Leslie Harrison's "[Dear god I ask]"

Thoughts on letting be and letting go.

from The Book of Endings (Univ. of Akron Press, 2017)

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Few recent books have moved me as much as Leslie Harrison’s The Book of Endings. It is, in many ways, a book that requires a great deal of patience to read. Each poem inhabits this same mood of unpunctuated emotion, whether grief, or pain, or anguish, or hope, or despair. If you’re not in the right headspace, the book will slip away from you, elide into the future-present, even disappear. But when you sit with it, you begin to feel the language of each poem as a language of enactment. And when that happens, it becomes a transcendent experience to read. It is like reading the inside of a mind. It is like a roadmap of grief.

In that same vein, today’s poem — and Leslie Harrison’s work in general — reminds me of another all-time favorite book: The Lamp with Wings, by M.A. Vizsolyi. It’s a little book of unpunctuated sonnets that fuss around with love and desire and grief. Like these lines, from “[the curtains are up this morning i’m]”:

the swan i held in my arms asked to
be put down told us there was no prairie
there was no prairie my love i won’t
be mad if you leave me forever
& i’ll understand if you’re too lazy to write

There’s something about the structure of the unpunctuated poem that — though some might argue the opposite — I find wildly generous. I think some might disagree, and say how could you argue that such a poem is generous when it feels difficult to access, and difficult to read? And yet, I’d respond by asking: what is this difficulty you speak of, and on whose terms is such difficulty decided? It’s true that I have to settle myself, and even be conscious of my breathing when I sit down to read Leslie Harrison’s work. But when I am in the midst of a poem, when I can hear the poet’s breath punctuate the invisible commas for me, when I can feel myself begin to catch my own breath, when I gasp — isn’t that the result of the poet’s generosity? Isn’t that the result of an invitation for the reader to further inhabit the emotion of the poem? To read a Leslie Harrison poem, I am only asked to take off my shoes before entering. Once inside, I am all hers, and I, as a reader, am offered so much. I find it beautiful.

Beyond structure and language, this book — and today’s poem especially — is particularly remarkable in its examination of loss and grief. Today’s poem begins with the smallness of the speaker, especially if we use the title as the first line:

Dear god I ask

nothing for myself…

When the speaker finally asks for something, just anything, it is this:

dear lord I ask only this

for myself that the stars come evenings out of the black

dark sky the snow fall enough to muffle the ping of pipes

There is a gentleness here, a sense of de-centering, where the speaker is not asking to be centered in this new world, where what she wants for herself has so much to do with peace, simple peace. I love the way the softness of this request runs in stark contrast with the hurried, long lines of the poem — these thoughts spilling one after the other, as if contained within a mind racing against pain. In many ways, it’s a poem that enacts anxiety, that conveys the sense of wanting something smaller, something gentler, something more sure in a world that offers noise, discordance, and the rushing mess of so much.

But what’s special, too, about this poem is that the speaker does not just want a sense of peace for herself. Rather, there is a gentleness — a grace — that extends outward, that even advises the lord she is praying to. It’s a lovely, astonishing turn on the idea of prayer, particularly when the speaker states:

dear lord be gentle with your angels for they know

only how to fail

It is at this moment that the poem seems to turn outward toward the world, to hold itself open not just to the speaker’s individual grief, but to something collective, a kind of grief that exists in solidarity with all that is “flailing [and] failing.” Though the poem begins in a kind of singular want, it moves toward a universal grace, a grace that stops asking the lord for anything and begins to start giving permission to everyone. In between, the speaker even tells the lord not to “tame our beloved Leviathan” — acknowledging the complex, luminous humanness present even in the devil, the monster, the thing cast off from society.

As the poem moves, it seems to say: the world was not made for us, so “let us run if that be / our desire.” It questions the idea of home, if home is possible, and what home means in a world that hardly ever, if ever, truly feels like home. It gives permission, finally, for us — all of us — to “run / back into what we thought was home,” even that home is on fire. Such lines make me think of Heather Christle’s poem “Self-Portrait with Fire,” from her book What Is Amazing:

They asked me if I was on fire and I said No no no no
no no no I did not want to make trouble I was lying I was
on fire on my legs and on my hands I was ashamed I tried
to hide my legs by kneeling I set the grass on fire The colors
were a brilliant green and orange combination I liked it and smoke
I was not in pain or on pain I was on fire and lying why
to the people Obviously they loved me were warm and pink
and vocal on a promising spring day with electric buds Electrifying
I mean I mean bright bright bright like a likeness of me I wanted
to gnaw and to gnaw on an extra large slice of my likeness

Both poems acknowledge a world that feels like too much. And where Christle’s poem gives voice to that feeling of shame, of trying to hide what it feels like to carry, or need to be carried, or feel burdened by the burdens of the self and those which exist outside the self — Harrison’s poem gives permission to exist in that fire, in that complexity, to stop asking of the lord and start saying: I will, quite simply, carry on — it is my only choice.

I am trying, I think, in my reading and writing, to shy away from answers. They most often feel wrong, or rushed, or in service of some other good that I no longer find myself in service of. What is the point of an answer? Perhaps the answer exists in service of comfort. What does comfort exist in service of? And who? Sometimes, being asked by someone for an answer, I feel like the speaker in Christle’s poem. I do not want to make trouble. I am ashamed. I try to hide. To have to give an answer is, in many ways, a way that you are forced into asserting your sense of belonging. And, it seems to me, no one should have to assert their sense of belonging. That is too much to ask for, and too much to demand. Give all permission. It is okay.