The Sublime
for Larry Levis
And what good is a dream finally? It breaks your head open
and cello music pours out of a stranger's window and the most
gorgeous woman you ever loved says to hit the road and you do
see them—that stranger and this woman. Kissing everywhere.
In the trees. On boats. In the kitchen cupboards. The fog
of daily life never lifts and the checkbook needs proper
calculations and the dog would like supper please and now
without warning the dream returns. It breaks your head open.
You lie there for a week and no one finds you until the dog
having lost its dignity finally eats and when there is no more
howls. It howls. And you are a missing person, a passage
of shit quivered into the dirt. A good boy. A terrible dream
someone picks up with a plastic bag wrapped in his hand
to throw away and you are thrown away. You do it every day.
Walking too early, driving to work, working and returning.
Reading poems of great beauty and crying at the movies.
Touching the hair of your niece who laughs at water. Flying
over cornfields so close and so openly that when you wake
there is silk in your beard. Your arms are tired and hang
at your sides like the wings of a migratory bird who is about
to die. And what good is a dream finally? It breaks your heart
and you stand in the lush dark of the moment after twilight
ends and begin to sing and nothing makes sense to you
and you sing louder for a while, then awkwardly sit down
where you are. And the stars overhead shine a little—no more
or less than usual—and whether it is daylight and they are invisible
or whether it is night and they are the embers of a blacksmith's
fire, they shine and you are grateful. That love is like a hammer.
from Sparks from a Nine Pound Hammer (LSU Press, 2001)
If you know me personally, you know that Steve Scafidi is one of my favorite poets. You know that I have a tattoo of a bison on my back and, beneath it, the final six words of Scafidi’s poem “For the Last American Buffalo,” a poem that my friend Jeremiah gave to me long ago when we were both teaching 7th grade creative writing in Queens. He thought I would like it, and I did. I didn’t just like it. I was enamored, entranced. I fell in love with this poetic interpretation of mystery, with Scafidi’s unabashed love of the soul, of life as something fully livable and yet unutterable.
I have been in a bit of a poetic rut lately, and so it’s no surprise — to me — that I find myself writing about Steve Scafidi’s work tonight. His work, ever since that first encounter, has always served as one part guiding light, one part guilty pleasure. I think we all have those guilty pleasure poets, those poets whose turn of phrase, or approach to lyric, or worldview, or embrace of the known or unknown — whose whatever — feel so akin to our spirit and soul, that to read them is to feel both known and saturated.
In “For the Last American Buffalo,” Scafidi writes:
and so we continue on
somehow and today while the seismic quietness of
the earth spun beneath my feet and while the world
I guess carried on, that lumbering thing moved heavy
thick and dark through the dreams I believe we keep
having whether we sleep or not
So we continue on somehow. We do, good lord, we do. And the somehow is important. The way it lingers there, broken off on its own line from what comes before. The somehow is the mystery. In today’s poem, Scafidi writes: The fog of daily life never lifts. It doesn’t, does it? It lingers, too. Ordinary life, full of rough tasks and emails, onion tears and stubbed toes. Scafidi asks: And what good is a dream finally? Yeah. What good?
Reading Scafidi is, for me, like that first encounter one has with geologic time. His poems do that miraculous work of gracing each moment of ordinary life with what each moment of ordinary life offers: despair and beauty, miracle and failure. His work reminds me of this passage from John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World:
A quarter-horse jockey learns to think of a twenty-second race as if it were occurring across twenty minutes--in distinct parts, spaced in his consciousness. Each nuance of the ride comes to him as he builds his race. If you can do the opposite with deep time, living in it and thinking in it until the large numbers settle into place, you can sense how swiftly the initial earth packed itself together, how swiftly continents have assembled and come apart, how far and rapidly continents travel, how quickly mountains rise and how quickly they disintegrate and disappear.
I think, as a poet, that Scafidi has that sense of time, that sense that we are here for such brief instants, not just as fully fleshed-out lives, but as moments lived in and seen. Memory can be a harsh past, and the present is barely there. Scafidi captures that present so well. You see it in lines like:
Flying
over cornfields so close and so openly that when you wake
there is silk in your beard.
Throughout today’s poem, there is that sense of oneness with the world, a world that is disappearing and rebuilding itself at once. But more so, there is a sense of deep, almost sorrowful beauty. There is another poem in the lines I just quoted: the poem of waking up next morning, brushing one’s teeth, and noticing a ribbon of silk caught in your beard. What then? Do you laugh? Cry? Do you smile at the memory? Do you wish it back or wish it forward? What to do with this life? See how it rolls on? See how it moves away and from? All the way away? All the way toward? So much — how to hold it?
