Maggie Anderson's "What Grief Does" & "Heart Labor"

Thoughts on carrying.

What Grief Does

        Like the ivy in my bedroom that climbs steadily from the red pot out the window, grief is the power of certain madness. And one dreams of bodies. They rise up from beneath blue blankets and expose themselves. They fly under the fluourescent lights and grow long fingernails; they never speak. The language of grief is silence.

         This will never go away. It is your middle name; how you hate it. Grief grows with you, against you, forever; a movie title you can almost remember, or a friend's phone number. Like the ham bone from the party that the black dog buries and reburies under the forsythia bush, grief only becomes more yellow, a bright fire at the center of the earth. And it keeps showing up, again and again, on the living room floor.

from Windfall: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000)

Heart Labor

When I work too hard and then lie down,
even my sleep is sad and all worn out.
You want me to name the specific sorrows?
They do not matter.  You have your own.
Most of the people in the world
go out to work, day after day,
with their voices chained in their throats.
I am swimming a narrow, swift river.
Upstream, the clouds have already darkened
and deep blue holes I cannot see
churn up under the smooth flat rocks.
The Greeks have a word, paropono,
for the complaint without answer,
for how the heart labors, while
all the time our faces appear calm
enough to float through in the moonlight.

from Windfall: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000)

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I first encountered Maggie Anderson’s work when I read her introduction to Have You Had Enough Darkness Yet, a posthumous book of poetry by Irene McKinney, whose work I wrote about last year (when I also couldn’t choose just one poem).

I then read Anderson’s poem, “Beyond Even This,” stopping at these lines for their bluntness, their dry wit, their direct portrayal of our collective condition and experience:

I lived for what seemed a very short time. 
Several things did not work out.

It is that wry directness that I admire about Anderson’s work, a directness I notice in both of today’s poems, which are peppered with short, declarative sentences about grief and loss and hearts and more, these things that are at once a certainty (we experience them) and also a mystery (we are sometimes wildly befuddled by such experiences we have with them). She writes:

    This will never go away. It is your middle name; how you hate it. Grief grows with you, against you, forever; a movie title you can almost remember, or a friend's phone number. 

In today’s other poem, she writes:

You want me to name the specific sorrows?
They do not matter.  You have your own.

This will never go away.

You have your own.

There is something special about these lines, aren’t there? How they acknowledge the difficult reality of being human—how, with utmost certainty, we can almost promise one another that we will each experience something so earth shattering and difficult that it will not leave us. Something at once seemingly impossible to face and impossibly to erase. And yet, if you are like me, perhaps there is something comforting about Anderson’s admission: this will never go away. Maybe it is the same comfort I feel when I read her write—of grief, of sorrow, of loss—you have your own. Taken together, these lines make clear that each of us suffers the memory of something specific that will not leave us. That we each carry that thing. And that we hold in common not the thing we carry, but the fact of our carrying.

Add that to the ongoing list of what makes us human: not that we carry the same things, but that we share in the work of carrying. Often in silence. Often for our whole lives.

The mystery, I think, is not in the carrying, but in how we manage any of it at all.

Consider how Ada Limón writes:

What if, instead of carrying

 a child, I am supposed to carry grief?

Or how Sean Thomas Dougherty writes, in a poem titled “Grief”:

I nodded into the wet dog smell of it
heaved it over my back

carried it like a man
who bears a wooden cross,

he will nail himself to

Or how Maggie Anderson writes, in today’s other poem:

Most of the people in the world
go out to work, day after day,
with their voices chained in their throats.

Such moments reveal that, for all of our endless focus on the qualities and traits that we share as people—a focus driven by notions of compatibility, by the datafication of our strange world—what we share most of all is not something easily quantifiable or categorized. It is, rather, something at once simple and massive. It is the fact of our losing.

In my novel, Pilgrims, there is a scene where one of the protagonists meets a cemetery keeper who maintains this small roadside collection of graves in the aftermath of his father’s passing. In that scene, he talks about the grief of that passing:

I talked to someone for a bit, Jack said. They told me that my grief was like a ball bouncing in a room. They said in the room was one of those cartoon switches that drops a bomb. A big red button. They said the ball is always bouncing. And they said that most days, the ball bounces and doesn’t hit the button. But then, they said, it’ll be a blue sky Sunday, and the ball will hit the button, and you’ll be on your knees crying. People will think you saw a ghost. That’s what grief is like. It gets you any second. The ball is bouncing always. And life is just adding more of those red buttons as you go.

