Rachel Mennies's "December 11, 2016"

Thoughts on the light in December.

December 11, 2016

A friend has just left her girlfriend.

Each time there is the beginning, she said, where I am best—where I am always sure.

And then there is our future, where anything good is possible.

The trouble, she said, is with everything in between.

I once thought all I ever wanted was the trouble.

To shovel the ice from the doorstep, so that the beloved might not slip.

To argue with the beloved about whose books belong on which shelves, then build them a bookcase with my hands.

(I have learned so many useful skills in the service of desire.)

Today longing for you feels like pressing a foot into untouched snow.

It contorts the face as weeping does, or an idea suddenly arrived.

It lives on the page where I know it will find you.


Where my friend awakens, there is no snow.

Can you imagine it?

She must step into her grief in a world full of sun.


from The Naomi Letters (BOA Editions, 2021)

---

I’ve always admired the work of Rachel Mennies, ever since I first encountered it. And I remember, years ago, awaiting this book — when I heard the news of its forthcoming publication — with a real joy. And then I remember reading it. And I remember this poem. And I remember these lines:

Each time there is the beginning, she said, where I am best—where I am always sure.

And then there is our future, where anything good is possible.

The trouble, she said, is with everything in between.

And I remember these lines:

Can you imagine it?

She must step into her grief in a world full of sun.

And so, remembering how I remembered these moments from long ago, I am sitting with these lines again now. I was struck by them today almost by chance. I haven’t read much this week. One of the four classes I teach at my high school is a Journalism class, where my students work to create monthly issues of our first-ever school newspaper. This week was our “publishing week,” where we finalize each student’s article and press publish on the whole thing. It takes up most of my mental space, a week like this, filled as it is with days of helping over twenty-five students revise and polish their pieces. It’s a joyful process, exuberant. It makes me feel so many wonderful things. But my brain tonight, as I just told my wife, feels like it only has one percent of its possible capacity to retain anything.

And it is with that brain that I sat down and pulled Mennies’s book from my shelf. Epistolary in scope, written by a woman to the woman she desires, the book is full of poems titled by their date. And so, I found one written in December, only to find it already dog-eared. And then I re-read these lines above, and I remembered why I loved it, and why I still do.

There is something about Mennies’s work that lives in the in-between named above. In that in-between is a kind of gentle mundanity. Mennies’s speaker calls it “trouble” in this poem above, but it is also filled with these images:

To shovel the ice from the doorstep, so that the beloved might not slip.

To argue with the beloved about whose books belong on which shelves, then build them a bookcase with my hands.

Ordinary moments, these. The kind that make up a life. I notice that fixation on the ordinary throughout Mennies’s book. In another poem, Mennies writes:

Here's my fantasy: sitting on the arm of your chair, watching as you labor between the various privacies of your inner life.

And, in another:

Have you realized my utter ordinariness yet—how each book I read you also lives in a thousand libraries?

And, in yet another:

What warm silence I have found here alone in the morning.

Various privacies. Utter ordinariness. Warm silence. Here alone. These moments are moments of gentle mundanity. They are moments in between other moments, where — though they may also be where trouble lives — life still lives. They are moments where silence is found, where intimacy is cultivated, where a person is known, and seen, for who they are when they are being exactly who they are.

I think I am drawn to all of this tonight because it is December, and because, both in December and right now, I feel so heavily this poem’s final line:

She must step into her grief in a world full of sun.

There is something about the winter — which is the time in which, in Mennies’s book, all of these moments of ordinariness above occur — that enlivens the ordinary with a real richness. I think this is because we spend so much of our time indoors, and because, when we venture out, we are bundled up, huddled into ourselves. When we come back inside, the most ordinary acts — watering the plants, rearranging a bookshelf, making the coffee — feel heightened by the cold outside. They feel, finally, as if for the first time, as full of life as they always are. Sometimes, sitting and reading by a window on a cold day, I reach out and touch the glass that separates me from outside. And I feel it. I feel the cold. And then I feel lucky, to have a moment of separateness from such a thing, to be allowed such gentleness in a season of such extremes.

And, in such a season of extremes, it is often a privilege to simply have something to do. I think of this image from today’s poem:

To shovel the ice from the doorstep, so that the beloved might not slip.

That act of shoveling — ordinary act it is — becomes a way of coping with an extreme. It is not just shoveling; it is now doing; it is now helping. It is a way of approaching mystery with humanity. You wake up to find the world blanketed, almost unrecognizable, and then you approach this new world by trying to find a path through it. You try to return it to how it was, futile act this is — futile act this always is. But it makes sense, doesn’t it? To shovel a path through the cold? To cope in that way?