Such questions pepper every reading of every poem of Scafidi’s. In today’s poem, I’m particularly struck — as always — by the constant juxtaposition of the dream and reality. This is a poem that begins as a poem of unadulterated sorrow. Love is lost. The dream of love is lost and reminded of again and again. And yet, as Scafidi writes:
The fog
of daily life never lifts and the checkbook needs proper
calculations and the dog would like supper please and now
without warning the dream returns. It breaks your head open.
God. And isn’t this the most perfect and specific approximation of ordinary life? That each daily task becomes insurmountable, simply because of its daily-ness, and because of the way you never know if today will be the day your heart is broken? And notice the way Scafidi enacts this, with this constant repetition of “and,” this refusal of punctuation. Perhaps we think the day is punctuated, sentence-stopped by hours and minutes, second-hands and alarm clocks. And yet, it’s not, is it? The day runs on, full of and’s, never a single period.
That seemingly little move — the sentence run on and on — peppers Scafidi’s poetry. If you pick up his first book, which I hope you do, you’ll notice the way so many of his poems exist as one sentence, as if a breath could breathe more air and yet remain one breath. He even has a poem in the book titled “Ode to And” — which I excerpted in a post many months ago, and yet will excerpt again, simply because the following lines break my heart:
and it is a rare thing to say but everyone
I love still lives and soon the one by one of going away
grief is comes and I want whoever you are to somehow
enter my day with all the mysterious privacies and tender
joints and ankle bones and the lovely grace of that place
behind your knees
That and does so much. It allows the poem to move fluidly — as lives do — between love and grief and back again to grace. And I think, writing this tonight, I have come to my own plain conclusion that it is the word and I am concerned with. Because I think it is that word — and — that opens up the doors to possibility. And I think sometimes, even as poets, we close those doors to possibility. I certainly do.
Notice how often Scafidi begins a sentence in today’s poem with and:
And what good is a dream finally?
And you are a missing person…
And the stars overhead shine a little…
Each and signals a continuation, an attempt to bridge whatever finality emerged from the previous thought and connect it to what will come next. The word and is an act of deep un-isolation. It breaks a hole in the wall you attempted to build by offering a period, a conclusion, and says no, no, let’s continue on. Sometimes, I think, that is my gripe, not just with poetry, but with anything: some attempt toward finality. Finality refuses the word and. It offers instead: a period, a data point, a place of conclusion. Where there is and, there is a kind of hope. I think of the final two stanzas from today’s poem:
And what good is a dream finally? It breaks your heart
and you stand in the lush dark of the moment after twilight
ends and begin to sing and nothing makes sense to you
and you sing louder for a while, then awkwardly sit downwhere you are. And the stars overhead shine a little—no more
or less than usual—and whether it is daylight and they are invisible
or whether it is night and they are the embers of a blacksmith's
fire, they shine and you are grateful. That love is like a hammer.
There it is again, that juxtaposition. Dream and ordinary life. Despair and love. But notice how it is the and that offers the break from despair. And the stars overhead shine a little. So much is caught up in that and. It is, in many ways, an act of noticing. If you give permission, as Scafidi does, for the and to exist, you give permission for whatever it might offer to alter your perspective. Here, the stars shine. And yes, it is no more or less than usual, but it is enough. It is enough to be grateful. It is enough to signal some kind of love. And that is enough, I think. It is.
In her novel, Long Live the Post Horn, Vigdis Hjorth writes:
What do we do with our despair if our lives are too small to contain it?
In another one of her novels, Will and Testament, she writes:
It requires hard work to transform suffering into something which is useful to everyone.
I think of both of those lines when I think of Scafidi’s work. I think of how Scafidi’s poems are full of ordinariness, a sense of small lives going about small tasks in the midst of the so-much-ness that is the rest of the world: love, despair, nature, death. And yet, Scafidi’s poems do not separate that so-much-else from our ordinary lives. Rather, they entwine the two. They say we are one and the same. We are at once ordinary and at once feats of extraordinary endurance. We are small witnesses to large things.
And so I am thinking about that tonight. I am thinking of the connective tissue that binds us between one moment and the next. In a language, the one I am using, that tissue is called and. In the last line of Scafidi’s poem today, it is also called love, I think. As Denis Johnson writes:
It was love that sent me on the journey,
love that called me home.
The word and is an enactment of love. It says, simply, that you are trying to continue. It enacts, as Vigdis Hjorth writes, the hard work of transforming the suffering of our daily lives into something useful, maybe even universal. I think, actually, that the urgency of our daily life under capitalism is a refusal of the and. Each urgency seems hard-pressed toward finality, determined toward some objectified goal. Yes, there is forward motion, but it is fixed. It labels anything unlike itself as something akin to waste. There is no love there. But there is love in time. And there is love in noticing. There is love in and. And every time your head turns to see something else in the world, that is you saying and. And every time you rummage through a closet, a forgotten drawer, that is you saying and. And every time you second guess yourself, it is you saying but, but it is also you saying and. And every time you want more from life, that is you saying and. And every waking day, another and. And every life, another and.