Su Cho's "Ode to the New York Heat Wave"
Thoughts on the work of joy.
Ode to the New York Heat Wave
My family discovered each other in a house during a heat wave. The five of us, on the bare floor, trying not to touch each other, breathe too loud, and inching closer to the window. My sister is the youngest and won’t stop crying. She asks if we’re poor now, if she has to go get a job. We laugh, congratulate her for being able to see the bigger picture. At night, my dad orders buffalo chicken pies, vodka pies, a classic pepperoni, and as many cold liters of Coke we want, keeping our mouths full and quiet. We broker bathroom time like strangers meeting for the first time every morning. from The Symmetry of Fish (Penguin Books, 2022)
Yes, I know we live in a climate emergency, the response to which seems to forever be discussed and negotiated and delayed in the various rooms of power that exist throughout the world. And yes, I know that the two hottest days ever recorded on earth were recorded back-to-back not long ago. And I know it was over 118 degrees for three straight days in Las Vegas. And I know that in New York City, where I am writing this, the summer has been defined by these days-long stretches of severe heat and humidity, an extra shirt in my bag to replace the one I sweat through as I walk around. And, amidst all of that, I do believe — with real vigor — that poets, among so many others, have been and will continue to be the ones to point us toward both the tragic reality of this emergency and the joy that still persists within it. That joy is important. It reminds us, each day, of what is possible within us, and what might continue to be possible in that seemingly impossible future.
I think of how Ross Gay, in an interview, says the following:
It’s like joy — sometimes I think there’s a conception of joy as meaning something like — like something easy. And to me, joy has nothing to do with ease. And joy has everything to do with the fact that we’re all going to die. That’s actually — when I’m thinking about joy, I’m thinking about that at the same time as something wonderful is happening, some connection is being made in my life, we are also in the process of dying.
And then later:
And it’s sort of like it is joy by which the labor that will make the life that I want possible. It is not at all puzzling to me that joy is possible in the midst of difficulty.
And I think, too, of Ali Smith’s Companion Piece, a novel I am reading now, a novel which continues to prove (for me, at least) Smith’s wildly imaginative and critical capacity to be a novelist who can translate the moment we are living in into some conception of the possible moment we could be living in. In one scene of Companion Piece, her narrator recalls a time spent helping an old classmate do a close-reading of a poem:
I hate this poem, she says.
Do you still hate it? I say.
But she doesn’t hear me; she’s holding the paper with the poem on it and turning it round in her hands.
He’s saying death’s a game, she says. Which it really isn’t.
Or saying there’s a way to be playful even in times of really terrible doubt? I say.
Ah, she says. I like that.
A way to be playful even in times of really terrible doubt. Isn’t that one way of being and living — of many — that a poem maps out for us? And isn’t it part of the mapping-out that today’s poem offers for us? A few pages before that exchange above, Smith writes: And you’re smiling at death now. Look how powerful a poem is. I love today’s poem because it gives us that map that allows us to find joy even in the midst of doubt and fear and, yes, death. And because it offers description and voice to that very labor that Ross Gay hints at — the labor of making a life possible. In today’s poem, that life is the life of family. It’s there in the first lines:
My family discovered each other in a house during a heat wave.
And what I love, too, about today’s poem, is that Su Cho makes it clear that this discovery of family is not without difficulty. Notice the immediate description of the circumstances that allow for this discovery, which juxtapose the strange joy of the poem’s opening lines:
The five of us, on the bare floor, trying not to touch each other, breathe too loud, and inching closer to the window.
This work that Su Cho does in these opening lines — to make the fact of discovery possible within the circumstances that are described — is just one of the many labors of a poet, someone who, I think sometimes, maybe often, certainly in my reading, makes real the fact of two truths, or three truths, or forty-five, or seventy million, someone who looks close enough at the world to wonder: could joy exist here? could sorrow? could I find connection, still, while trying not to touch?
And aren’t these many truths at play (yes, play) in the heart of today’s poem? Notice here, in these lines, the way the sorrow of tears and the joy of laughter sit right next to each other:
My sister is the youngest and won’t stop crying. She asks if we’re poor now, if she has to go get a job. We laugh, congratulate her for being able to see the bigger picture.
And how, in the lines after, the facts of the ordinary — the pizzas and the Coke, remembered clearly, because a poet reminds us that they are worth remembering clearly — take on this kind of totemic quality; they become touch points, little windows for the light to get in to the story. I think of how, later in Su Cho’s book, The Symmetry of Fish, she has a poem titled, “In the Middle of the Highway, There Is a Garden.” That, too: a window to let the light in.
