Sophie Cabot Black's "It Never Goes Away"

Thoughts on ongoingness.

It Never Goes Away

I will try to know your death exactly
As you do. The moon has shown up tonight,
Coin in the palm of one we wait for, sunset

Long gone. So hard this practice to wake
Into no more light, not even in the place
You left it. Then each morning comes

And you are followed by the rise
Of landscape everywhere. We never know
How much it takes, this business

Of departure; you stare into ocean
Outdone by all you want. Enough
Of what continues. Here it comes again,

The turning of dark and dirt, unable to stop;
Love, even with everything to be sad about.

from The Boston Review (2008)

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I have been reading Sophie Cabot Black’s work for the past few weeks, ever since — in writing about Jason Shinder — I read that Black was one of Shinder’s literary executors. When I first read this poem today, I had the experience of being so gently inside the momentum of something — the turning and pulling back and turning again — that I could only describe the act of reading such a poem as purely a mood. I reached the poem’s final line and just said yes.

I co-founded and helped run a reading series — once known as Dead Rabbits, then later and briefly known as Animal Riot — in New York City for five years. The pandemic put a stop to it, and we never got to officially say goodbye. A sad fact. But over those years, that sense of a mood is how I’d describe the readings that struck me the most. I’d listen to someone read, and the very idea of language became this wildly expansive thing — not just words, but breath and tone and image and rhythm and contrast. Sometimes the feeling of hearing something beautiful read was this holistic and all-encompassing feeling of wholeness. An entire forest delivered slowly, tree by tree, but without the knowledge of each branch. When the poem would end, sometimes I couldn’t remember a single line — I’d just be struck. I’d stand there and want nothing more than to just remain in the wake of something beautiful.

That’s how I feel about today’s poem. It exists in almost two distinct realms: the realm of the specific, where every line break and word — every punctuation mark used or resisted — feels so intentional and worthy of exploration, and the realm of the gestalt, where the poem itself, when taken as a whole and turning thing, is simply beautiful in that wholeness — like, I imagine, watching the blue orb of the world from a window in outer space.

On a craft level, this poem feels like a sonnet. It has some of the assigned cues — occasional rhymes, fourteen lines, and then — perhaps most strikingly — the literal word “turning” popping up in the penultimate line. But it feels like a sonnet, too, in the holistic sense of the form. The idea of something being posed as an argument — an argument of feeling or knowledge. The first two lines begin:

I will try to know your death exactly
As you do.

And then, later, that trying to know is corrected:

We never know
How much it takes

And yet, in some ways, these lines, when paired, form the antithesis of a sonnet. Though the sonnet is an argumentative form, these lines correct themselves away from argument. The opening lines attempt to know the mystery of death, and then such lines are revised. The speaker — speaking not just for themselves, but for everyone — understands that some things, like death, are impossible to know. What argument can be formed in such a space? What argument of certainty? To say I don’t know is one of the truest things one can say.

But perhaps there is an argument in this poem, in this sonnet. Perhaps we are so programmed to believe that an argument offers an advancement of thought, some sort of linear progress, that we don’t realize the way in which the admission of uncertainty could be, in and of itself, some sort of argumentative victory. Perhaps we are so fixed-geared toward progress that we don’t — or can’t — imagine the beauty of arguing ourselves back toward uncertainty.

I mean, notice how the opening lines of this poem are buoyed up with specific images. There is the moon described as a “coin in the palm.” A sunset “Long gone.” And yet, despite this imagery, which is in and of itself an attempt at certainty — what you see is what you get — there is no real certainty. The death can’t be known. Departure forms its own mystery. It always does, doesn’t it?

As such, I am struck by the way this poem today resembles a life. The way it desires to know more of something — like death — that is impossible to know in its entirety, and the way in which such an attempt at knowledge reveals more about mystery than anything else. The more we try to know a thing, this poem seems to say, the more we realize how much we do not know. But even if that is one truth of the poem, that doesn’t mean it is not hard. Such difficulty is, I think, illustrated by the constant use of punctuation in the middle of the lines. Though the poem feels almost fluid when read in its entirety, if you look more closely at it, you’ll notice that 12 of the poem’s 14 lines are marked by a caesura — a punctuated pause in the midst of a line. Such a craft choice feels like an enactment of trying, an enactment of the very difficulty of trying to grieve, to understand, and to live — trying to know what you cannot know.

For much of the same idea, I love these lines:

So hard this practice to wake
Into no more light

When I read these lines, I think about them first, almost immediately, on a literal level. I think about each day of the week that I wake around 5:30 in the morning, without a single shred of light — as you might do, as well. And I think of how hard it is. To wake in darkness, without something as simple as light to tell your body that morning has arrived. But then I think beyond the literal. I think of such lines metaphorically. I think about the way in which it is impossibly hard to make a commitment to even think about the unknown. To even think about death, or loss, or love. And the way such thinking — especially when faced with uncertainty — must become a kind of practice. Which is a kind of work. Which is a kind of choice. Which is a kind of thing that goes unvalued, unseen.

