R. A. Villanueva's "This dark is the same dark as when you close"
Thoughts on love.
This dark is the same dark as when you close
your eyes I whisper to our son while he catches his breath. It is well past midnight and he will not describe the face of what he fights to unsee. By his feet, the green glow of a nightlight retreats into blue, slips softly to red. Above his bed: notes we once had time to tape onto the latch of his lunchbox, flights of origami swans, throwing stars and fortune tellers. When your turn comes to lie beside him, this is the bridge he’s set to repeat: Always an angel, never a god—and so you hold him close like a saint shadowed by the axe, cradling her own haloed head in her hands. first published as part of Poets.org's Poem-a-Day Series
I was delighted when this poem popped into my inbox a little over a month ago as part of Poets.org’s Poem-a-Day series. I love R.A. Villanueva as a poet and as a person, and it was a joy to read these words that morning, to really delight in the tenderness of them, the beautiful love of fatherhood, the “notes / we once had time to tape onto to the latch / of his lunchbox” — this fever dream of trying to care as the fever dream of time marks our passage through the world.
Years ago — so wild, that it has really been that long — I invited R.A. Villanueva to read as part of an “Offsite AWP” event I curated and hosted a couple of years in a row for poets and writers who didn’t want to or couldn’t afford (because of work or money or other forms of labor) to attend AWP (which is finishing up this year’s edition as I write this). It was always a blast, and I remember, those years ago, Villanueva reading a poem about fatherhood. We were at Powerhouse Arena, that gorgeous bookstore nestled under a bridge in Brooklyn, and I remember listening to this poem unfold and thinking there’s a person who loves the work and joy and surprise that love affords us.
A few weeks ago, as part of one of my classes, I designed a pretty low-stakes assignment that asked students to use a number of resources (including the Poem-a-Day series) to encounter poems in the world, and to then pick a few that resonated with them and write about them — about the poems made them feel, about what they noticed in the poem, the little moves and moments of attention to detail or style or feeling. I wanted to provide my students some exposure to contemporary poetry without picking poems for them; I wanted them to love what they had found themselves.
Reading their assignments, I smiled when I saw that one of my students had selected this poem to write about. It was the same smile I smiled when, reading this poem for the first time and coming across the lines in italics in the poem’s final stanza — Always an / angel, never a god — I realized that they were from the band Boygenius, and felt these threads of my life connecting, the right train pulling into the right station of my heart at the right time. And so, it was a joy to read this poem over a month ago, and a joy to think about it now. It was also a joy, a few weeks ago, to find it nestled in one of my student’s assignments. So yes: lots of joy, so much, that this poem has brought me.
Now: the joy of this poem. Villanueva so often styles his tenderness, in that his poems are these hand-knit things, these artworks of yarn threaded into feeling. This poem is no different. It’s a sonnet. Maybe a sneaky one, but a sonnet nonetheless. Notice the fourteen lines, the ten syllables of each line, the way that the words “turn” and then “bridge” — which introduces those lyrics from Boygenius — also signal the onset and midst of the poem’s volta, where one parent relieves the other parent’s role, a kind of salve for loneliness. In that moment, the poem turns towards its final image at the same time as one parent turns away from their child and another parent turns toward their same child. And yes, the world, as always — turning on its axis.
As such, this poem enacts that same salve for loneliness that each parent within it tries to nurture out of the darkness. And if the poem is an argument, as many sonnets are, it is an argument for the ongoing labor of love, for what love brings out of us so that we can feel — as Galway Kinnell writes in that first, beautiful poem I ever read of his — “this blessing love gives again into our arms.”
It’s no surprise to encounter such resonant love in Villanueva’s work. I still think of the final poem (“Mine will be a beautiful service”) of his book, Reliquaria, and how it ends — the poem and the book — with these six lines, uttered by a speaker on the precipice of dying:
If you each day clutch our pillows, press them to your face, pray to take in some atom of me all into the hollows of your chest, yes I promise my ghost will find you should you want someone else to love
Come on now! What a moment. What lines. And what movement within them — the all into split between two lines, so that one line ends with that word all, soft and echoing and gentle like a moan; the dangling yes just before the poem’s final couplet, calling back to chest and making these words sing, yes, sing.
So yes, it’s no surprise to encounter a poem with such style and such love written by Villanueva. I think of these lines from today’s poem:
It is well past midnight and he will not describe the face of what he fights to unsee. By his feet, the green glow of a nightlight retreats into blue, slips softly to red.
I notice a few things: the lines resisting to end with punctuation, so that each one moves into the next, the little echoes of sounds — unsee, feet, green, retreats — that urge the poem forward, the commas introducing or bracketing the clauses that pull and push and dance along the poem. I notice, too, the way that so many of these moments obfuscate the poem’s sonnet-like status, confuse it a little bit for the reader, only for them to realize it and say ah, fuck — what a beautiful thing.
And what an apt metaphor that feels for a poem, or for a life, or for anything made out of love. The way that it’s the care, most of all, that I notice in this poem. The way I feel someone bent over, stitching something, over and over again, by hand. How you might not notice the work of it just yet, and how you’re stretching, craning your neck to take a look, seeing nothing yet, nothing yet, nothing yet — until that moment when, finished, it is held up, this life, this poem, this made thing: here, I made this for you.
