Self-Love Is Important
In the night I sit
With a cup of old wine
Tearing me up
It’s terrible to admit
I haven’t left the house today or gotten dressed
I don’t know what yellow the moon is
Or the tail of clouds around it
Or what is a moon
Forgetting is easy: just never go out
Really soon the sun too will become an elaborate metaphor
Yes when we’re dead we come apart
A little at a time
Today my exposure
To wilderness is a zooming house fly
And the smell of my own sweat
Hey, creature
I am too poor to kill
The death of a body means nothing
Unless it’s your own
And basically the deal is until I get to the end of this poem, or any poem
And/or until I have no more body parts to give
We can both live
Self-love is looking
At yourself like a foreign bug and still loving
I hate my long-dead body, I think every morning and night
Shuddering wine or black coffee down my neck
Pull it down with gravity
With the grace of gravity
I feel less and fear
Paroxysm, bless
The nerves down
To the feet that fold from my body like serifs
I am going to love something to the ground for once
from Dead Horse (Birds LLC, 2015)
I think this poem is so good. Honest and funny and sad and observant and beautiful (the feet that fold from my body like serifs!). It’s such a joy to read it, even in its darkest moments. Niina Pollari is coming out with a new book, too, and you should preorder it. Today’s poem is from her 2015 book, Dead Horse, which I’ve had a copy of for a long time — because any book that’s published by Birds, LLC is bound to be a pretty great book. I felt compelled to return to it when I read two of Pollari’s poems in Granta a few weeks or a month ago. Each of those two poems is almost un-excerpt-able — they combine the curious, wide-eyed permission of the observational with the intimate vulnerability of the personal. To pull out one line is nearly impossible; the poems demand to be read in full.
Today’s poem does that same work. It begins in the everydayness of the world, with that same intimate vulnerability of a speaker willing to admit so much, even if it’s not flattering or beautiful. But it’s honest. It feels honest. Notice again the beginning:
In the night I sit
With a cup of old wine
Tearing me up
It’s terrible to admit
I haven’t left the house today or gotten dressed
I don’t know what yellow the moon is
Or the tail of clouds around it
Or what is a moon
Forgetting is easy: just never go out
I love that moment — It’s terrible to admit. It reminds me of a couple of lines in Jamaal May’s “Macrophobia,” a forever-favorite poem that I am often reminded of:
This is stupid, but I couldn’t wait
to tell you everything
This is stupid. It’s terrible to admit. These are moments of recognition on the part of each speaker of the absurdity of what they are about to say, which then makes each poem a poem of honesty, since acknowledging the absurd is one of the few honest things any of us can do.
And I love what follows that statement in today’s poem: I haven’t left the house today or gotten dressed. Though I am writing this on a Thursday, or maybe a Friday, or maybe both — who knows — I imagine you are reading this on a Sunday, the day after a holiday you may or may not celebrate, and maybe there’s black coffee in your mug or old wine on the table, or maybe there’s old wine in your mug and black coffee on your table, and look, I’m just here to tell you, along with this poem, that it’s fine. It’s okay. Drink the coffee, or drink the wine, or drink both. It’s fine. It’s great, even. Don’t worry about the moon. It’s there. It’s hanging out, being awesome. It’ll be there when you’re ready.
But really, the speaker’s thoughts about the moon in today’s poem offer such an apt way of expressing how disconnected we often feel from the world when we are caught up in extended moments of self-loathing. In a time of intense hyper-connectivity and share-ability, to find yourself in a place where wonder or joy is not the most immediate thing on your mind often feels like finding yourself at such a remove from the world — and the people within the world, and your own body — that you wind up saying I don’t know what yellow the moon is. And it’s funny, because I don’t think wonder and self-loathing are mutually exclusive. Or wonder and the recognition of the absurdity that leads one to feel sorrow.
This week, I was also reading Kwoya Fagin Maples’ collection Mend — a compassionate and painful book from the perspective of three black women made to be experimental surgical subjects. In that book, Maples has a poem simply titled “Moon,” which reads:
If I was up there with you
I’d dress yellow all the time
and some nights I’d wear copper like youIf I could get up there with you
I’d forget all about this life
Leave the earth the way you did
a long, long time ago
What a poem. Stark, stunning, full of longing. And what a beautiful example of the way in which wonder — a moon dressed in yellow! — can offer someone a way of moving beyond the absurd and honest horror of the world, and can allow that same person to fashion a kind of radical imagination.
