Act III, Scene III
This lonely, mistaken sense of time remains true even in winter. In December I feel myself multiplying. Robbing banks of their snow. I have this impulse, to appear splayed out on the ground, looking up at the sky as though I have never before seen a sparrow. I learn that the most triumphant way of being is to stay very still. This I am forever working to comprehend. I cannot relate to the desirous pause the cold weather brings about. How the dawn in January stretches out like the journey from New York to California. In the kitchen, flour stains my bones. Elsewhere, imprints of who I love are left out in shadowy fields. I no longer wish to discuss this pain. How you moved in riddles on top of me. from Wandering In All Directions of This Earth (Ghost Peach Press, 2023)
I remember the first Loisa Fenichell poem I ever read. It was this one, published last year or maybe the year before, where her speaker wishes to “Visit a field / in which everybody is there / for the sole purpose / of being alive.” The poem ends with the kind of power of those great poems that lodge themselves in your memory, those poems whose final lines ring out with a kind of resonant, bell-like truth:
I realize I too have never loved.
I’ve been carrying Fenichell’s first book — Wandering in All Directions of This Earth — with me the past few days. It’s a beautiful one, arranged in acts and scenes, filled with prose poems that are paired with pictures — intimate pictures, pictures of fields and street corners and water and church towers. As such, reading the book feels like being welcomed not just into someone’s brain or heart, but also into the deep sea of someone’s loneliness, into their gaze as they lean their head against the window of a moving train, an airplane window, the fields beside or far below. Reading Fenichell’s work feels like being welcomed into both the intimacy of such a moment and the distance of such a gaze.
Today’s poem is one of the many that I have dog-eared in Fenichell’s book. So many of her poems feel magical in the sense that it’s hard to pinpoint how they move, or why they move. And then I wonder: why do I want to pin such a thing down, to make it certain? I don’t. I love the way today’s poem moves, a series of thoughts and ideas that are related by virtue of coming from the same person. I want to allow it to move. I am grateful to be welcomed into such movement.
In one of her poems, “Creative Exercises,” Fenichell writes:
Instead I was told to use less parentheses,
to introduce my thoughts as whole, undivided little children.
Those parentheticals are at play in today’s poem, even if they are not visible. Today’s poem moves with such tangential energy, the opposite of something whole and undivided. However, I’m also interested in how that moment mentioned above is contrasted with a desire for certainty offered by these lines that follow:
If a therapist could give me anything it would be a list of concrete ways to do away with the shame that comes when the night rolls around, terrified & chilled.
When I think of certainty, of concreteness, I think too of that same certainty mentioned here — the certainty of knowing how to do away with the worst parts of me. An impossible ask, I know. But true, nonetheless. This, though, is where the strange and absurd and powerful energy of being human comes in — those things we call love or grace or forgiveness or desire, those places where what we know and what we hope for do not quite match, and so we, being human, make up the difference. It’s beautiful, I think — this inescapable distance. It’s beautiful even when it’s hard.
I think of these moments when I think of the structure of today’s poem, tangential and searching as it is. Time. Winter. December. Snow. Sparrows. Stillness. Desire. January. Flour. The poem moves between these words and images and topics with the searching fluidity of a person alive in the world, inspired and hurt and loved and in love and still and moving and so much else.
I just finished Eimear McBride’s Strange Hotel — a short gem of a book, told entirely in this stream-of-consciousness style that mystifies language and plays with it at the same time. In the midst of this foggy, gorgeous play, sometimes a single sentence moved me beyond belief. A sentence like:
Why is the world always such work?
Or:
If I could just look back and look back and never change, would I choose that for myself?
In the same way, I found myself so moved and struck by a moment in Fenichell’s poem today, the one where she writes:
I learn that the most triumphant way of being is to stay very still. This I am forever working to comprehend.
I was reminded, reading this, of Bianca Stone’s “Reading a Science Article on the Plane to JFK,” where she writes:
I seek forever the right way to know this.
I love these moments because of how, to use Fenichell’s language, they quite literally still me — they bring me to stillness not just in the midst of reading, but also in the midst of whatever the world is doing outside of my little act of reading. I love that feeling of being stilled. And I also love this conversation between these two poets, how it models, for me, the kind of humility that a poem can so often model. I love, in other words, when a poem presents itself not as concrete knowledge, but as a map of mystery, a way of getting lost. And maybe staying lost. Just lost in a different way. Knowing, perhaps, that being lost is part of being alive.
Yes, something there is of this poem today that feels so much like a mood. So much like a way of expressing the searching quality of being alive, especially amidst a world that makes it seem as if what we are searching for is certainty. Maybe the searching, sometimes, is the point.
