On the Train, a Man Snatches My Book
On the train, a man snatches my book, reads the last line, and says, I completely get you, you're not that complex. He could be right—lately all my what ifs are about breath: What if a glassblower inhales at the wrong moment? What if I'm drifting on a sailboat and the wind stops? If he'd ask me how I'm feeling, I'd give him the long version—I feel as if I'm on the moon listening to the air hiss out of my spacesuit, and I can't find the hole. I'm the vice president of panic, and the president is missing. Most nights, I calm myself by listing animals still on the Least Concern end of the extinction spectrum: aardvarks and blackbirds are fine. Minnows thrive—though this brings me no relief—they can swim through sludge if they have to. I don't think I've ever written the word doom, but nothing else fits. Every experience seems both urgent and unnatural—like right now, this train is approaching the station where my beloved is waiting to take me to the orchard, so we can pay for the memory of having once, at dusk, plucked real apples from real trees. from Space Struck (Sarabande Books, 2019)
I’ve been meaning to write about Paige Lewis’s work for the longest time. I remember when I first started reading their work, back in the age of being on Twitter, and how I felt so struck by their cosmic, playful, tangential poems — these things that wondered and wandered their way toward some criticism or noticing or beautiful, awestruck declaration of love. I don’t know if I’ve ever read poetry so gentle and yet incisive — like being able to hear the surgeon say I’m sorry as they make that painless cut into you, that wounding that sometimes makes healing possible.
Consider this moment, from Lewis’s “You Can Take Off Your Sweater, I’ve Made Today Warm,” where the speaker critiques both men and technology (and the sometimes aimless way in which men can feel so unserious about the power they know they hold) with this small characterization:
Right now, way above your head, two men floating in a rocket ship are ignoring their delicate experiments
But then, a few lines later, there’s this:
When they were boys they were gentle. And smart. One could tie string around a fly without cinching it in half. One wrote tales of sailors who drowned after mistaking the backs of whales for islands.
This is what I mean. A poet capable of holding all of this — this tenderness and this criticism, this vividness of description cut through, as it is, with a kind of magic. Yes, what is gentleness if not being able to tie string around a fly without cinching it / in half?
Today’s poem feels like a gorgeous exercise in expressing that complex capability that Lewis so often enacts in their poems. I mean, here’s the conceit:
On the train, a man snatches my book, reads the last line, and says, I completely get you, you're not that complex.
The rest of the poem proceeds from that false assertion — proving such an assertion false not through meanness or some sort of quick, terse comeback, but rather through a gentle raising of one possibility — He could be right — followed by such a profound and meandering and multilayered expression of the depths possible within a single self that it seems as if the poem could walk out of the book and into the room where you are reading the book. That expression wanders through questions — what if — and metaphors — I’m / the vice president of panic — and so much more.
I’m struck by the generosity of Lewis’s poem, too. It does not need to exist. By that I mean: the speaker of this poem does not need to offer us this depiction of a self in response to such a baseless assertion (and, too, the baseless, mean, invasive act of snatching someone’s book) — that a person can be completely gotten, as if a person is simply one thing. And yet, not only does Lewis offer us this poem, they also offer us a better language for learning who we — and others — might be, which is not — no, cannot be — merely one thing. In this sense, the poem’s existence is its own kind of magic.
In today’s poem, Lewis models a curiosity towards feeling rather than towards judgment:
If he'd ask me how I'm feeling, I'd give him the long version—I feel as if I'm on the moon listening to the air hiss out of my spacesuit, and I can't find the hole.
And notice, then, what that curiosity opens up. An image — a simile — so playful and yet so apt, so genuine in its depiction of what it feels like to panic, or to despair, or to simply figure out why it feels so hard, sometimes, to move through the minutes of a life. Yes, isn’t that kind of panic a sort of wondering? Doesn’t it feel like trying to figure out if you have enough air — which might be love, which might be affirmation, which might be food, which might be anything needed to live at all — to make it through the day, the moment, the night, the very second in which you, reading this, are reading this right now?
This is poetry that reorients me back toward what language can enact of a self’s feeling and experience. Poetry that reminds me that sometimes words can do this better — yes, sometimes — than anything else. Words can make feelings into felt things — the way that music, though invisible, can still drop a lead weight into your gut and become, in that moment, entirely visible and entirely felt. Words can do this, too. I read, and I wonder, and I feel, and I wonder more, and I feel more, and then I feel less alone.
I think I was drawn to Lewis’s work today because I just finished Michael W. Clune’s White Out, a book detailing — in prose that is at once precise and yet sublime, like if you could ink a pen from the outline of an alpine mountain, and then write with that same pen — Clune’s addiction to heroin and subsequent, ongoing recovery. Clune fills that book with moments that offer the sheer complexity of the human experience, of each human experience.
Here’s one:
Who am I? Writing is an aid. I prop myself up on this cane of ink and paper. When I look down at my life, the sadness is a thousand miles wide. When I let the cane fall and drop back down, I see the sadness is one inch deep. A thousand miles wide and one inch deep.
Here’s another, of Clune’s journey back into sobriety:
Not that I missed the dope body. I was sick of having the kind of problems that demons have—sick to death—but the scale of the human problem was breathtaking. It took my breath away, standing in front of those colossal sunsets. Red and purple. The memory of bedtime when I was four coming back in that color. The memory of my first kiss coming back. The way my bedroom smelled when I was ten and I was sick.