When I was really little, I would fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning, only to find that my father had trimmed my toenails while I was sleeping. I was young, young enough that these moments, morning after morning, became some of my first memories. I didn’t think of them until I was older. How beautiful, I think now, that such moments were such memories for me. This invisible love; this invisible care — this labor made visible in the light. This gentleness, too. I never thought of my father as a delicate man until I, remembering such moments, knew that he had to have been one, which means that he is one still. It has to mean that. It was this work he did in the shadows that I noticed in the light. And now, oh now, I’m thinking of Robert Hayden: “No one ever thanked him.”
And, too, I am thinking of Villanueva:
you hold him close like a saint shadowed by the axe, cradling her own haloed head in her hands.
It’s that image that I’m holding as I write this. How it echoes back to the relics of history, how it connects the labor of love within this moment to a long litany of love made and remade and imagined and reimagined over time. And how beautiful it is.
I still believe, romantic that I am, that love can be — and is — a transcendent force. That, to be reminded of it, either in the morning upon waking or in the safety of one’s dreams, is to be reminded of one’s connection to life itself, to the stuff of saving and being saved — the stuff, in other words, of grace. Over two decades ago, my mother wrote to me, as she was moving through the long journey of an illness: look up at the sky and know we are both looking at the same sun and moon. And not a day goes by when I do not think of that. I look up, and I feel. I see light, and I feel. Life is the long labor of love trying to create safety out of the very harsh and very real pain of this world. Today’s poem reminds me of that.
Years ago, in the midst of being broken up with the woman who is now my wife (funny and beautiful thing that is, that such a thing can happen, I think now, giving grace to grace itself), I wrote a poem — one I sent around a bit for publication before Covid happened, and I grew, for a moment, tired of trying any of that, shelving so much of my work on that invisible shelf in the cloud. I’ll leave you with it, because of Villanueva’s poem today, and what it makes me think of care, and childhood, and fatherhood, and sonship, and love, and the small and beautiful act of clipping a child’s nails in the middle of the night — so gentle, so as not to wake them.
If Memory Is the Only Truth We Know
For years I watched my father fill his loneliness with time. He slept little in a bed too big for him & woke early, driving me to school with eyes stitched against his waking. I’d get home before he did, sit in front of the television, rewind the same movies on the VCR. What they don’t tell you about love is that it resembles a wound, which is why so many lovers, even in the darkness of a room alone, are afraid to slip off their shirts, scared of the thin thread count of the bedsheet running against the sores just outside their hearts. My father taught me that. The way loneliness looks good on no one, & how it’s love that splits the seams of an old sleep shirt until you can’t sleep without the reminder of what sleep could be. When she left, I left everything in its place — the morning’s coffee mug spent gathering rings, the water slowly evaporating from the bedside table’s glass. I thought I could fill what absence left unfilled. But absence, even it, is made of something, the way a child is made of trauma, the way sometimes love, even at its best, feels like living in a house with no windows. I walked for a long time afterwards. I paused at every stoplight. I bought cigarettes & smoked them until I had to buy more. If memory is the only truth we know, then the present is just a shell waiting to be filled. If we acknowledged love as absence, we might spend a night running the soft edges of our fingers along the thin red of our wounds instead of trying to sew together what we can never cure. Some nights my father snuck into bed with me to trim my nails. He managed to do it noiseless, in the solitude of bodies & the dreams bodies have when bodies no longer live in this world. I think I know now why he did it this way & not in any other. Without tenderness nothing changes. Over ten years ago, I began a job at a cemetery. When I first met my coworker, he asked do you have a girlfriend, & when I said yes, he asked me something so awful & crude I wanted to run away. I was young & afraid. I didn’t know what to say. I sweated through the thin linen of my pants & went each afternoon to lay between the graves until the white of each headstone & the light from the sun became one shimmering thing so bright & beautiful I did not know if I was alive. For so long I have not been alone & now I am & now I am already tired of myself. When I called my father to tell him it had ended, he lowered his voice to the kind of softness he must have reserved for the nights he took care of me the way they say angels do. When I hung up, I cried the long cry of being somebody’s son. For so long, I wanted a child, if only to mimic my father’s kindness with my father watching. To look over at him, the child of his child in my arms, & say you did alright, so he might die happy, no longer alone. For so long this seemed close. Now, I sleep on a bedsheet made of fingernails with my own hand in my mouth.
Some notes:
The poet Victoria Adukwei Bulley posted about this, and I wanted to share it here: many writers are donating signed copies of books as part of an auction raising funds for injured children in Gaza. The auction ends today. Here is a link.
As I 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. I also recently donated to this fundraiser, in support of the Gaza Sunbirds — a para-cycling team that is reallocated their resources to offer on-the-ground aid in Gaza. Maybe consider donating if you have the means.
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Devin, Your work is outstanding. Thank you for introducing poems I never would have found. D
Thank you for these wonderful connective thoughts on parents, children, safety, loneliness in love and out, tenderness, and beauty of it all. And for these poems.