Michael Burkard's "Prayer"

Thoughts on care & prayer.

Prayer

My dog
who disappeared,
may you sleep soundly
in the form of this
cat I found, have
taken in to heal,
address as being in
league with you and 
your form, until all 
or much is mended.


from Entire Dilemma (Sarabande Books, 1998)

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I owe the wonderful poet Tom Snarsky a debt of gratitude not just for introducing me to this poem (and many others), but also for writing so beautifully about Burkard’s work (which Snarsky describes as “a candle from which were lit a thousand other poet-candles”) not long after Burkard passed away, right at the end of last year.

I first encountered Burkard’s name in a poem by Noah Eli Gordon, who also sadly passed away not long ago. That poem, “What Do I Know,” is dedicated to Burkard, and ends with four lines that have been seared in my brain ever since I first read it:

ten years ago I wrote "gushing self-pity" next to a poem
in one of your books I'm sorry ten years ago I thought I knew
everything about what poems should do now I know I know
very little and that it's better this way standing here in the dark

I had that poem taped above my desk when I first started writing, and I thought to myself that someone for whom such a poem was dedicated must be a very wonderful someone indeed.

Today’s poem — and so much of Burkard’s work — proves that to be true. It’s a poetry of joyful looking, the kind of poetry that leaves you with turns of phrase and moments of description that feel like you’re seeing the world for the first time in a long time, the dust of life’s detritus wiped away from the windshield of your eyes.

Like here, in his poem “Pictures of the Life,” where he writes:

if the face is a window
or if my love is one
I may be a window to their
wounds as well as mine

Or like here, in his poem “Hat Angel,” when Burkard writes of the feeling of need. He describes it in this way:

to
have something in this life pull
her out of this, like the moon,
the moon's a puller

Come on! The moon’s a puller! Yes, it is! It is. It pulls water away from the shore, and it pulls us away from our sadness sometimes, the subject of which is its own poem, by Catherine Barnett:

Not wanting to be alone
in the messy cosmology
over which I at this late hour
have too much dominion,
I wander the all-night uptown Rite Aid
where the handsome new pharmacist,
come midnight, shows me to the door
and prescribes the moon,
which has often helped before.

And so, today’s poem does that work of scrubbing away the shitty calcification of the world, the way sometimes a life lived each day can feel like a life dulled each day, a life pained into submission by news or by disarray. Today’s poem wakes me up to the newness that exists, even when everything feels old. It wakes me up — in this way — to hope, which is a word for what happens when what has been given up feels like it might be given back.

I have always been drawn to poems that are prayers. Here’s one of my favorites, by Galway Kinnell:

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

And another, by Christian Wiman, that ends:

that a mind
blurred

by anxiety
or despair

might find
here

a trace
of peace.

Or another, by Danez Smith, which I sometimes catch on the walls of New York City’s subways, part of that ongoing initiative that exposes riders to bits of poetry framed above orange seats, poetry read while standing amidst the crush of people during rush hour, clutching a bag against your body, in the weird and forever strange silence of a hundred people each listening to their own music:

let ruin end here

let him find honey
where there was once a slaughter

let him enter the lion’s cage
& find a field of lilacs

let this be the healing
& if not   let it be

I think I am drawn to these prayer-poems because, though I no longer practice a faith, I feel that the practice of asking — whether one god or many, whether someone, whether whatever mysterious force you recognize, whether, even, no one in particular, or anyone in particular — for something, for anything, is the kind of practice that is worth practicing. Asking presupposes a not-having. It also presupposes a state of need, a need that I might suggest is borne out of a recognition of one’s fragility or humility or longing. Mary Oliver writes, in her poem “Praying,” that prayer:

isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks

This idea finds a home in Larry Levis’ newly published poem, “Prayer,” which ends with the words: Thank you.

And so I think, in other words, that asking is good. And kind. Without asking, there would be less giving. And giving, too, is also kind. But I think, especially now, that I am drawn to these prayer-poems because I don’t know where else to turn. And I appreciate Burkard’s poem today because of the way it allows me to see in the world what I might want and need to see.

Consider this world that Burkard portrays, a world where what is lost (a dog) can be loved and cared for through what is found (a cat). It’s a magical world, yes. Even absurd. But it’s also — in some tangential way — a world worth seeing, a world where things can exist not just relationally, but dependently. That world — where our dependence on each other is made evident not just through loss, but through joy — is this world, though it doesn’t quite seem like it. This poem today reminds me of that. A lost dog can become a found cat. A poem does make it so. A poem makes real the parts of the soul that we most long to see in the world. And, in doing so, a poem makes real the soul itself. Magic stuff, don’t you think? It’s beautiful.

Today’s poem makes me think of my mom, who has always been a caretaker of injured things. I remember being little and meeting her at an airport, to find that she had returned home with a cat she found near a dumpster, a cat whose single toe had been broken into over twenty nearly uncountable pieces, and had, because of that sad fact, to be amputated. Her name was Eugenie — Genie-pie or Gene-fry for short — and she spent the better part of her early life thumping angrily around in a bright pink cast. I can still hear the way my mom said her name, almost on the verge of crying — she loved her so dearly.

Then there was Maggie, the beloved puppy, and Luna, another cat, and Athena, another cat still. There was the one cat who ran away, and my mother’s desperate sadness at the time. She was living then in an apartment that bordered an alleyway, and I remember walking the length of the alley with her at night, calling that little cat’s name.

