Raymond Carver's "At Least"

Thoughts on three years of writing about poems.

At Least

I want to get up early one more morning,
before sunrise. Before the birds, even.
I want to throw cold water on my face
and be at my work table
when the sky lightens and smoke
begins to rise from the chimneys
of the other houses.
I want to see the waves break
on this rocky beach, not just hear them
break as I did all night in my sleep.
I want to see again the ships
that pass through the Strait from every
seafaring country in the world—
old, dirty freighters just barely moving along,
and the swift new cargo vessels
painted every color under the sun
that cut the water as they pass.
I want to keep an eye out for them.
And for the little boat that plies
the water between the ships
and the pilot station near the lighthouse.
I want to see them take a man off the ship
and put another up on board.
I want to spend the day watching this happen
and reach my own conclusions.
I hate to seem greedy—I have so much
to be thankful for already.
But I want to get up early one more morning, at least.
And go to my place with some coffee and wait.
Just wait, to see what’s going to happen.


from Where Water Comes Together with Other Water (Vintage, 1985)

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I started this newsletter just a little over three years ago. My first post was on June 17th, 2020. At the time, I was three months into the lockdown phase of a global pandemic, and — in between online classes and those strange primetime specials when celebrities would sing to all of us — I was trying to give myself a chance to think more deeply, to pay more attention to something, anything. This newsletter arose out of that, and now, a few years later, this email is sent to a few thousand people every Sunday morning, and I get to spend a few days each week thinking about a poem and wondering towards whatever it makes me wonder towards.

I feel in many ways, each time I write this newsletter, like Carver’s speaker in the final lines of this poem:

I want to spend the day watching this happen
and reach my own conclusions.
I hate to seem greedy—I have so much
to be thankful for already.
But I want to get up early one more morning, at least.
And go to my place with some coffee and wait.
Just wait, to see what’s going to happen.

It is greedy, isn’t it, to spend a day full of watching and paying attention? It’s greedy to hold that joy; it’s greedy simply to want. But the wonder of such greed is that it hurts no one. We can all be here, in the same room, reading the same poem and stumbling into what we find in it. We can all be here, in the same room, watching the light decorate the dust that dangles in between the slanted shadows. If there is room — and room can be made — we can each sit and watch the birds make shapes out of their bodies together, rising and falling in long, speckled arcs. The joy of such greediness is that it hurts no one. I guess this greed is not greed at all, then. I guess it is like life.

I think that is why I chose to write about Carver today. His later work, poems written in the midst of his sobriety and toward what I am not sure if he knew was the end of his life, is imbued with real sweetness. Real, real sweetness. Consider this entire poem, “Happiness,” first published in the book today’s poem is from:

So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.
They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.
I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.
They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.

Come on. What sweetness, yes? I think if they could, they would take / each other’s arm.

When I read Carver’s late work, I am reminded of the way in which life can turn toward such sweetness and gentleness, and how such a turn is often bound up in a recognition of the ordinary. The wants in today’s poem are simple things. Let’s read some of them:

I want to get up early one more morning

I want to throw cold water on my face

I want to see the waves break

I want to see again the ships

I want to keep an eye out for them.

These are wildly simple wants. They ask nothing of the world other than to allow it to be what it is. They say I will cherish you. They say I will just watch. They accept — and then enjoy — what the world offers with the same almost childlike giddiness Carver employs in these lines from his poem, “For Tess”:

Glad I fished all day
on Morse Creek, casting a red Daredevil back
and forth. I didn’t catch anything. No bites
even, not one. But it was okay. It was fine!
I carried your dad’s pocketknife and was followed
for awhile by a dog its owner called Dixie.
At times I felt so happy I had to quit
fishing.

I am writing this just a day after my high school’s graduation, where I watched over a hundred students who I’ve known since they were in ninth grade walk (or dance, as some did) across a stage to receive their diploma. I cherished this day deeply, mostly because I have come to know so many of these students and their families so well over the past four years.

On days like yesterday, I find myself so hyper-attuned to ordinary gestures. I sat just behind my students in the auditorium, and I noticed so many little things — whispers and laughs, rapidly taken selfies, wide-eyed glances around the room to find a parent, a single dollar bill taped to a graduate’s cap. After the ceremony, I noticed even more of such moments: a graduate letting her baby niece play with the tassel dangling from her cap, a beloved student wiping a flood of tears from his cheek just before being bombarded with hugs from his friends, kids near-sprinting, gowns open and sailing in the wind, to join a picture with their friends.