You might not have to imagine both of the aforementioned things together. Perhaps that is your life. Perhaps it is your life to wake early, before sunrise. And perhaps it is your life to spend time each day wondering about what it all means — trying to figure out how to make sense of it all. Perhaps you spend more time than you’d like away from the certainty of light, whatever light might mean. And that’s not somewhat hard or almost hard or even just a little bit hard. No. That’s very hard.

Black enacts that difficulty on a line level throughout her poem today. It’s not just that we never know, it’s:

We never know
How much it takes

It’s not just enough. It’s:

Enough
Of what continues.

Such moments are examples of the way Black uses the poetic form to complicate thought and life themselves. They are moments when the poem uses the line as a vehicle for uncertainty. Within one moment, we are certain — we never know, we have enough — but then in the next, such certainty is complicated, made more specific. These are times when I realize one beauty of poetry. Part of poetry’s structure — though it does not always resemble life itself — allows a poet to offer a way of complicating the thinking of our daily lives. A line — and its subsequent break — can mirror our indecision, our uncertainty, our pain. In many ways, we are broken just like lines. We are our own completeness, but we are fractured in the construction of ourselves.

Now, thinking of the poem holistically, I can’t help but dwell on the second half of it:

We never know
How much it takes, this business

Of departure; you stare into ocean
Outdone by all you want. Enough
Of what continues. Here it comes again,

The turning of dark and dirt, unable to stop;
Love, even with everything to be sad about.

Unable to understand or know death, the speaker becomes, in some way, consumed by everything. Consumed by the want that comes in the wake of loss, consumed by the ongoingness of a world that continues — that goes on and on and on and on. Oh, gosh, I think. How difficult that is — when we want the world to stop but we realize there is no switch to simply pause its motion. And how comforting it is, at the same time, that the world continues — that we cannot even try to control it, that we must surrender ourselves a little bit each day, over and over again, to all that carries on and reminds us of our smallness.

This difficulty, this uncertainty, this desire to understand the unknowable — it makes me think of a line from Sarah Manguso’s beautiful book, The Guardians:

I want to know about my particular grief, which is unknowable, just like everyone else’s.

Something so remarkably lonely about sorrow is the way in which the certainty of your uncertainty is its own particular isolation. In other words, when you lose someone or something, you know that you are left with so many questions that arise out of grief. And you know, with certainty, that you will have no answers. And that circumstance — despite the fact that everyone experiences loss — is your own to hold, and move through, and live with. I think about that all time. The way everyone I see is moving through their own experience of loss at every second of every day. And the way it is their own shape, that loss.

What to do, then? In the midst of such particular loneliness? I don’t know. I’m thinking of a poem, “Crescent,” by the wonderful C.D. Wright.

Those final lines:

draw nearer my dear: never fear: the world spins nightly toward its brightness and we are on it.

The world spins nightly toward its brightness and we are on it.

In some sort of other dimension inhabited only by poets and poetry, I imagine the speaker of Black’s poem and the speaker of Wright’s talking to one another. The former attempting to grieve and the latter attempting to find whatever happiness they can. Both living among and within and upon a world that forever “spins nightly toward its brightness.”

The last line of Wright’s poem and the last line of Black’s poem — they sing together, don’t they?

The world spins nightly toward its brightness and we are on it.

Love, even with everything to be sad about.

Both lines remind me of what it might mean to cultivate a world of light. To say yes, and. To say maybe. To say I know it is hard, but it is also. The way, even in the midst of a world that offers so much to be sad about, just this morning I saw someone at the coffee shop ask the person behind the counter for a handful of coffee beans, just to carry them around, to hold them to their nose. The way I brought a bag of oranges to school the other day, thinking they would last as an occasional snack for me or a student for a week, and the way they were gone in 30 seconds. The way a student saw the bag from down the hall and held up their hand, and the way I threw one bright fruit in a perfect arc to them, and the way they caught it, and the way I felt buzzy with joy the whole morning. Love, even with everything to be sad about.

So what is it that never goes away? Is it death? Is it each morning, and the light each morning brings? Is it our doubt? Our grief? Our occasional joy? I think it is each of these things, and more. But I think it begins with light. I think it is light that reminds us of both the fragility of our existence and our ongoingness. I think it is light that humbles us, the way it moves slowly across the gentle rise of a field, like a wide door opening to reveal all that we don’t see, or know, or understand. It opens this door and closes it. It does this every day. And we live forever in the midst of this opening and closing, this leaving and returning. Every day we witness something about loss and something about joy, simply by waking into the morning.