I don’t doubt that, for my mother, there is an idea that all things live inside all things, that maybe her cat now — Athena — is connected in some way to Eugenie, that they feel each other across the infinite billions of wavelengths that connect two souls across space and time. And even if that is not the case, what I know for certain is true is that whoever my mother is caring for now feels the wild and moving depth of her love. And love — which is the work of attention we give to one another as a form of care — is a language developed over the space and time of a life. It is our love, I think, that connects us to others, because it is our love that is constant over time. It is our love that is the personal trademark of our attention, that way of seeing that is unique to each of us. My friend who holds me tighter than anyone. My friend who somehow knows what my eyes are hiding from the world, and who asks about it. My love who holds my earlobes as if they were lifeboats. What a blessing it is to be loved in so many ways.

Today’s poem is a prayer for rest and healing. Shortened into a single sentence, it reads: may you sleep soundly until all or much is mended. That’s a wish I wish for many people now — for rest, and for healing, even, and especially, in a moment that requires so much constant action and vigilance and witness, a moment where rest feels impossible or luxurious or both.

I think I wish this because it feels lonely now. It feels lonely to care, and lonely, even, to love. It feels awfully lonely, with an emphasis on the awful. And perhaps it is still worthwhile to think of poems in such a moment, because the art of poetry feels like an art of connection in a world of loneliness, this art of creation that exists not just for itself, but also as a result of someone (or many someone’s) else. It’s an art that sometimes feels useless, maybe, and yet, and yet, and yet. Burkard’s poems are littered with dedications. His poetry — like the poetry of so many — is a poetry of constellation-making, a poetry whose very existence honors the very existence of so many others. There’s beauty in that. And there’s something worth thinking of, in this world of revisionist truth and undoing, this world of unmaking the work of others, this world of warring against love. It’s worth thinking of work that makes its dependence on others as clear as possible. Like the lost dog that lives inside of a cat. Like the poem dedicated to another poet. Like the prayer that says I need help.

In one poem, “A Blue Line,” dedicated to the great Denis Johnson, Burkard writes:

Hey, once in the blue rain I was screaming for
you. It was more foreign than a foreign city.
Every time I left the house the rain got bluer,
and I had to turn back.  Worse, I felt trapped.
It went on and on.  I went nowhere.

I didn’t even know there was still a blue line
from me to you, that if I had just followed it
I would have found you:  lonely like me then,
with your mouth to the window, and the stars
blinking but saying write darkly for now.

Write darkly is a worthy mantra for this moment. As we scream for each other and as we feel trapped and as we walk roads that might feel as if they lead to nowhere. There is a line connecting us, and even if we cannot see it, we make it so by believing it, and by continuing to make whatever we make in these rooms we live in, these rooms where there might be little light by which to see. But light enough. So write darkly, yes. Write darkly.

As I did last week, before I close, I’d like to mention a little something. I am in the middle of teaching a virtual class for the Adirondack Center for Writers. It’s called You Do Not Have to Be Good, and it’s on reading and writing with generosity in mind, on moving away from a restrictive and prescriptive method of such things that can label things in ways that feel reductive rather than expansive.

I’ve asked my students to, in the week between classes, engage in reading and writing prompts that feel, at least to me, like some small way to try to read a poem and then look at the world and then try to approach any of it — however hard — with generosity. I’d like to offer the prompts here, each week, as well — in case you, reading this, are interested. I don’t want to gate-keep every aspect of that class. And I’d like to answer them myself. Here’s this week’s prompt:

Read, as a guide, E.C. Belli's "Illumination," and Ada Limón's "The Quiet Machine," both of which unpack the grace and process of learning. Learning how to change. Learning how to be. Learning new ways of trying to exist in the world.

Then, in a little mini essay or a poem or whatever you want, write about what you are learning. Maybe it's something ongoing. Maybe it's something sudden. Maybe it's a choice you're trying to make. Maybe it's about what feels impossible. Write about it. See what happens.

Here’s Belli’s poem:

And here’s Limón’s:

As I told my class the other day, I had to prepare a talk for my school this week, as we spent this week pausing classes as part of a weeklong initiative of project-based learning that we undertake a couple of times a year. This week’s project asked kids to work together to prepare “Ted Talks” — talks based on their own choices and stories, talks they could structure however they wanted. I was asked to prepare a model talk, something I struggled with. But I ended up creating a talk on learning.

I’d post the whole thing here, but it ended up being approximately 80 slides long, filled with stick figures. I talked about learning how to ride a bike at the age of 32, an event I undertook — thanks to my friend Hal — in the middle of Central Park in the middle of summer, surrounded by tourists. I talked about how such learning wasn’t easy, how it was quite hard, how I fell a hundred times — in front of kids and babies and more — and how I felt, in those moments, embarrassed, ashamed, and alone.

The truth is that learning is hard, and that we forget that. We forget, I think, how hard the easy things once were, and then — in that forgetting — lose our capacity for grace and compassion. This means, perhaps strangely, that learning is an act of forgetting though we might think of it as an act of encountering. And yet, when we learn, we forget so much. Our shame. Our falling. Our loneliness. This is liberating, I know — it allows us to enjoy what we have learned, and to try the next thing we encounter. But when we continue forgetting such moments of vulnerability, we don’t see people engaged — as they always are, as we always are — in perpetual and ongoing acts of vulnerability.

Everyone, in other words, is in the middle of learning how to do something they did not know how to do. Suffering illness. Caretaking. Navigating sobriety. Saying goodbye. Saying hello. Committing. Letting go. Riding a bike. To see people in this way, rather than as people who are somehow fully formed, having encountered every unknown they will possibly encounter, feels warmer to me. Gentler. I’ve needed to be seen that way, certainly. There are times when it would have meant the world. Maybe this is true for you, too?

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Some notes:

1. Here is a website — put together by volunteers — that tracks the jobs lost and lives affected by the de-funding of USAID. It’s worth reading in order to fully understand the severity of what is happening, who it is affecting, and how to help.

2. You can find a list of the work that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing to build solidarity among writers in support of Palestinian and against their consistent oppression here.

3. Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

4. 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.