Seán Hewitt's "Leaf"

Thoughts on holding.

Leaf

For woods are forms of grief
grown from the earth. For they creak

with the weight of it.
For each tree is an altar to time.

For the oak, whose every knot
guards a hushed cymbal of water.

For how the silver water holds
the heavens in its eye.

For the axletree of heaven
and the sleeping coil of wind

and the moon keeping watch.
For how each leaf traps light as it falls.

For even in the nighttime of life
it is worth living, just to hold it.


from Tongues of Fire (Jonathan Cape, 2020)

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For the past few years, I have cajoled a growing group of teacher-friends into playing a game that, starting in mid-September and extending into the new year, we lovingly call “The Leaf Game.” It is a simple enough game. If a leaf is falling in the space between where it once dangled upon a branch and where the ground always is, and if you happen to be in the vicinity of that act of falling, and if you reach your hand up or out or down or around, and if the leaf lands in your hand, then, well, that leaf is added to your tally of leaves caught for that season. There is, on my phone, a group chat that contains hundreds of photos of people holding leaves. It is many years old, which is a funny thing to say about a group chat. If it were archived on paper, it would be a tome, printed on glossy cardstock. Scroll upwards through it, into the past, and you will see the hands of so many people holding the stems of so many leaves. They are often holding them lovingly, the way someone holds a late grandmother’s crystal stemware. Every Monday, I scroll through the photos submitted during the past week, update the tallies accordingly, and send out a weekly message with the latest leaderboard. Leaferboard, I should say.

I participate in this game each year, and I care very deeply about the quality of my participation. In the past few seasons of leaf-catching, I have awkwardly attempted to vault over cars. I have veered off Central Park’s running path, into softball fields and places where people gather to stand next to each other while their dogs run around. I have stopped mid-sentence during a conversation to gaze upward, thinking a bird flitting upon a branch was a leaf somersaulting off of one. I have stood in the middle of streets. I have stopped traffic. I have bumped into other people, at least a half dozen aging dogs, and once, a solid, ten-foot-tall stone wall. I have jumped, which is not a pretty sight. I have tiptoed and clambered and, with what I think involves a great deal of finesse but almost certainly just appears awkward, I have even shimmied. I have just missed and I have just barely held on only to let go, but I, too, have also caught—oh, have I caught! I have caught beautiful leaves and speckled leaves and leaves serrated by wind and punched clean through by rain. I have caught magical little numbers, these dancing guys who love to twirl as they fall, and who make my head spin circles around a sunny sky. I have caught lucky ones, too, including a leaf who fell through an open window after I parallel parked a car that I was learning how to drive. I caught that one, I’ll always remember, in my lap.

When I was gifted the book this poem is from by my friends John Mark and Karen while sitting in John Mark and Karen’s kitchen and eating John Mark’s chili, I turned to this poem, which is the book’s first poem, and reached the poem’s final lines, and thought—perhaps it is silly—of catching leaves. For even in the nighttime of life, Seán Hewitt writes, it is worth living, just to hold it. My god, I thought, isn’t that true?

This poem is a poem that gives language to the worthwhileness of holding. Consider some of the moments from earlier in the poem. Like here, where the rain on the surface of a leaf holds the light of heaven:

For how the silver water holds
the heavens in its eye.

Or here, where the word guards implies that the tree is holding, within itself, some not insignificant amount of the lifeblood that is water:

For the oak, whose every knot
guards a hushed cymbal of water.

Or here, where the creaking and the burdening and the weight all mean, too, that each tree is holding a kind of grief:

For woods are forms of grief
grown from the earth. For they creak

with the weight of it.

Yes, this poem today is a poem about—among so many other things—holding. I think now about how there is a real preciousness to this silly game of catching leaves that I mentioned earlier because it turns me, briefly, into a child, which is an act of turning that I am grateful for whenever it happens. In one moment, I am a 34-year-old man lamenting to someone else the weirdly, unexpectedly high cost of train travel in this country, and in the next, I am twisting my ankle on wonky cobblestones as I chase a leaf down a city street. And then, when I catch it, I am overcome with disbelief. I cannot believe I caught that, I say. I cannot believe I am holding this leaf.

That moment is precious, yes. It is a preciousness that moves me out of a headspace where I am distant from the world and yet so critical of it, and into a place where I am literally holding a part of that very world that sometimes feels as if it is ruining me. This act of holding is on display in so many of our encounters with the world, and with each other. I think about how there is the less precious and yet still grace-filled acknowledgment of holding we make when we learn that someone has experienced a tremendous grief. I cannot believe that happened, we say, which is to say, I cannot believe you had to hold that. And there is the perhaps even less precious and yet still undeniably ordinary holding we take on each day, juggling our coffee while we juggle our plans while we juggle our anxieties and our own feelings about our anxieties, our conception of our own self worth juggling itself while we juggle, too, our interactions with others, trying to listen while we juggle that inner monologue in our heads, a thing we hold each day even if we sometimes do not want to be holding it. And then, not finally, because I could go on, there is the holding that we do want to be holding. The body in our arms we love dearly. In the kitchen in the morning light. First hug of the day. Hold me, you say. And I do.

