Because There’s Still a Sky, Junebug
I turn on the porchlight
so the insects will come,
so my skin that drank of you
can marvel at how
quickly it becomes enraged,
a luscious feast. I’m waiting
to hear myself crystallize
with revelation.
Who stands guard at rooms locked into tombs?
Who will dictate the order
in which we’re consumed?
—I turn the light off,
but who taught me to stay quiet
when the power is down?
You’re so sweet, men say to me,
but tonight, I want
no one. Tonight, a drone
in Yemen detonates and rends the sky,
and in my father’s garden,
a drone is a stingless bee unable
to make honey.
I crush the antennae, regard
the exoskeleton. Do we ever learn
that we’re given weapons
to be vicious so we can be sweet?
I look up,
because there is still a sky, the junebug
that whirs across it, because
there is still a head-scarfed girl
who sucks the sugar
from a ginger candy
before she explodes—I look up,
and the sky still flints with so many stars. Above me.
Above you.
from Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf Press, 2018)
It’s a strange night. I’m writing this beside a window, not on a porch — though I wish. There is a debate about to happen. Tomorrow, my high school — remote up until now — is reopening. Because I am still — and perhaps always will be — a little spiritual, in moments like these, moments of unease, restless energy, I do that thing where I pick up a book and flip to a page, any page, and spend a moment with it. Today’s poem is that page.
I love Tarfia Faizullah’s work. It does that thing, so hard to explain because it cannot possibly be re-manufactured, where it allows for so much to enter. It does not resist moving in and through and all the way between a mind, a heart, a soul, a world, a country, a body. It’s funny, that Faizullah writes “I’m waiting / to hear myself crystallize / with revelation” in this poem, because this whole poem simmers at the surface of it, in what it allows for and what it resists and what it looks toward and recognizes.
See this what this poem reaches toward: light, want, rage, witness, violence, colonization, sweetness, hope, death. See how it, from the start, invites complexity with an opening such as:
I turn on the porchlight
so the insects will come
Here, we can imagine the speaker, in the moment before this poem, caught in an argument. No, no, no, you don’t understand, the speaker says to some unnamed person just off stage, I want the bugs in my life. Already, the poem is wrestling with something, already wrestling with what it means to be alone, to want, to be both what is “enraged” and what is feasted upon. Already, the poem invites itself to speculate about the purpose of poetry with that aforementioned line:
I’m waiting
to hear myself crystallize
with revelation.
I love the move Faizullah makes right after that, to go from that place of wanting answers to immediately offering questions. Not one, but three. I’m particularly drawn to the second one:
Who will dictate the order
in which we’re consumed?
That question reminds me of one of my favorite poems by Faizullah, “Poem Full of Worry Ending with My Birth,” which opens with these four couplets:
I worry that my friends
will misunderstand my silence
as a lack of love, or interest, instead
of a tent city built for my own mind,
I worry I can no longer pretend
enough to get through another
year of pretending I know
that I understand time…
I feel, in both the aforementioned questions, and these couplets, a sense of a need for order in a world that both offers enough order to think such order might occur, and yet offers enough insecurity, unknowability, wonder, and mystery to fear being mistaken, mistrusted, misunderstood. What do we know, these lines seem to ask, what can we know? There is also a sense, in these lines, that to be alive at all in this world is to need a “tent city built for my own mind” just as much as one needs love, or that such an act of building, of comfort, of retreat, is a needed act of self love.
That kind of uneasy place of in-betweenness is where the rest of today’s poem dwells. Notice how it immediately shifts from the personal intimacy of the self — “but tonight, I want / no one” — to the violence at once distant and specific to that same self, to someone’s self, to someone’s intimacy: “Tonight a drone / in Yemen denotates and rends the sky.” The poem continues to do that, to place words, moments, violences, and intimacies right up against each other. The drone above Yemen. The drone of the stingless bee in the garden. The violence of the drone. The violence of the hand crushing the antennae. The poem seems to argue that a sky can be a thing of hope at the same time as it is a source of violence, that there is complicity even in beauty. And it is a tragic world — and a colonialist country — that would ignore its violence and focus only on the beauty.
What this poem teaches me has to do with placement. A poem is many things. I imagine each has their own definition, and each definition, as Faizullah writes about the sky, “flints with so many stars.” I think one thing a poem can do is place ideas, objects, memories, desires, sorrows, and more beside other ideas, objects, memories, desires, and sorrows. And perhaps that seems simple, that a poem is a continued, deliberate act of placement. But notice how today’s poem intentionally places intimate violence alongside state-mandated violence, how it places revelation alongside curiosity, how it places desire alongside rage, how it places hope — emphasis on the still in “still flints” — alongside death. And that’s just the start.
Sometimes I hesitate about certainty, about deliberateness. I think, sometimes, that the desire for certainty can cloud the capacity for wonder, and for what wonder might allow. In a poem, that might look like forcing meaning out of something that isn’t ready to give it. In life, well, that might look like the same thing. But I think being deliberate about what you decide to place in a poem, and what you decide to place it beside — that can lead to a kind of beauty that isn’t forced. And when you reach that kind of beauty, you have something beautiful not for what it looks like or feels, not because it is objectively easy, or because it is forgiving. It can be difficult, beauty. I think of how Terrance Hayes, in his poem, “God Is an American,” writes:
Yes, I have a pretty good idea what beauty is. It survives
alright. It aches like an open book. It makes it difficult to live.
The difficulty of beauty, I think, often comes as a result of reckoning with such beauty. It is what happens, too, when you reckon with hope, or a country, or a parent, or anything once valued differently. There is a poem, “God’s Places,” by Linda Gregg, that begins with the question:
Does the soul care about the mightiness
of this love?
And ends with the hopeful declaration:
Let us make a place
of that ripeness the soul speaks about.
I think Tarfia Faizullah’s poem today dwells in that place of ripeness, which is a place, I imagine, that engages always in recognition, which is a kind of witness, which is a kind of act that is intentional — and deliberate — about what it sees and chooses to see. It is a place that understands that the world is a place of love as much as silence, of intimacy as much as violence, even if it doesn’t understand why, or how. To dwell in such a space is its own beauty, even if the beauty isn’t pure or easily digestible, because who would want that? In the one poem I quoted, Faizullah writes: “I worry I can no longer pretend / enough.” Sometimes people interpret pretending as beauty. To admit that one can longer pretend is another beauty, perhaps more complex in how it dwells and presents itself.
I am trying to remember, tonight in particular as I write this, that, just like the porch light at the opening of this poem, the ripest fruit draws the most bugs. Let them come.