In this sense, the poem’s final three lines, separated even further from the rest of the poem with a wider blank space, take on a real sadness:

Where my friend awakens, there is no snow.

Can you imagine it?

She must step into her grief in a world full of sun.

Without snow, the speaker’s friend has no way to transition her way through mystery, which is part of grief. She moves from one mystery to another — the mystery of grief to the mystery of light, the mystery of how the world still continues even as we suffer our own private pains.

That mystery — of how the world carries on, despite us and with us and without us and through us — is unending. In her poem, “December 2, 2002,” Juliana Spahr writes:

As it happens every night, beloveds, while we turned in the night
sleeping uneasily the world went on without us.

She continues:

We live in our own time zone and there are only a small million of
us in this time zone and the world as a result has a tendency to
begin and end without us.

While we turned sleeping uneasily at least ten were injured in a
bomb blast in Bombay and four killed in Palestine.

This is an awful feeling — the sadness that awareness makes out of life, and the way that such sadness, even, feels futile in the scope of the world’s unceasing nature. To acknowledge it is not to give in to it; it’s simply to recognize it, and yet such recognition can feel brutal, sad, so sad.

And I think that’s what I’m thinking about today, as we move into December, and as I read this poem. I am thinking of the extremes — of weather and grief and the world. I am thinking of all the life that is lived in between. I am thinking of carrying on, and coping, and trying. I am thinking of taking the subway to my school and taking off my coat and teaching my classes and microwaving my lunch while the world continues being the world, awful and yet full of light.

And so, you might think it odd, but I want to talk about clouds. I want to talk about how, when I leave my high school building sometime between 4 and 5 in the late afternoon or early evening, stepping outside for the first time in hours, there is that fading light, that spectrum of sky blanketing the wide swath of my vision. And I want to talk about how it is always, without fail, the first thing I see. I want to talk about what it is like to spend a day in a building and then leave it, longing for light. And I want to talk about how striking this reminder always is — how I hold whatever I have built up throughout the day, whatever stress or pain or joy, and then meet the world with it, nearly always awestruck by the sky.

Just yesterday, I left my school, looked up, and saw the light streaking across the sky in different shades of purple. It was not the same sky; it was so many skies at once. To my right, the brilliance of the sunset lit the horizon on fire, as if the top of each building was burning. And in front of me, the remnants of that sunset rearranged the clouds into serrated knives of light.

And, the day before yesterday, the sky was a spectrum of blue-gray-orange. I stood on the train platform and tried to find the point at which it changed, at which one cloud became another, or one part of sky separated itself from the other, but I couldn’t. It was as if someone, with the widest brush, had watercolored from horizon to horizon and back, letting the water bleed and seep amongst itself. There was no ending and no beginning. There was only light.

In these moments, I have felt myself stepping from one world to another. I have found myself letting go, just a little bit, of whatever I have been holding onto, and seeing whatever light did to the sky, and whatever the sky did to light, and finally breathing. We do this all of the time, don’t we? We step — holding our grief, our love, whatever — into a world full of whatever it holds. We are always in between these striking moments, and then we are struck, or moved, or lost, or so much and so much else.

There is something about the light in early winter that does this for me. There is something about the magic hour of the evening, the depth of the orange as it lands upon the bricks of the apartments that stagger throughout each block. And there is something about the bright and sharp light of midday, that so-blue blue sky with no end of light in sight. There is something about it, I know. Something that illuminates every grief I have and erases it at the same time. Something that makes me at once so visible and so hidden. This winter light — cold and raw — it makes me remember I am vulnerable. It’s a beautiful thing, that vulnerability. It’s also terrifying.

In her poem, “Entering the Principality of O’ahu by Sky Roads,” Joy Harjo writes:

Somebody sang these clouds into being.
Tell me, who is your singer?

The poem ends with a description of the songs that must have allowed for such beauty:

Songs that aren't paid for
By the money and influence
Of rich, fat corporate gods.

It is the winter sky, these days, that makes me feel that sensation from today’s poem, that moment where anything good is possible. I think this is because light holds mystery just as much as it holds clarity. When we are at our worst, suffering the painful intimacies of our private lives, then the light magnifies such sorrow. I have hid from light many times over. I sometimes hide from light still. But the light fading over an early winter sky? The way it staggers its leaving into a color I’ve never seen, over a pattern of clouds I never knew existed? That is the mystery that gives me hope. When I leave work, bundle of ordinariness that I am, messenger bag slung over a faded green puffy jacket, baseball cap on my head, and I look up, I am stepping with my grief and my awareness and my stress and my joy into a world full of mystery, hoping — in that mystery — to find hope.

---

Some Notes:

1. 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.

2. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.