Music for Guitar and Stone
In music I can love the small failures,
the ones which show how difficult it is:
the young guitarist's fingers slipping,
for an instant, from their climb of chords.
He sits alone on the stage, bright light,
one leg wedged up on a step, his raised knee
round and tender, and the notes like birds
from a vanishing flock, each one more exquisite and lonely;
the fingers part of the hand, yet separate from the hand,
each living muscle married to the whole.
In life the failures feel like they'll kill me,
or you will, or we'll kill each other;
it's so hard to feel the music
moving through us, the larger patterns
of river and mountain, where damage is not separate
from creation, transformation;
where every mistake we make can wash
smooth and clean as stones in water,
then land on shore, then be thrown in again.
I want to sleep, like a stone, for a thousand years.
I want to wake with creatures traced smooth on my skin.
I want to forget I loved you and failed you
as you failed and loved me too, in the lengthy, painful
evolution of our kind; I want to sleep
for a thousand years, then wake up in some other world
where failure is part of the music, and seen
to make it more beautiful; where the fingers
forgive each other; where we can sit naked again
at the window, watch the notes fly by like birds
who have finally found their way home.
from Dear Good Naked Morning (Autumn House Press, 2005)
If you’ve been following along with these little essays, even just a little bit, then you’ll know I’m a sucker for any poem that dangles the complexity of existence with just a little bit of grace and tenderness. I’ve always been enamored by Ruth Schwartz’s work ever since I read her short poem, “Perseid,” which ends with the following lines:
If I were outside I’d want to look up
and see someone naked in every window.
I think we need
the difficult river, we need the absence of tenderness,
so love can come like shooting stars
if it comes.
I’ve loved those lines (which also echo the final lines of today’s poem) ever since I first read them — I think in some wonky contemporary anthology from the aughts. They reminded me of long car trips, when my father would drive me and my brother from Washington, DC, where we lived, to his mother’s house in Rochester, New York. At some point along that drive, which my father always insisted we take at the onset of evening, it would be pitch dark. We’d be rolling along one of those two lane highways somewhere in northern Pennsylvania or southern New York, through towns with names like Dansville, and you’d see them: these little houses sitting astride the highway, their windows yellow-lit and full of kitchens. And I remember pressing my face to the glass of the backseat window and wanting to see anyone, literally anyone, in one of those windows. There was a tenderness to that waiting, like I was about to be invited in, like that space between ringing a doorbell and having the door be opened, like that not-knowing, like, as Schwartz writes, love coming “if it comes.”
And so, today’s poem. It does that thing I love in poems. It rushes, tenderly, headlong into the impossible. Those first two lines:
In music I can love the small failures,
the ones which show how difficult it is
This opening does so many things at once. First, it states openly a love for something oft-deemed impossible to love: failure. But secondly, and perhaps more obliquely…well, if a poem is a kind of music, and if today’s poem is a poem (it is), well then it invites us to consider loving it because of (not despite) whatever imperfections it attempts to grapple with. Though the poem is speaking of a different image, it is also speaking of itself. It is saying: this too will have its failures, this too will try to show how difficult it is.
This is a persistent theme in the poems I’ve read by Ruth Schwartz. In her poem “Falling in Love After Forty,” she writes:
I don’t want you young again, nor me
I want every sadness we’ve ever lived to stand here beside us
And in the final thirteen lines of “The Swan at Edgewater Park,” Schwartz practices a similar kind of wrestling. She writes:
Beauty isn't the point here; of course
the swan is beautiful,
But not like Lorie at 16, when
Everything was possible—no
More like Lorie at 27
Smoking away her days off in her dirty kitchen,
Her kid with asthma watching TV,
The boyfriend who doesn't know yet she's gonna
Leave him, washing his car out back—and
He's a runty little guy, and drinks too much, and
It's not his kid anyway, but he loves her, he
Really does, he loves them both—
That's the kind of swan this is.
And so, yes, Ruth Schwartz’s poetry is engaged with “how difficult it is.” Today’s poem sets up that difficulty by way of an image that spans the ten opening lines. There is the guitarist, and he is playing, and it is beautiful. But at all times that beauty is thrown against the solitude of beauty, and the loneliness of both beauty and its failure. His notes are “like birds,” yes, but then there’s that line break, and they are not just like birds, they are like birds “from a vanishing flock.” His notes are “exquisite,” yes, but they are also “lonely.” His fingers are “part of the hand, yet separate from the hand.”
