Michael Lavers' "The Happiest Day of Your Life"

Thoughts on us, all of us, being enough.

The Happiest Day of Your Life

You wake up and hear rain. You wake up
and think there’s not enough rain, not enough
songs about rain or memories of rain.
Of being numbed or warmed by rain.

You wake up. Your eyes are open.
Lilies in a moss-green bowl. Elms through
the window moving their hands like cellists.
Books exist. And paintings. And pillows.

Blue Mountain and Saddle Mountain.
Abundance Creek. Alpha Centauri. Delft.
The woman in your dream was putting down
a crate of oranges, but then you woke up

remembering there is custard.
There is Verdi, there is smoke-filled 
late-fall air. And even joy in what 
it feels like to grieve. Wanting to sleep 

instead of bear what you must. 
Like finishing the best book in the world.
You wake up, wanting to try.
You try. Here in the swirling eddies,

in the dark river of time and decay.
There is rain. There is this day. There is
this day and no other. Praise it with trumpets
and zithers. Praise it however you can. 


from The Inextinguishable (University of Tampa Press, 2023)

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I was sent a copy of this book by a fellow writer who remarked, upon sending it my way, that they had spent many of the nights prior reading some of Lavers’ poems aloud to others. And so I begin with that image for you to imagine — a group of friends gathered, holding this book, passing it around, and one of them, I’m sure, under starlight and smelling of woodsmoke, saying you wake up and think there’s not enough rain. Beautiful, right? It happened, I believe. It happened.

(A note: These things happen all of the time, by the way, and by that I mean that, nearly every waking moment, one person or a group of people or, good lord, a whole crowd of people, are literally having the time of their lives, their own perception of time, perhaps, absolutely operating on a different scale than yours or mine, the clock no longer working and the night forever-long, the way, just the other morning, I was running on a road along a beach and saw, upon a grass-lined promontory that looked over the water, a circle of various-colored beach chairs and the remnants of rocks gathered in a circle, charred on the edges and maybe even still warm, and I thought to myself, ah, fuck, they must’ve had a beautiful night, letting myself imagine the smell of salt air blending with the scent of fire, that one friend who can’t help but smoke every cigarette, and the chatter of conversation and the clatter of glass and the feeling that something is okay, briefly, in the context of a life that can sometimes feel too long and can sometimes, graciously and blessedly, feel too short, the night you can’t help but wish would never end alongside the friends you don’t want to ever die, and so you hold and hold and hold, knowing the letting-go might happen without your permission and sooner than your liking, which is the difficult beauty of all your loving.)

I am drawn to this poem today because of its title, because of the bait of its title — how it tricks us, perhaps, into thinking that this poem might be about the triteness of happiness without being aware of the triteness it is about. It’s hard to think of happiness these days, and even the word happiness feels like something approaching shitty, this thing borne out of consumption and a lack of attention, rather than care and a wellspring of awe. But today’s poem subverts that expectation, doesn’t it? It’s there in lines like these:

even joy in what 
it feels like to grieve

This is one of three poems in this absurdly beautiful collection by Lavers that holds the title “The Happiest Day of Your Life.” Here’s a few lines from another of the same-titled poems:

If it must be like this
if we must be reminded the body is frail
if the body is frail...

let's demand what we can
let it it grant us at least for a moment
the world
let me once
make my daughter's braid tight
let the pear branches bow
to the weight of their fruit

And here’s a few lines from the other of the three same-titled poems:

the world wants nothing
but the endurance of its journey

Yeah. Beautiful, right? These are poems of dependence, aren’t they? These are poems of dependence rather than independence. I think we often think of joy as something related to independence — this notion of having a kind of limitless array of choice, perhaps even this rare and unreal possibility of living forever. And yet, such poems as today’s remind me that our joy is tied up — radically so — in our limitedness, in the very notion that it rains, that we grieve, and that the body is frail.

Indeed, in another of Lavers’s poems, “Sun, Birds, and Leaves,” he writes:

Who's to say things should be different?
It is spring and there are birds, and sun,
and leaves, and my happiness in this moment
knows death. It has agreed to the moaning.
It seeks neither recompense nor relief.
Heaven is here, and I have not forgotten.

Whew, come on! I am thinking of a recent interview with Peter Thiel, which I did not want to read but then began reading and then, begrudgingly and with a desperate rage, continued reading. It is a sprawling, unjustifiable mess that takes as a given that we, as humans, have every answer to what we define as the problems of the world. To which I say: we don’t. And to which I also say: we are, in many ways, the problem of the world. And to which I finally say: the central problem of this world is not that we haven’t attained immortality; it is that, in chasing an unattainable dream for a very select few, we have neglected to meet the most essential and basic needs for every mortal being.

In the interview, Thiel says, among many things:

The ideal was this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body.

And then continues:

We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body.

Not enough, Thiel says throughout the interview. The growth we are making is not enough. The way we think is not enough. The little progress we make is not enough. I read things like this and feel a great loneliness crawl its way into my body, a twisting and turning of agony and grief, and I become somewhere far beyond frustrated about the way those with power define what progress means, and how it happens. I don’t understand, sometimes, why we cannot pause, breathe, and admit how little we know and how much we’ve fucked up. There is a massive gulf between those who think a solution to our existence is something limitless and those who think that our mortal bodies, fragile and limited they are, are not a problem to be fixed.