I thought of that as I read these poems today—how grief, no matter how you describe it, whether it is the buried bone in the yard or the blue sky Sunday, never goes away and keeps showing up. It is part of us because loss is part of us. I wish I knew what to do with that other than to add it to the list of things I hold. And to remember to hold it. Everyone, I think, has that button inside of them. Everyone, I think, has a grief that will never go away, a voice chained in their throat about one thing, a cross they nail themselves to, a haunting, a ghost, a wish they cannot stop wishing, a prayer they cannot stop praying, a bag they cannot put down, a derailed train of sorrow, a loneliness that visits them even in the midst of company, a worry, another worry, a worry worse than that other worry, an unseen tremor of the heart, an empty room of the soul that once was filled. It is so much work, this carrying. It feels like more work when such carrying is not acknowledged.

Here’s one more thing: in my AP Literature class the other day, I made a chart of various elements of figurative language. Some students had asked me to help them think through the inner-workings of these things they are supposed to write about, and so I bucketed aspects of figurative language into separate corrals in the hopes it might make these things easier to identify when a centuries-old poem is placed in front of them in the midst of a three hour test. I said that some aspects of figurative language existed as feats of comparison. Others as feats of style. Others as feats of perspective. I said that metaphor is an example of the first. Repetition an example of the second. Point of view an example of the third.

It was a small lesson; I was responding on a whim and trying to think it through with students. I’d probably do it differently now, create different categories, think of different ways to bucket a student’s thinking about language. But now, in thinking about it again, I wonder if every aspect of figurative language is essentially a feat of comparison. I wonder, in other words, if all writing is relational. By this, I mean: I wonder if all writing is inherently rooted in an act of placement, of taking one idea, one image, one character, and opening the door next to such a thing or person in order to see what might be standing right beside them.

Grief, I think, feels insurmountable because it is relational. It is relation with an absence attached to it. Impossible thing, that. A relationship with an absence. It reminds me of the line from Anderson’s other poem today:

The Greeks have a word, paropono,
for the complaint without answer,
for how the heart labors

The complaint without answer. Isn’t that another way of describing something that wants to relate, that wants to be related to, but cannot? The complaint without an answer. The memory without a life to make that memory whole again. The love without its reciprocation. The labor of a heart that goes on without acknowledgement. What are such things if not moments of possible relation that do not find such relation? I think that is where grief lives. And loneliness. And I think that is what makes the carrying so heavy.

But I think, too, that this notion of relation is part of the mysterious and strange and delightful work of art-making. There are, to me, few things more delightful than a metaphor that shatters my very conception of what two things could possibly be compared, or a line in a poem that breaks into another line that absolutely subverts my very expectation of what might come next. There is a real joy to read something like the opening paragraph of Moby Dick, when Melville writes of a “damp, drizzly November in my soul,” a sorrow so vast and all-encompassing that “I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet.”

To me, this kind of moment is not just a moment of specific, surprising description; it is also a moment of relation. It is a moment when Melville writes of something with such specific, slanted, and surprising language that I cannot help but say oh, someone else feels it, too! The what matters less than the fact of feeling, and the trying that comes with carrying what we feel. The joy of reading such a passage is not that someone found the specific words for what I might feel; it’s that someone searched for them in the first place. That someone felt something so vast and complicated and unnameable that they sought about trying to figure out how to name it.

That act of art-making is relational. It reaches into the unknowable void and hangs out there for awhile. It reaches where you might be reaching, too. And me. And so many others. It meets us there, as if to say, I, too, have felt the shapeless grief that does not leave me. And we raise our hands, as if to say join us here, where we are trying to figure out how to carry what we carry, and what to call it, in the midst of our carrying-on. There is no answer there, in that place. No. I don’t think so. But we are there together. Making, out of what we have no words for, words.

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