What a beautiful way to render the expectations of a life. That it must be something, and yet, by being something, it must also engage with the deep and utter loneliness of being something. That it is the expectation to be “exquisite” that leads to the solitude of both the attempt to be exquisite and the failure to live up to such an attempt. This is why those first two lines are so important: they tell us, the readers, that it is okay. They ask us to find love in this first image.
And then, Schwartz does this beautiful thing. She turns the poem, throws a volta in the first third of it. The speaker introduces herself. She says:
In life the failures feel like they'll kill me,
or you will, or we'll kill each other;
it's so hard to feel the music
moving through us
Before I talk about the themes inherent in the rest of this poem, I want to make just a quick craft-aside to say: what a gorgeous and risky move. I say risky not because I believe this insertion of the first person to be risky at all, but because I often feel taught to stay, stay, stay in the image, to let the image speak for itself, in all its unspoken-for glory. But why not speak — not for the image, but from the image? Imagine if Rodin stepped out of the Burghers of Calais and held out his own hand, stretching from one of the oversized and upturned hands cast in bronze to say I, too, have felt despair. Wouldn’t you listen? I would. And maybe that’s not the point of art, but perhaps it is a point of life.
And so, when the “I” enters today’s poem, I find it defining the large and complex scope of the elegy inherent in the opening ten lines. I find it extending the problem of how we define failure, and the consequence of failure, which is a kind of loneliness. I find it doing the hard and vulnerable and poetic work of relating the beauty and suffering of one image to the beauty and suffering that feels, so often, universal.
It makes me think of so many things. It makes me think of how, in Lila, which I’ve been reading, Marilynne Robinson writes:
Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvelous.
And, later, how she writes:
Nothing makes sense until we understand that experience does not accumulate like money, or memory, or like years and frailties.
It makes me think of how whatever we come to define as failure or success is perhaps a more absurd way to measure a life than how we come to grow in our relationships to ourselves, each other, and the earth. An earth where, as Schwartz writes, “damage is not separate / from creation, transformation.” The beauty of such lines is that they are true. The tragedy of such lines is that they are only not true when the damage of earth is caused by the rampant industrialized push for “success” that has been undertaken by humans. In other words: damage is not separate from creation only when such damage is part of the organic relationship between life and more life. A relationship where actions can be forgiven, where grace is at the root of things, where love is not despite certain things, but encompassing of all things.
Schwartz embodies that longing for such a world when she writes: “I want to forget I loved you and failed you / as you failed and loved me too, in the lengthy, painful / evolution of our kind,” before stating later her desire to wake up in a world “where failure is part of the music.”
I think of how, in Annals of the Former World, John McPhee writes:
A million years is a short time - the shortest worth messing with for most problems. You begin tuning your mind to a time scale that is the planet's time scale. For me, it is almost unconscious now and is a kind of companionship with the earth.
I feel that echoed in Schwartz’s line: “I want to sleep, like a stone, for a thousand years.” I don’t know how to take the sharpness of the present, which so often feels overwhelming to me, and turn it into a kind of companionship with the earth. But maybe such a process begins with a way to allow the fingers to “forgive each other.” And I say that because, as Schwartz illustrates, it begins with the self. The fingers are part of one singular body, and if the body cannot forgive itself, it might have a hard time forgiving anything else. Or it might forgive everything else except itself, which I sometimes do, almost every day. So…not sometimes. Often.
These are all hard questions. It’s why I’m drawn to those who write with such earnestness about them. To earnestly engage with the unanswerable, well, some might say it’s a futile pursuit, a kind of inevitable failure, but I disagree. Or maybe I agree. Maybe it is an inevitable failure, and that’s why it should be done, again and again. Not because one day someone will eventually conjure the correct image and the correct relationship to such an image, whatever correct means, but because, if we do it enough, maybe it will help collectively change our relationship to failure, which currently is, at its heart, a collective ignorance of loneliness. I think we are each lonely. I think we should say it more often. I think, if we do, we can learn to forgive each other, and the birds will be less afraid of us, and we can watch them as they don’t fly away, because home will be where we each and all are.