Stanley Plumly's "Sonnet"

Thoughts on showing up.

Sonnet

Whatever it is, however it comes, it takes time.
It can take all night.
My father would sit on the edge of the bed
and let the tears fall to the floor
the sun the size of the window, full
and rising. He was a dead man and he knew it.

I think of him every time I fall in love
how the heart is three-quarters high in the body.
—He could lift his own weight above his head.
—He could run a furrow straight by hand.
I think of him large in his dark house
hard in thought, taking his time.

But in fact he is sitting on the edge of the bed
and it is morning, my mother's arms around him.


from Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me (Ecco, 2000)

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Before I talk about anything else in regards to this poem; before I talk about fathers; before I talk — as I will — about my own father; before I talk about how I’ve talked about this poem and poet before; before I talk about tenderness, as I am sure I will; before I talk about a small city in Michigan, which I’ll get to later; before I talk about a poem I once wrote; before I talk about holding and being held; before I talk about love, I want to talk about this one line:

how the heart is three-quarters high in the body

I’ve loved this poem for a long, long time, and in all the time I’ve loved this poem, I have loved this line without really thinking about it. It has been — as sometimes happens for me — the kind of line I read, internalize, love, admire, and yet fail to wonder my way towards meaning. Which, I think, is fine. Sometimes, or maybe more than sometimes, it is okay to simply love something without parsing it to pieces. But today I am sitting with this poem and wondering about this line.

I am wondering, especially, about what it might be gesturing towards — why Plumly saw fit to point it out. Because it’s true. The heart does sit high up in the body.

I think, perhaps, that it could mean that the heart — situated as it is, so high up in the body — becomes a symbol of something carried. When we bend to pick up a heavy object, and when we lift it upwards, it takes strength. And so perhaps it takes strength to love, seeing as we spend all our lives holding up this thing we call a heart. And I think, too, that it could mean that this strength is enduring, in that the heart is always there, so high up in the body. It is being held up every day. And that must take work, mustn’t it? That daily defiance of gravity? And so maybe love is a daily defiance of gravity, a pushing against all that pushes us down. And maybe, then, as a result of this holding, this constant lifting up, it is tiring to love. And maybe that is okay. Maybe it’s worth admitting.

Or maybe — just maybe — this line might be gesturing toward the idea that it is okay to let the heart back down to earth. Sitting down on a bedside, for example — in such a moment, your heart descends from its high height. You give your heart a break in such a moment. You give it a break, too, perhaps, when you let yourself be held (and think, too, then, of all the work the person holding you is doing, seeing as they’re holding their own heart up as they hold yours — perhaps they, too, need to be held). And so maybe we don’t always need to celebrate the high height our hearts sit at. Maybe there is something here about all we hold for ourselves that could be held, at times, by something — or someone — else.

And maybe that is part of the opening of today’s poem:

Whatever it is, however it comes, it takes time.
It can take all night.

Whatever it is — by which I mean, in this case, maybe the letting-yourself-be-held — can take time. It can take all night to arrive.

Okay, that’s enough about that one line. I want to say that I love this poem. It makes me think of my own father. I am sure I have mentioned it before. It sits in conversation with another poem I love, Ross Gay’s “How to Fall in Love with Your Father,” which ends with a similar image to today’s poem:

In this love poem
the son trains himself on the task at hand,
which is simple, which is, finally, the only task
he has ever had, which is lifting
the father to his feet.

And it has echoes of one of the great poems of all time (a phrase I hardly ever use and do not use lightly): Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” In that poem, Hayden employs a litany of sounds to enact the labor of the hardly-thanked father:

blueblack...cracked...ached...banked...breaking...chronic

The world that Hayden builds in that poem is a world where the soft vowel sound of love is nearly drowned out against the harsh ache of every creaking and breaking thing. And yet, and yet, and yet. The poem ends with the softness of vowels, an echo of regret, a deep wish to have insisted on love instead of harshness.

And here, too, in Plumly’s poem, notice these lines:

I think of him large in his dark house
hard in thought, taking his time.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Plumly was thinking of Hayden as he wrote these lines. Because it’s there, isn’t it? Large…dark…hard. That world-building through sound. An enforced, masculine stoicism that tries (and fails, as it always will) to craft an idea of a world that doesn’t need softness, and doesn’t need light.

It’s no surprise that this poem’s volta — as it is a sonnet — arrives right after that aforementioned moment:

But in fact he is sitting on the edge of the bed
and it is morning, my mother's arms around him.

No matter the largeness, the darkness, the hard edges of the world…tenderness arrives. I think of the final, oft-quoted line from Aracelis Girmay’s “The Black Maria”: & so to tenderness I add my action. But I think, too, of some of the lines that come before:

Each of us entering the world

& entering the world like this.
Soft. Unlikely.      Then — 

the idiosyncratic minds & verbs.
                 Beloveds, making your ways

to & away from us, always, across the centuries,
inside the vastness of the galaxy, how improbable it is that this 
iteration

of you or you or me might come to be at all — Body of fear,
Body of laughing — & even last a second. This fact should make us fall all

to our knees with awe,
the beauty of it against these odds

I see, in Plumly’s poem, and in Hayden’s poem, and in Gay’s poem, an attempt to recognize the ways in which there is a real, often-masculine desire to ignore what Girmay points us toward in her poem: the softness, the unlikeliness, the improbable nature of things, the laughter inherent in awe, the beauty of it all. And it is an ignorance that Plumly is pointing out in today’s poem. That’s why those words that begin the volta matter: But in fact. It is not like the father in Plumly’s poem makes it out to be. It is not hard, large, and dark. In fact, he is being held. In fact, he is letting himself be held. Perhaps — as the poem’s opening hints at — because of something awful, some diagnosis, some wildly tragic pain. But, as Stanley writes, however it comes, it takes time. And it took time. But he let himself be held.