I want to say I have come to see and notice and appreciate such moments because of the work of looking more closely at poems. Maybe that is true. While reading Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography, I came across a point she draws from quantum physics that “the observer and the observed are in the same critical field.” It’s a line that resonated deeply with me, as it rang true about my experience of reading and writing about poems. It also rang true about my experience of teaching. To acknowledge the critical field of our living as wider and less narrow than one might make it seem is to cultivate a sense of awareness and appreciation for the complexity that such width and breadth offers. One of the joys of being a teacher is the same joy as being a close reader of anything. The joy is this: I find my cup to be tremendously full nearly all of the time. My mind will stumble upon the memory of a line — like Terrance Hayes’s “Yes, I have a pretty good idea what beauty is. It survives / alright.” — just as it stumbles upon the memory of a student who is now off to college and who just four years ago once rescued a butterfly that could not fly and carried it around with him for hours, asking me once to take a picture and send it to his mom. Yes, my cup is full. I am grateful for this work.

And so yes, as I continue to write these little essays for as long as I will (and who knows how long that will be), I aim to center the generosity at the heart of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s point above, to acknowledge that we exist, even as we experience different contexts, in the same critical field, a field where, as Christina Sharpe writes, “a word might hold you close when the world does not,” or where, as she writes later, “there is, in other words, every possible reason to be overcome with an awful grief,” and where the feeling of such grief is experienced in different degrees and at different intensities based on who you are or where you are or both and then some, all of this still part of the same critical field in which we live, where we observe and are observed so often and so often without permission, and where poems exist too, though they do not save us and never have, where they simply offer an invitation to look at this world we live in together differently, or more sweetly, or more harshly, or anywhere in between or in combination.

In the opening pages of Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind, she writes:

To get the feeling of what it is like to be a creature of the sea requires the active exercise of the imagination and the temporary abandonment of many human concepts and human yard sticks.

I think of this as one thing I have felt over these years of writing these essays. Or this line from the late Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men:

On my better days I think that there is somethin I dont know or there is somethin that I’m leavin out.

Those better days are almost every day I write one of these essays. They are the days where I try to surrender myself to an active imagination and to a what-I-hope-is-healthy abandonment of so many human concepts — an abandonment of the “bad idea,” as Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, “that better information from better data is what is needed to make the world better.” What is difficult, always, is the act of turning away at the moment of finishing each essay, the act of returning to the world, with its reliance on information and data, with its commodification of slowness and mindfulness, with its relentless pursuit of profit, with so much that often feels so at odds with whatever a poem might remind me of — whether generosity or wonder or attention or anything I find myself obsessing over, again and again and again. It is difficult, yes, to obsess over what sometimes feels as if it makes no sense, to write about patience in the midst of feeling burnt out, or to even write using a hosting website and platform that consistently tries to remind me about how to monetize all of this. Every word. Yes, my emails tell me: every letter might be another dollar. A scary thought. I don’t like it.

I turn to poems in the midst of all of this in order to experience the gratitude of encountering a wellspring of generosity. I read a poem like today’s and say fuck yes, thank the world. I read a poem like today’s and say I am not alone for all this simple wanting. I read a poem like today’s and sign a permission slip that allows me to be a little more of who I am for a little while longer. Over these past few years of reading and writing, I think less about what I have learned and more about what I have allowed myself to do or be. I have, in my own writing, allowed myself to finish a draft of a novel where nothing much happens other than pursuit of mystery, the expression of platonic love, and a lot of bread baking. I have felt, in my own life, a desire to be more of a child, to conduct elaborate pranks in my classroom or to dance from the kitchen to the bed. And I have noticed; I have simply noticed. I don’t know what good comes from this, if at all, but I believe that reading — not just writing — can be an imaginative practice, a connection between lived and unlived moments in time, the opening of doors to rooms that have yet to be built, but where there still is light waiting to be windowed.

All that to say: thank you for reading these words over the years. I find myself changed in the act of writing them, and reminded in the act of writing them, and angered and sorrowed and overjoyed and enraptured and so much more. In other words: I find myself feeling and being. I hope you have found something of worth, at least once in a while. Yes: I love the title of today’s poem. At Least. It is no small thing, the at least of our lives. At least we are here. At least we have this morning light, this just-blooming flower, this bird bobbing along the waves, this man in the shallows digging for clams or searching for shells. At least, at least, at least. It’s no small thing. It is as much, sometimes, as what we need. Thank you again for reading.

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A Note:

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