Oliver Baez Bendorf's "Take Care"

Thoughts on mistaking.

Take Care

Sometimes I mistake the sound of my voice

for a rubber tire on the shoulder of the road.

I mistake my shoulder for an angle formed

by two lines coming together in geometry.

I mistake geometry for the way mothers

are the holy holy holiest of holes in the heart

and I mistake holy for a dried-up plant

rolled into the pages of someone else’s vision.

I am just as full of shit as everyone, incl. you.

And I mistake my fullness for abeyance,

mistake suspension for an early spring

rabbit hiding frozen in the road — I am

not the spring rabbit, I know, but it’s easy

to mistake my ears for tambourines; I am

good at them without expending any effort.

Once I mistook the tart infatuation of a

kumquat for another seedless calamity.

I mistake seeds for nothing all the time.

I mistake time for space, space for freedom,

sparkles in the alley for a sign that our

universe is sentient after all, and loving,

and will take care of those of us who pray

however mistakenly, not on our knees

exactly, but with our hands clasped

that we may be mistaken for believers.

I mistake my hands for belief all the time.

I keep waking up expecting them to be

someone else’s, but so far they’re only

mine, and when I mistake distance for

absence I tend to go astray. Like when

I can’t tell if someone is walking away

from me or toward me until it’s too late

in either direction. I wonder whether coroners

mistake knees for elbows the way my love

loses track of left and right. There are times,

or should I say spaces, in which I mistake

fire for work gloves, which is almost always

a mistake and vice versa. I want a compass.

I need deliverance. Good god, take me,

mistake me back to the soft shoulder

which I mistake so often for the road itself.

from The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State University Press, 2015)

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This is the final poem in Oliver Baez Bendorf’s first book, The Spectral Wilderness, which I only recently read for the first time. It’s a beautiful book. Of it, Natalie Diaz says the following:

In poem after poem he builds and rebuilds a body, a story, a desire that are at once familiar and strange, capable of brightness like any headlight but also capable of losing that light in their brokenness which makes us love them even more.

It’s hard to add to that. There’s a deep vulnerability in today’s poem, but also throughout the book, which is a book that teaches something about tenderness on every page. It’s a tenderness of vulnerability. A tenderness, that comes, I think, from — as Baez Bendorf writes in one poem — a sense of teetering on the edge. In the poem “Precipice,” he writes:

There are a million

and one ways for me to look, but I only want one.

I teeter at the edge.

In another poem, “Ghost Dog,” Baez Bendorf writes:

I miss things sometimes that I cannot locate in the heart.

I have said too much.

There is a sense, throughout the book, of the grace of absolute vulnerability, of having said “too much,” and of the reader knowing, or feeling, that such too much is simply enough. There is a through-ness, not just a beginning, or an end. There is the wide and sometimes lonely and sometimes full and sometimes so big and sometimes so narrow and sometimes magical and sometimes horrible space of what is in between. It’s why I love today’s poem — “Take Care.” It is buoyed by the constancy of mistakes. By their momentum. By their endless reoccurrence. And by the way they offer openings, sometimes, into different ways of viewing and being in the world.

So often, I think, we begin with what we know. It’s why the entirety of Baez Bendorf’s first book is such a gift — it moves the reader through the ongoingness of transition, through a whole series of unknowns. And it ends with this poem, “Take Care,” which begins:

Sometimes I mistake the sound of my voice

for a rubber tire on the shoulder of the road.

Even the poet’s voice, a thing of such deep intimacy to the self, is mistaken for something else. I don’t know why you, reading this, read poems. I’ve typed and deleted some false answers of my own. At first, I typed that I read to be bewildered, that I read to be surprised. And maybe that’s true. But I think what’s most true is that I read because I do not know what I will encounter, and that it’s that act of unknowing — and then the subsequent encounters — that stun, bewilder, surprise me. If I read to be surprised, I don’t know if I ever would be. In Yu Miri’s novel Tokyo Ueno Station, translated by Morgan Giles, Miri writes:

I was still stunned by the same numberless doubts.

I feel that way when I read, sometimes, and I feel it throughout today’s poem. I feel it in the immediate dichotomy between the title — Take Care — and the word mistake glowing in that first line. How the two exist both apart from and within one another.

So much of the beauty of this poem today is the way it is formed by a constellation of doubts. I think, in the same vein as what I said earlier, that a lot of writing — I certainly notice it in my own — is formed from a constellation of truths: these small things we know form the dots, and our writing strings a connection between them, and then we step back and see the larger image of what we have made. But this poem is strung together by a constellation of mistakes. One mistake leads into the next. The shoulder of the road becomes a body’s shoulder. The holiness of mothers becomes the holiness of the holes one imagines in a dried plant held between the pages of a book. There are few certainties, one of them being:

I am just as full of shit as everyone, incl. you.

And I think that is something I love about this poem, too — how it models a way to talk about ourselves in a way that is generous — both with ourselves and the selves we encounter (both within ourselves and the world). One could say, I imagine, that the admission that one is “full of shit” is perhaps self-deprecating. And maybe it is. But I think I’d argue that it is one of the few honest statements one can make, and that there is a hint of kindness in it, a hint of play. Because we are full of shit, aren’t we? Not just literally, but also in the ways in which we live: in our contradictions and our complexities, in our beliefs and the ways in which we justify when we allow ourselves to run counter to such beliefs. To admit such a thing is not to be self-deprecating; rather, I think it’s to model a kind of openness that might breed more openness. And more openness means more compassion means less shame means more of so much more and less of so much else. I think of how, in one poem from The Spectral Wilderness, “Caper in Which We Masquerade as Braver than We Feel,” Baez Bendorf writes:

We were a cruel irony to be too ashamed to talk about

our shame.

That irony is at the heart of so many interactions in this world. It is perpetuated, I think, by the fact that the language of shame does not offer a language to talk about shame. The language of shame makes us ashamed of shame. What is needed, then, is perhaps a new language, which, I think, Baez Bendorf models so often. Today’s poem models the kind of grace that allows for compassion to exist. And patience. It is a grace that is lit up in lines such as these:

I mistake my hands for belief all the time.

I keep waking up expecting them to be

someone else’s, but so far they’re only

mine

It’s hard to imagine a better description of loneliness than this. Loneliness: that feeling of being so deep in yourself that you expect, sometimes, you must be someone else, only to realize that you are only you. And that there is only you. And what to do with that? It’s impossible not to think of Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” and that lonely excerpt:

You remember too much,

my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,

Where can I put it down?

I don’t know the answer. I don’t know if anyone does. But I imagine, if something approaching an answer exists, it exists within the kind of language that Baez Bendorf models for us in today’s poem. A language that is open about doubt, and open, too, about the certainty of not knowing. It is a certainty that comes through at the end of the poem, when Baez Bendorf writes:

I want a compass.

I need deliverance.

Those lines echoed in me. I want a compass, too. I need deliverance, too. And I think they echoed in me because of the way the so-much that came before this admission was a litany of vulnerability. And I wonder, too, if Baez Bendorf was playing with the word mistake to the point where it would reach a kind of semantic satiation, where it would lose its original meaning, which is, quite literally, to be taken wrongly. Earlier in the book, in the poem “The No Shame Theatre,” he writes:

Your body. Look at it. It’s like when

you say the same word a bunch of times.

Boy, boy, boy, boy, boy, boy,

see, it’s lost all meaning.

If you say the word mistake enough, maybe you can mistake its meaning. And maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it allows you to live in the beauty the word offers without the shame it so often produces. Mistake. Mistake. Mistake. Maybe we should say mistake more often. Maybe, if we did, we would mistake ourselves into a more compassionate language.