In another of her poems from her collection, Fenichell writes:
There’s so much more I could tell you.
Later:
I could tell you I was lonely but still I loved.
There’s so much more. I was lonely but still.
I’m thinking of that phrase but still today. And I’m thinking of Fenichell’s poem, of what it might mean to stay very still. I’m thinking of stillness, too, that very word. I’m thinking of stillness both as the act of remaining motionless and also as a kind of quality-of-being, like kindness or goodness. I’m thinking of stillness as the quality of someone who continues saying still or but still, who continues asserting themselves, who continues writing, desiring, who continues, simply, or very complexly, being who they are. I’m thinking of stillness as the act of saying I’m still here, over and over again.
Maybe a poem is one way of doing this. Certainly a life is. And certainly this world makes it hard for a life to be that way. To continually say I am here; I’m still here. And so we write, I think, to assert who we are. We make art, in other words, to live.
Such an assertion feels apt in the winter, where there is, as Fenichell writes, a “lonely, mistaken sense of time.” I think of the kind of winter that prompts this poem. A winter of months that move over and through us, that chill us through coats, that blow our hats off with the same gusts that sting our eyes. I think of the “dawn in January,” and how it does stretch out into the darkness of the early morning. I think of finishing a run in such a dawn, as I did this morning, a run that I completed almost entirely in darkness and cold, only to be greeted — just at such a run’s end — by that winter dawn, speckled and stretching and brilliant in what little light it provides, what little light I’m grateful for. To be still in the midst of all of this, in this season of such little light, is no easy task. It is certainly “triumphant.”
Earlier this week, I went with my wife to see the great tightrope artist Phillipe Petit — who nearly fifty years ago walked on a tightrope between the World Trade Center buildings (the process of which is illustrated immaculately in the 2008 documentary Man on Wire) — walk on a tightrope inside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Manhattan’s West Side. As part of the show, Petit walked amidst hundreds, if not thousands, of hanging ribbons, his tightrope positioned in the midst of the cathedral’s great nave.
I think I am thinking of this because I am thinking of stillness. I am thinking of stillness both as a sense of immobility and as a sense of motion. I am thinking of stillness as a word that conveys what it means to be receptive to the world and yet still alive and humming and brimming with breath. I am thinking of stillness because, while waiting for movement and breath, I held my own breath. We live this life of constant contradiction. I love this life for it.
Such a sensation was how I felt in the moments before Petit’s walk. I have never seen such a thing before. I have paid money to see people play basketball. I have paid money for theater. I have paid money for music. I have never before purchased a ticket to see someone walk across a tiny thread in a gorgeous space, strange and absurd miracle such a thing is. And yet I did. And others did, too. And what I felt most of all was the anticipatory rapture of such a thing, the way that there was — and is — no rulebook for how to behave during such an event, and yet how there didn’t have to be. People were stilled into silence because of the sight of a man still moving across a rope so thin you had to squint to see it. Around him, the ribbons — of many colors — swayed, and I thought it could have been the breath of some invisible force. Call it god, or call it the wind, wanting to be let in to the little miracle we find people making out of this life. I don’t know, so often, what to make of it either. And yet I am still here. And you are, too. Still here, yes. Still.
The world is moving faster than I ever thought it could. And sometimes — most times — I don’t know what to do with that. And so I try to stay still. Only now, reading this poem again and again today, do I think of such trying as triumphant. I will have to remind myself of this, over and over again. Maybe you will, too. As the dark becomes light, and the clouds break free from the night sky and become dawn, staggered and beautiful thing it is. Yes. Maybe you, too, will say that is me, still here, full of light, becoming morning again.
Some (more than a few) notes:
I don’t talk about it much in my newsletter, but I designed and now teach a Journalism class at my high school, where each month I work with my students to create and publish our school’s first newspaper/magazine. The work of my students is available to read online, and we just released our third issue. You can read it here.
As I mentioned in past newsletters, the ad hoc coalition Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here. I also recently donated to this fundraiser, in support of the Gaza Sunbirds — a para-cycling team that is reallocated their resources to offer on-the-ground aid in Gaza. Maybe consider donating if you have the means.
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So much to relate to in this post featuring Loisa Fenichell's writing. The words still and stillness appear frequently in my life, more clearly since I read your post early this morning. Because I'm learning Spanish, I looked to find how those words might sound in Spanish. Standing still is quedarse quieto. Stillness is quietud. Still listening is sigo escuchando. Still alive and well is Todavía vivo y bien.
" Fenichell writes: There’s so much more I could tell you." I wonder what would be the title of this poem Devin. And yes, another great piece, certainly the best this year. And also i am thinking of WS Merwin's The Morning as i read this today