I love this poem because it makes me think of my father, and yes, I know — today is a day to think about fathers. My father turns 80 in a few months, and is a living embodiment of something an old friend named Dennis once told me at a party. The party was years ago, maybe almost ten years ago, and it was for Dennis’s close friend, who was moving away from New York City, and when I arrived, Dennis nearly cried upon seeing me. He said he couldn’t believe I showed up, seeing as I wasn’t super close with his friend. At the time, however, I lived only a few blocks away, and a party was a party. I didn’t tell Dennis this. I just sort of nodded. But Dennis went on. He was angry at a friend who didn’t show up. He was really angry. And I think this is why he cried when he saw me, because he was so angry. And he kept talking, and he finally said something I’ll never forget, not just because I was 23 and impressionable and a little bit drunk, but also because, even now, despite those circumstances, I found it profound. He said you know, Devin, most of life is about showing up. We were in a basement somewhere near 145th Street and that’s what he said.

I know, I know. It’s one of those things you put on a t-shirt or end a commencement address with. But it’s true. Or, at least, I found it true. And I found it true because I thought immediately of my father, who raised my brother and me for most of our formative years, and who did so with the kind of determined, sometimes-harsh stoicism of the man Plumly depicts for a second there in his poem today. We had many quiet car rides and many short, bursting arguments and we had that one time where he told me you should talk about your feelings, but you don’t have to talk about them to me. Oh, we had lots of things. And yet (or and still, or even so, or just plain and) in the midst of all that, my father showed up.

He sat on the bed while I slept and trimmed my toenails. He woke me up early each day and drove me to school. He stocked the car with Diet Cokes and steered it all the way to Rochester a few times each year to see his mother. He never missed a race I ran, nor one that my brother ran. In fact, as I write this, he is on his way to Michigan to see my brother attempt to qualify for the Boston Marathon. He did the same thing for me over five years ago, when I found some small, last chance marathon on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. We arrived together at a one-room airport in a town with just a prison, and we drove through the night while the northern lights danced outside the passenger side window, and we watched the big boats pull into the Soo Locks at Sault Ste. Marie, sitting on these bleachers that were there just for the occasion, eating ice cream and passing the time.

What can I say? I realized long after my childhood that my father was speaking his own language of love. It is a language that says, without words, I am here; I am here; I am here. It is a beautiful language, I think, but it is also, I know now, a lonely one. That is part of what today’s poem teaches me. The language of showing up is a language of love that insists that it can, and that it will. It is beyond beautiful in this regard. But what happens, I wonder, when it cannot? Is it possible for a language without words — a language built entirely on presence, and on action — to say hold me, to say I need help? I wonder. I wonder, and I hope.

Until then, I know that it is part of the responsibility of those gifted — as I am — with the privilege of being shown up for, again and again, to return the favor of love in a way that teaches that language of action a new language: tenderness. That teaching is there at the end of each of the poems I have mentioned today. It is there in the holding at the end of today’s. And it is there in the lifting at the end of Ross Gay’s. And it is there in the knowing at the end of Robert Hayden’s. And it is there, certainly, when Aracelis Girmay writes: & so to tenderness I add my action.

My father, perhaps without knowing, taught me this work, despite the silence. And that is one of the strange notions of this life — how we can be taught beautiful things by people who might say they don’t recognize such beauty. How people hold that deep, rich complexity inside of them. How we all do.

I wrote about what my father taught me in a poem from many years ago, the first poem of mine I ever really memorized, because I began almost every reading I gave with it. I’ll leave you with it. It’s called “Elegy for the Long Drive.”

When pops aired his words over space
to tell me grandma had a heart attack
I couldn’t hear the quiver in his voice.

I had just bought coffee in Queens
for a dollar & the steam of it when held
close to me made the inside of my nose

sweat. You are someone made by her,
I wanted to say. Can you cry for me,
dad? But no, we talked quiet & stern

like two boys tucked away in the corner
of a schoolyard, pretending at something
larger than themselves. We are all

someone made. God is the space
between the last word of a sentence
& a question mark. A heart attack

is the shake a pen makes as it scribbles
along a page. It is all so very human.
Most nights, before sleep, I think

of the slow rolling heave of my father’s
gut, of the breathing in & breathing
out, of his hands, nearing the pigment-

drained, speckled stage of old age.
When my grandma dies, tonight
in a hospital bed, or tomorrow,

I will remember the hush of her slippers
as they shuffled across the floor. I will
begin a sentence with didn’t she or

isn’t this where or I can’t believe or
she was so. Notice the space where
I didn’t place a question mark. I don’t

believe in God anymore. I believe
in my father & that long drive years ago
through the white-out, where even the truckers

pulled to the side of the road, the snow
a steady horizontal machine of erasure,
where we passed through the names of towns

so plains-like & lilted I could’ve sworn
the snow pattering against the window
was the brush drum of the song we inhabited.

Painted Post. Cooper’s Plain. Savona.
My father turned the radio low & from
the backseat I marbled him into a statue

made of miles. Most people forget the woman
who shouted out at Jesus, blessed is the womb
that bore you. My father didn’t. Each winter

he drove back toward it under cover 
of darkness. Each winter he taught me
without words how to write an elegy.

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Some notes:

1. As I will continue to mention, 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. Here, too, is a link to the New York War Crimes page — their ongoing publication.

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.