes, particularly when I’m outside. A few times a week, as I continue to ease my way back into running after injury, I wake up and walk to the Central Park reservoir just around dawn. Once there, I shuffle into a jog and manage a few laps around the cinder track that hugs the water. Almost always, the dawn surprises me. It, too, does its own dance of ease — its light gliding over the horizon, stretching across Queens and then the East River. But, from the reservoir, I only see it as a kind of instant miracle: this flush of pink pouring over the buildings, flooding the spaces between them, the city awash with light. And almost always, I stop to marvel. I take a picture and send it to my girlfriend, who is back at the apartment, probably waking up. It suddenly seems important to tell you. To show you. To let you in. To wish you were here. To want you to be part of this.

One of those mornings looked like this:

It suddenly seems important to tell you. I think those lines are why I am thinking of this poem at this time. In the ongoingness of a pandemic that has not ended, and amongst the people of a society who have borne the burdens of so many systemic failures, those lines offer a kind of generosity that I have found myself lacking so often, so recently, and for so long. Such lines make me want to reframe my conception of someone “telling me” something as an act of sharing, rather than as an act of dominance. Certainly someone telling you something can be an act of dominance, a way of showcasing some form of believed superiority. Sadly, this is so often true, and so often true of men. But here, in this poem, the act of telling is an act of longing. It is the poet saying: I wish you were here. If you could see what I am seeing, then we would both be seeing it together. And that is what is important.

Over and over again, Stokesbury details what his brother is missing. It is devastating to witness this within the singular context of this poem, and it is devastating, too, to extend that idea of missing-ness to the broader whole. The poem serves as a reminder of the simplicity of joy, the way joy exists in storm clouds, in waking up before someone else, in dawn light, in the act of cooking. And in togetherness, most of all. In the way nearly all of those things can be shared with someone else, can be seen together and done together and felt together. To want to tell or share or feel something with someone and to have someone there to listen and feel with you is one of the most beautiful feelings of all. But to want to share in joy with someone and then, instead, find yourself alone — that is such a profound experience of loneliness.

As Ross Gay writes, in The Book of Delights:

Our delight grows as we share it.

Similarly, as Barry Lopez writes in his essay “Gone Back into the Earth”:

The living of life, any life, involves great and private pain, much of which we share with no one.

All of this makes me think of a few sentences Dorothy Gallagher writes of her cat, in another favorite book I read this year, Stories I Forgot to Tell You:

Every night I fell asleep grateful for her warm, purring weight. In this way we through that first summer and fall together. She was only a cat; she wouldn’t have done for you, but I felt companioned.

I felt companioned. I love that, the verbing of that noun companion.

Listen to me. Please don’t go. Such requests long for companionship, the simplicity of it, the delight it offers, especially in a world, where, as Barry Lopez writes, so much hinders our ability to even share our pain, to commune in it. A world, too, where so much causes pain.

Today’s poem is a kind of blueprint for joy. The hope this poem offers, as such, is that we don’t need much. It’s why that line — “I shit you not, / we will cook with wine” — might make you cry. Sometimes I think beauty is just out of reach, when really it most often caught up in the ordinary: the slow dance around the living room, the quiet morning, garlic meeting butter in the pan. It is also caught up when we are, as Gallagher writes, companioned by others in the ordinary. One tragedy of the past year and more is the way in which the systems of the world — with the inadequate protection they have offered and their desire to value labor over people — have un-companioned people, isolating them in their homes or their jobs or their illnesses. There have been moments of joy and companionship, yes, but such moments almost always involve people doing more than they should have to in order to experience the potential joy inherent within the ordinary moment.

As I write this today, I long for more moments of ordinary companionship. I long for moments of people companioning each other through the world, saying let me show you or let me tell you or come join me. I long for moments of shared beauty, particularly ordinary beauty, the beauty of the everyday. Our delights, as Ross Gay says, really do grow as we share them. The world, it so often feels, becomes less and less conducive to such sharing, but it’s still possible. It reminds me of something my mom told me so, so long ago, when I was really young and always scared of losing her: “Look up at the sky and know we are both looking at the same sun and moon.” I want to take a later flight, a later train, another look around. I want you to do it, too. I want to do it all together.

Thank you for reading these little essays over the course of the last year, and the year before. It means the world. I hope you have a joyful, kind, and gentle new year. I hope it brings you the peace you need, and the courage, and the generosity, and whatever other gift you long for from this world. I hope you get it. You deserve it.