In his book, Clune renders addiction as a disease of memory, a kind of whiting-out, and here, in these moments, he renders life as this constellation of memories so remarkable for their feeling, their color, their smell, so mundane and yet magical, the simplest things holding on for dear life in your brain, these tiny stories of almost-nothing that are everything. Yes — if life is this web of such beautiful, speckled once-felt things, then how dare we say that we could completely get someone, could completely get ourselves?
And, too, I love that line from Clune’s work above: the scale of the human problem was breathtaking. That seems true, taken at face value. But substitute the word problem for one less pejorative, or consider the word problem itself with a bit more generosity, and that sentence becomes a blossom. Yeah. It is breathtaking. The scale of the problems we inflict, yes. But also the scale of the problem of trying to hold all this love and beauty and loss and grief and so much else. Of trying to hold it while knowing we will lose it. Of trying to remember something that you have now forgotten. Of being in a moment — yes, this morning, sitting on the floor as I watched my wife sip coffee on the couch — and knowing you might forget it. Not all of it, maybe. But parts of it. The color of her sweater, the way her body became a shadow against the soft grey of the outside light, and my bare feet on the carpet — I’m curling my toes now, trying to find that carpet. And I’m losing it. It’s gone. Though I had it. Yeah. The scale of that problem. Of all of that. Loving and losing. How can we be gotten if we cannot even hold on to all of who we are, and who we were? How can we be gotten if the fact of that is part of our condition?
That is the travesty at the heart of today’s poem. How it begins in unfairness and makes out of such unfairness a singular, spinning thing that is at once so singular and so universal. It is Lewis’s playful specificity that feels so alive in this poem, so distinct, and yet it is that same specificity — a lived experience so deftly described that it cannot be my own — that makes me feel less alone, that makes me feel a kind of solidarity.
Yes, though I have never thought What if I’m drifting on a sailboat / and the wind stops, I have placed my ordinary anxiety into the realm of strange possibilities and let it fester. It’s like how, in Osamu Dazai’s The Flowers of Buffoonery, he writes: “I’m horrified by failure…I barely qualify as human.” I don’t know if I have felt the specific depth of that despair, but I’ve felt terrified before, and anxious. I’ve felt enough to know that, even if I don’t know the depths, I know the feeling of deep water. It’s enough. It must be. We share that deep water.
Or consider this moment:
Most nights, I calm myself by listing animals still on the Least Concern end of the extinction spectrum: aardvarks and blackbirds are fine. Minnows thrive—though this brings me no relief—they can swim through sludge if they have to. I don't think I've ever written the word doom, but nothing else fits. Every experience seems both urgent and unnatural—
No, I do not calm myself in this same way, but I feel that experience resonate so deeply with my own, the way I like to know the names of the birds — of which there are essentially four — that land on the fire escape outside my window. The way that this calms me, how it feels as if a kind of companion is returning to say hello, just because I know their name. I seek that calm in my own way, just as Lewis’s speaker seeks theirs, just as you might seek yours. Our solidarity in this strange and absurd world is not always in the sameness of our actions, but rather in the feelings of safety or care or love that we seek out and seek to provide. A solidarity of feeling living beneath a difference of experience. Poems, I have learned, can help us practice noticing such solidarity, and appreciating it. Even loving it.
In another one of their poems, Lewis writes:
I’m learning that we forgive those we know the least
Poems, too, have offered this kind of lesson in grace to me. And when I consider a poem like today’s, a poem that describes a self at once panicked and calm, in the midst of an experience of the world that feels both urgent and / unnatural, I think of how a poem can be this long act of attention made into language, an act of attention that reveals to me, the reader, among many things, that I know so many things in the least possible way. To confront the fact of this — through reading, through conversation, through attention — over and over again is not limiting, at least not for me anymore, but rather quite liberating. It creates a space in me that makes grace possible. And forgiveness. It creates a place for me to play with mystery, and wonder. To put the part of me that is still a child, and will always be, and let him make a home there. I could say of so many people, of everyone, that I know them the least. And so, in that place between what I know and what I don’t, I want to place my love.
Some notes:
This interview of the Palestinian poet Fady Joudah, by Aria Aber, in The Yale Review, is wonderful and worth reading. In it, Joudah says: “Love is necessary for humans, because without it we are destroyers of worlds, and with it, we still struggle not to be destroyers.” Later, this, which implicates our commodified, Western culture for the way in which we turn to those marginalized by tragedy only in the aftermath of tragedy, and not in the ordinariness of life: “All our failures, wickedness, desires, and liberations are stages of love. Eros is a marker of life, against alienation, against death as a tool that imposes subordination. I am a Palestinian man. An Arab man. A Muslim man. My desires are ordinary. My fragilities, too. In these poems of longing, I reclaim my body from the culture that wants to hear and read me only as a voice in the aftermath of disaster and as a wound at that, not much more.”
I appreciated a recent post by
on so much: the absurdity of trying to talk to whales, failures of the imagination, and, perhaps most importantly, Aaron Bushnell’s recent self-immolation as an act of protest against the ongoing genocide in Gaza.As I have mentioned in past newsletters, the ad hoc coalition Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here.
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