In this poem today, I feel Hewitt looking closely at a thing and saying look how much it holds. And isn’t that a kind of poetics? A kind of politics? Isn’t that a beautiful way to encounter the world: to look closely at it and wonder aloud at all it must hold? It is a wonderment that makes us better for the looking.

A few pages after this poem, Hewitt has a poem, “St. John’s Wort,” that both doubles down on this gift of holding and also offers a set of final lines that anchor themselves somewhere down in the soul. Here it is, in full:

Named for a man who carries his own head 
on a platter, for a day when the sun bears 
its light over the land so slowly, so measuredly, 
that the night crouches back and waits. A token 
of love, of patience, of the will to lift the mind 
outside oneself, and let it rest. Let it heal. Alone, 
I remembered this little herb, the yellow spikes 
of the flower, frill of stamen, as something akin 
to happiness — its bright stars, its tiny play 
at hope, its way of lifting through the grass —
and I brought it to you, a light to illumine 
the dark caves of your eyes. At the door 
of the ward, being searched, the nurse 
took from me my gathering of flowers. 
I found you on the bed, staring, still in shock. 
Bringing no gift, I took your head
in my empty hands like a world and held it.

When we have nothing to give, and even, too, when what we have to give has been taken away, this poem teaches me that we can still hold.

Perhaps all of politics involves some kind of negotiation of holding, the way, toward the end of Hewitt’s poem above, the “gathering of flowers” held by the poem’s speaker is taken from him, and held by someone else. Who gets to hold what, and who gets to hold who, and who has to go without holding, and who is forced to lose who or what they are holding, and who is held out of some sense of authority rather than some sense of intimacy — I think most questions of politics can be reduced to these questions. When people in power place permissions and exceptions and definitions on relationships and personhoods, they are also placing those same permissions and exceptions and definitions on acts of holding. They are saying you cannot hold this person. They are saying you cannot be held at all. They are saying you have no right to hold anything. This is tragic, I think. And sad.

We’d do better, I think, to consider a question at the very heart of one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets, Larry Levis’ “In the City of Light.” In that poem, he writes:

A body wishes to be held, & held, & what
Can you do about that?

I’ve always adored this question at the heart of this poem because I know the answer is as simple as the ending of Hewitt’s poem above: to hold. And yet, I think Levis gets at some kind of impossibility at the heart of being human, which is that we are these longing things, these vessels in need of filling, with so much we are able to hold, which is not always beautiful, and so much we are able to give others to hold, which, also, is not always beautiful. Every day, we hold gazes and hold space. We hold doors and we hold hands. We hold, amidst all of this other holding, whatever not-light or bright-light is dimming or shining the inside of whoever we are. We hold memories, god. We hold awful ones and joyful ones. We hold onto them when we want to let go. And we let go of so much we probably wish we could be holding onto once more. And so, yeah — what the fuck can you do about that? And, finally, we hold and let go and hold still and hold ourselves and hold each other amidst a world that makes us feel, sometimes, like we need to hold a thousand pillows to our chest.

Our holding, I think now, is so essential. It is as if we have, at once, a million hands and none at all. As if we are, at once, gallon jars and teacups. We have a loneliness that makes us long. We have an emptiness we feel needs filling. We have joy we find ourselves bursting to share. We have leaves falling, one season a year, from the sky. We have the smell of a newborn baby’s head. We have unseen griefs and we have great distances, at times, between us, even when we are standing close. We have these gaps between our twin solitudes, which are also these gaps between our twin loves. We have arms to reach across those gaps. Hands to touch faces. Have you ever had two palms cradle your cheeks when you needed them most? We have these hands to hold, and we have ourselves to be held, and sometimes, when you hold me like that, it feels like you are holding me in place.

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1. In the past few newsletters, I announced that I am teaching two workshops for the Adirondack Center for Writing. I believe they have reached capacity, but you can still join a waitlist, so I’ll offer the links one more time in case you are interested and spots open up later. The first is called “Rewriting Your Life,” and will be a 5 week multi-genre workshop, for anyone writing poems, fiction, or essays. The second, which I’m wildly excited about, is called “A Line As Long As the Heart Is Wide.” It will be a deep dive into Larry Levis’s poetry in celebration of the release of his Collected Poems early next year.

2. My novel, Pilgrims, is out in the world, and I am deeply grateful. Thank you for reading it and sharing it and all sorts of things. If you are interested, you can buy it here. Consider writing a review on Goodreads if you’d like. Consider asking for it from your local library. I appreciate it. Thank you a million times over.

3. The word ceasefire seems to be just a word. As news outlets report, Israel has violated the terms constantly, and, as the Gaza Sunbirds posted awhile ago, the language of ceasefire does not mean a language of peace, and, as Doctors Without Borders stated, it certainly does not mean that help is not needed. Consider donating to Doctors Without Borders here as they continue their work in Gaza. And please consider following and supporting the work of The Sameer Project (link here) and The Gaza Sunbirds (link here) as they provide on the ground support for Palestinians in Gaza.

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