Today’s poem — though it is peppered with moments of deeply honest self-loathing (I am too poor to kill / The death of a body means nothing) — contains wonder. That wonder is there in the permissiveness that can turn feet into a remarkable, even thrilling image of serifs folding away from the speaker’s body. That wonder is there when the speaker says “Hey, creature,” and it’s there when the speaker allows for the possibility that something as seemingly-simple as a bug “zooming” around the room might teach her about self-love:
Self-love is looking
At yourself like a foreign bug and still loving
And that, too, is why I love today’s poem. It’s not clean or simple. Just now, I googled “goodreads quotes self love” and the fourth result read: The only person who can pull me down is myself, and I'm not going to let myself pull me down anymore. Today’s poem is not like that quote, no. Today’s poem is not like that quote at all. It is not as declarative or generic. Pollari’s poem has bitterness in it, and despair, and self-correction that moves in multiple directions. I haven’t left the house today becomes, a little later, just never go out. That’s a self-correction toward hopelessness. But then, gravity in one line becomes grace of gravity in another. How lovely. That’s a self-correction toward something beautiful. These moments, when combined, illustrate that self-love is not some cliché. Instead, it is difficult, and even sometimes tragic, and is full of ongoingness and uncertainty. It requires a lifelong labor. Pollari’s final line — I am going to love something to the ground for once — is stunning in this regard. It admits, perhaps, that both life and love are two of the most difficult acts we can each attempt. But maybe they are worth it.
Indeed, in Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness, a gorgeous book, she writes:
What interested me was the kind of love to which the person dedicates herself for so long, she no longer remembers quite how it began.
That ongoingness, that difficult uncertainty — it’s pervasive. I just finished reading Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (translated by Adrian Nathan West). What a fucking book. I was struck by a couple moments in the titular story, which fictionalizes a quantum physics debate (battle of the minds?) between Heisenberg and Schrödinger. At one point, Labatut writes:
When Bohr returned from his holiday, Heisenberg told him there was an absolute limit to what we could know about the world.
That limit is clarified later:
[W]hat was beyond our grasp was neither the future nor the past, but the present itself. Not even the state of one miserable particle could be perfectly apprehended. However much we scrutinized the fundamentals, there would always be something vague, undetermined, uncertain, as if reality allowed us to perceive the world with crystalline clarity with one eye at a time, but never with both.
Immediately after reading this passage, I texted my friend, a physics teacher at my high school who, on an unrelated note, often has to endure me popping into her classes mid-class to either break down the etymology of a word like kinetics or hold up a giant piece of paper I sometimes carry that just reads Doubt Everything. Anyways. I asked: “Are you a Newtonian determinist or a Heisenbergian dweller in uncertainty?” She responded: "Newtonian determinist. But you love uncertainty.” I was joyous! Astounded! I had never felt so seen! It was beautiful. I do not know if I love uncertainty, but I do believe — as today’s poem seems to, as well — in acknowledging that it exists, and that there’s some value in simply living with and among it: to be a “foreign bug” that one tries, still, to love. It’s why I am struck by that line above: However much we scrutinized the fundamentals, there would always be something vague, undetermined, uncertain, as if reality allowed us to perceive the world with crystalline clarity with one eye at a time, but never with both.
I think the tendency of our societally-programmed selves is to look inward and find fault with ourselves when the pieces don’t add up. When we are tired for seemingly no reason, or stuck all day in our own head within our own bodies. When the holidays roll around and celebration feels like the last thing in our minds. When we are drinking old wine or don’t feel like seeing a friend. It must be my fault. But to value uncertainty is to understand that there will always be times when the pieces don’t add up, when life feels awash with nonsense, malaise, the sorrow that hits you out of left field. And I guess valuing uncertainty means simply accepting that difficulty, accepting it without blame. And maybe that allows you to come to an understanding that loving something to the ground might feel sometimes like burning something to the ground: difficult, and almost always absurd, but maybe sometimes beautiful.
And it’s funny. I’m thinking again about the moon. Maybe because of this poem, or the solstice, or the dark nights behind or ahead of us. No one really knows how the moon was formed, or how it got up there at all. Was the moon just walking by and then the earth caught it and placed it into orbit? Was the moon formed by some stuff that was just sloughed off the earth, shaken like mud from a dog’s wet fur? The prevailing theory is that the moon formed when the earth collided with some sort of planetary rock, which then expelled a bunch of debris, which then came together into what we now know as the moon. But people have their doubts. And I love that. I love the doubts. There’s a huge rock in the sky that is sometimes grey and sometimes white and sometimes yellow. It’s been there for a really long time. It controls our tides. People have stepped on it. But we don’t know that much about it. I love that. It makes me believe that a gentler way of being with ourselves is possible, that it’s okay not to know.