Or, too, I am reminded of a moment that may or may not be true from my childhood, but feels true because I have insisted to myself, over and over again, that it happened. I am reminded of a blizzard, the opposite situation of today’s poem, and how it snowed upwards of three feet, even four, and how I was still little enough to be held, and how my dad bundled me in a million coats and threw me out of a window into a snow pile, and how there, even in the midst of such cold and strangeness and, I’m certain, power outages and difficulty, there was, even there, at the bottom of that snow pile, the warmth of his hands picking me up, and the light of his laughter at the whole debacle.
So yes, that, too: a window to let the light in.
Come on, now.
Finally, in today’s poem, there is that ending:
We broker bathroom time like strangers meeting for the first time every morning.
It’s funny, in an earlier published version of this poem, the ending reads as follows:
We speak again as we determine the bathroom order like strangers having met for the first time seeing each other differently every morning.
I love having these two versions — how they speak to revision, and what it can do in service of a poem’s shape and texture and feeling. In the earlier version, the meaning is offered plainly. The family are strangers “seeing / each other differently every morning.” But that phrase is omitted from today’s version, and what is left is a sharper image. The suddenness of that word “strangers” is left alone, without meaning attached to it, and as such, it sits in direct contrast to the word “family” that begins the poem. We, as readers, are then left to puzzle that out in a way that is at once enriching and enlivening. How can they be strangers, if they are family? We might ask such a question. And then, maybe, we might settle into an understanding — that part of the intimate proximity of family involves seeing each other anew, seeing each other differently, seeing each other frustrated, seeing each other strange, seeing each other joyful, seeing each other whole.
And here, too, that word “like” holds so much weight. They are not strangers. They cannot be. They are merely like them. Just as they are like so many other things, in this intimate and difficult moment of togetherness. In the end, they are family, discovering each other anew through grace and difficulty and strangeness. They are who they are, and they are like so much else. And they are all of this together.
All of this — the climate emergency, the family, the strangeness, the laughter, the tears — feels important to me because all of it feels real. Today’s poem makes clear that reality in succinct terms. It is a reality I feel, as I sit here typing this a block away from one of the many pizza shops, where sometimes the smell of the exhaust fumes of the McDonald’s below seep through my window and confound me and please me and make me feel deranged all at once, and where I have felt sweaty and hot and frozen and loved and joyful and sad and angry and so much else, many times over. It is a reality so many feel, in circumstances varied and different, difficult and horrific, strange and absurd, full of their own experiences of sorrow and beauty.
One of the great injustices of any tragedy is the reduction such tragedy makes out of those who are most affected by it. While the powerful go on living their own version of their fullest lives, those affected by tragedy are reduced by the popular narrative, reduced into mere sufferers, reduced into debate points about worthiness and unworthiness. They are no longer lives that are merited the fullness that life merits to those who live it.
Early in Ali Smith’s Companion Piece, which takes place during a pandemic, she writes:
I’d understood fully, as I stood and watched it with my mouth open, why no government was ever going to think it worth recording never mind bowing its head even momentarily to the deaths and fragilities of any of the millions and millions and millions of individual people, with their detailed generic joyful elegiac fruitful wasted nourishing undernourished common individual lives…
I thought, while reading this the other day, of today’s poem. And I thought, too, of the pandemic, yes. The endless ambulances here in the city, the hospitals set up in fields in Central Park. I thought of the names of the dead printed in the paper, and the way each of those names was an example, as Smith attests above, to the full scope of a life, in all of its joyful, fruitful, nourishing, undernourished glory and fragility and individuality and so much else, and how one great travesty of such a tragedy was the way that no reaction from people in power felt anywhere near sufficient to honor or recognize such a fact, something that continues to happen in the midst of any tragedy, such as the genocide that continues in Gaza. People become, in such moments, one-dimensional pieces that are moved around a board in a room where they are not welcome. And it is the hard work of so many others to bring back the full scope of each person’s holistic dimensionality, their all-ness, their shape and sorrow and story, their joy and smile and laugh. That is hard work, the work of looking into this life and reminding us that we are capable of being — that we already are being — so much more than we are told we are.
And it is work that poetry reminds me, so often, that it is capable of doing.
Yes, poetry reminds me, in this moment of ongoing tragedy, that it is possible to hold the truth of tragedy alongside the playfulness of being alive, alongside the love of others in the midst of being alive, and alongside the rage towards the many injustices one experiences while being alive. In fact, it is not just possible; it is also good to do this. It is good and right to do this, because it insists and insists and insists that people are not merely one thing, not merely one-dimensional, not merely passive non-agents to be moved by the active agents of power. It insists that people — you, and me, and you, and me — are lives deeply engrossed in the act of living. Not merely engrossed, no. But deeply so. That’s the whole point.
Some notes:
Consider donating to the work of Doctors Without Borders to support their ongoing work in Gaza.
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.
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one of my favorites you’ve written