Notice, in today’s poem, how Lavers, whose poem is a poem that acknowledges such fragility, is keener to really truly see and describe the world as it is, rather than the world as could be. Notice how the poem begins with sense: you wake up and hear rain. Notice how such sense allows for a moment of description that verges on magic:

Elms through
the window moving their hands like cellists

(The cello, by the way, is right up there with the moon as the partner of poets; if a poet could have anything, it would be a symphony of cellos under a full moon.)

Notice the naming of things that are here with us right now, and were here before, and will outlive us:

Blue Mountain and Saddle Mountain.
Abundance Creek. Alpha Centauri. Delft.

And notice the music of such naming, how Creek bounces to Centauri, and how that thin, singing e sound comes back in dream, Verdi, grieve, sleep, eddies.

And notice, finally, that word: zithers. A fucking joy of a word and an insanity of an instrument, a guitar with all body and no neck, as if someone strung a bunch of strings on the one piece of shipwrecked wood that saved them.

You see, when your entire construct of the world is based on the notion that we are not there yet, then your attention, I imagine, is trained on a future that you believe can only exist with both your permission and your knowledge. Such a use of attention is, in many ways, a misuse of attention, which is perhaps our greatest gift. To take such attention and turn it towards the nonexistent is to ignore the precious and sometimes passing world as it is. Our attention is a gift because it reminds us, every waking second, that we are in the presence of so many somethings that exist without our permission and to the benefit of our curiosity, our imagination, and our understanding of beauty. Our attention reminds us that we are here, that we should look around. It begs us to consider. As Lavers writes, in another one of his poems:

I asked for awe, and ordinariness flared

If it is in our nature to be, at times, dissatisfied and idealistic and dreaming of immortality, then it must also be our nature to acknowledge — if we are paying attention — when the world reminds us that much of what we need is among us. We ask for the immortal world, but the mortal world is right here, and it is more beautiful because of its mortality.

I’m thinking, too, about how one critique of a poem such as today’s, or of any of the aforementioned excerpts, might be that such moments — of a kind of generous bliss, a satisfaction with the ordinary — are not afforded to many people. That it is a kind of privilege to be aware of death but not to feel it preying on your every immediacy, as those in Gaza must. As too many people must. I think I’d agree with that.

And yet, I’d also add that such a worldview as today’s poem suggests, a worldview that acknowledges frailty and admits dependence, is a worldview that puts one closer to solidarity with those who are marginalized by the pursuits of the powerful. Our politics, I think, are bound up in our intimate relationships with our own bodies, and with our own suffering. When you acknowledge your own dependence, you begin to see the dependence of others. When you no longer look to the immortal world, and look instead to the mortal one, the world becomes a world of communal need, rather than a world where every individual attempts to avoid the very fact of their needing. The mortal world also becomes, by the way, a world of deeper joy, where every peach pulled from every tree is cherished. Rare thing, that peach, isn’t it? It existed once and never again. The same is true for us.

When Lavers asks if things should be different, he is pointing, I imagine, at every person who suggests that our world is not enough, and who, in such suggesting, neglects the very mortal needs of those who live and die, right now, in this world. To worship immortality is, paradoxically, to make expendable the mortal lives of those who are alive right now. It is to say that the betterment of humanity is worth the lives that are lost in this second, and the next, and the next. To be clear, the world is not enough right now. But this has nothing to do with some for-profit definition of progress. It’s not enough because we haven’t done enough to acknowledge and meet each person’s humanity. That kind of enough-ness, which is an enough-ness of recognition, is what we are missing. Everyone deserves to feel the rain, smell the smoke-filled, late fall air. Everyone deserves to feel so precious about woodsmoke and the chatter of friends that you wish such moments could last forever. That wishing against the fact of our own lives? That longing? There’s joy in that, I think. Because you have to smile the moment you make that wish — I wish this night could last forever. The happiness of our lives is embedded in the impossibility of forever.

People deserve to reckon with their own mortality in a way that allows them to appreciate it. That takes safety. Not fear. People deserve that safety. It is an absurd thing to me that those with enough money to worry about their own mortality feel that it is their own bodies that make them unsafe, while they make decisions that endanger the lives of so many countless others.

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Some Notes:

1. I have found that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing great work in building solidarity and awareness and justice in this contemporary moment. You can find a list of their resources and areas of further support here. Please consider following and supporting the work of The Sameer Project (link here) and The Gaza Sunbirds (link here), as they provide on the ground support for Palestinians in Gaza.

2. My article for Outside Magazine, on what it takes to support someone as they run over a hundred miles through Death Valley, came out last week. You can read it here.

3. My novel, Pilgrims, has a cover, a release date, and a preorder link. It’ll be out November 18th. You can preorder it here. And the cover is below. For all of this, I am wildly grateful. This novel, which tells a story of monks and brothers and dogs and bread-makers and long roads, feels like a big chunk of myself. And I’d be honored if you read it.

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.