Brokeheart: Just Like That
When the bass drops on Bill Withers’
“Better Off Dead,” it’s like 7 a.m.
and I confess I’m looking
over my shoulder once or twice
just to make sure no one in Brooklyn
is peeking into my third-floor window
to see me in pajamas I haven’t washed
for three weeks before I slide
from sink to stove in one long groove
left foot first then back to the window side
with my chin up and both fists clenched
like two small sacks of stolen nickels
and I can almost hear the silver
hit the floor by the dozens
when I let loose and sway a little back
and just like that I’m a lizard grown
two new good legs on a breeze-
bent limb. I’m a grown-ass man
with a three-day wish and two days to live.
And just like that everyone knows
my heart’s broke and no one is home.
Just like that, I’m water.
Just like that, I’m the boat.
Just like that, I’m both things in the whole world
rocking. Sometimes sadness is just
what comes between the dancing. And bam!,
my mother’s dead and, bam!, my brother’s
children are laughing. Just like—I can’t
pop up from my knees so quick these days
and no one ever said I could sing but
tell me my body ain’t good enough
for this. I’ll count the aches right now,
one in each ankle, the sharp spike in my back,
this mud-muscle throbbing in my going bones,
I’m missing the six biggest screws
to hold this blessed mess together. I’m wind-
rattled. The wood’s splitting. The hinges are
falling off. When the first bridge ends,
just like that, I’m a flung open door.
from Brooklyn Antediluvian (Persea Books, 2016)
When I read Patrick Rosal’s work, I’m reminded — wonderfully — about how so much of the poetry I adore is absolutely breathless. Before I even dive into the mood of this poem, and the vulnerability it performs and allows for, I just want to mention that the first sentence of this poem takes nearly twenty lines to unfold. And, as it does, it riffs on the word and, letting each image, each admission, each doubt, each dance build upon the next until the speaker becomes “a lizard grown / two new good legs on a breeze- / bent limb.”
I don’t think this kind of breathlessness is the only way to enact an emotion, but often the height of feeling feels this way (for me, at least) — like a mind and body wrestling everything within arm’s reach into the orbit of the heart. Just a forever-tumbling, graceful and graceless at once. I love poetry for the way it makes this kind of enactment possible. How it feels to read the pathway of a feeling. And the way these things present themselves differently. Just as we feel in twenty-line sentences, don’t we also feel in fragments? In ruptured words? In collages and in repetitions? In music and in the space between the notes? Poetry makes all this possible.
If you were not familiar with Patrick Rosal’s work, I hope today makes you long to become familiar. There’s an ache at the heart of each of his poems, a swelling tenderness. It’s the kind of ache that makes it possible for him to title one of his poems: “If All My Relationships Fail and I Have No Children Do I Even Know What Love Is.” And the kind of tenderness that allows for lines like this, from his poem “Ode to Eating a Pomegranate in Brooklyn”:
The story of my heartbreak started like this:
someone gave me a key that opens many doors
I traded it for a key that opens only one
I traded that one for another and that for another
until there were no more doors
and I had a fist full of keys
Today’s poem is full of moments like this. I mean, the lines “I’m a grown-ass man / with a three-day wish and two days to live” make me catch my breath. Or “Sometimes sadness is just / what comes between the dancing.”
Those lines I just quoted hint at the craft and beauty of today’s poem, which is made more present by the constant repetition of the word and in this work. By refusing the period, by eliding one image into the next, Rosal allows for more image, more vulnerability, more accrual of detail. It’s like the poem is a house constructing itself in front of our eyes, line by line, and each and keeps a door open to a different room. When we walk through this poem, we notice more about the speaker. We notice the pajamas not washed for “three weeks.” We notice fists clenched like “two small sacks of stolen nickels.” We are the people watching the speaker “let loose.” Noticing is an act of care. Noticing more is an act of caring more. So that, when the speaker says, “my heart’s broke and no one is home,” we reach out with our open hands into the open door that Rosal has offered us.
When I think more, though, about those lines — “Sometimes sadness is just / what comes between the dancing” — I think about how apt that is, how fitting for poetry, how fitting for life. Notice the lines that follow:
And bam!,
my mother’s dead and, bam!, my brother’s
children are laughing.
These lines, these images jammed up against the other — they might seem glib. But isn’t that how so much of life just, well, happens to us? You’re at a wake for your friend’s mother and there are children laughing in the next room. You’re walking alone through the streets of New York, ten feet deep in your own head, and someone is eating an ice cream cone and the ice cream is melting all over their hands. You’re wishing forever one night that you were somewhere else, and then the night turns some kind of beautiful, fucked-up orange that makes you know you can’t be anywhere but where you are. As Ellen Bass writes in her poem, “Any Common Desolation”:
You may have to break
your heart, but it isn’t nothing
to know even one moment alive.
No matter what, “it isn’t nothing.” Our moments alive contain so much, just as the people — Rosal’s speaker included — who move through those moments contain so much. I think of today’s poem, and how the speaker is both “water” and “the boat.” It might seem special, to be both, but I think you and I both know that it is part and parcel of life. It is special, though to recognize it, to honor it, to validate it.
A poem can be a vehicle for this kind of validation. I think, often, that poems are often thought of as ways to close a door on a moment, a feeling, an anything. When I read the ending of Rosal’s poem today — “I’m a flung open door” — I think of how special that is, to encounter such vulnerability. Yes, to be a flung open door is to be wholly open to the world, to no longer care about the people watching through the window. Though I love it, the Bill Withers song that this poem alludes to contains a typical, self-deprecating masculinity — the title is referred to in the final line, where Withers sings “She’s better off without me and I’m better off dead.” I love, too, that Rosal’s poem tries to turn this on its head, remaining so alive, and so open, at its end. How can we approach a poem with a willingness to leave it open at the end? How can we write into and through our unknowing, our desires, our anxieties, without hoping always for a solution? What slowness does this require? What kind of noticing? What kind of care? What kind of resistance of the period? What kind of elision, what kind of and’s, what kind of connections?
I think of the notion of making sense, of sense making, as in understanding, as in attempting to understand. But what if we approached the notion of sense making as literally crafting sense, as an act of construction, as a kind of offering? What senses are we offering in our work, our lives? How can we resist the sometimes-selfishness of understanding, and just leave the door open for others to follow?