Tawanda Mulalu’s “All We Got Was Autumn. All We Got Was Winter.”

Thoughts on contrast and contradiction.

All We Got Was Autumn. All We Got Was Winter.

nothing was fervent. nothing was budding. everything was
the sickness and then my bed. everything was all midnight all
touching myself in dark corners hoping for release. constantly
finding myself awake in mornings despite the persistence
of retreating. how to sleep forever without dying. how to sleep for-
ever without depression. how to sleep forever but someone notices
long enough to come and wake you into spring. then summer.
then everything I wanted was the birds bothering me with all
their muchness outside my window. everything was love, love
my season and still the mother sicked herself to sleep with gas
and she did not wake up. I remember her every day and pretend
a love of both poppies and horses and bread and milk. how I miss
her. watch from the ashes and no one rises and how men continue
to breathe this air. almost thankful for not being consumed
but to instead consume. almost thankful for my bones if not for
the fact of my back. depended on you. you depended on nothing
but pictures. would wish myself to end if not for the fact my love
for the birds and the bees. wished myself into tears. somewhere else
an ocean roars I do not see it I do not hear it, I brush my teeth.

from Please make me pretty, I don't want to die (Princeton University Press, 2022)

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I’ve been reading this debut collection from Tawanda Mulalu all week, and encountered poem after poem that froze my attention and stayed with me. This one in particular — dog-eared and well-read — has sat with me. It makes me think of the opening of another one of Mulalu’s poems, which begins with the title — “Good Long Poem” — and bleeds into its first line:

was something I always wanted. Because something was never working inside of me.

I feel that same energy of excess pouring through today’s poem. It’s a poem that feels relentless in its longing and desire and grief and its knowledge of what is and what could be. In other words, it is a poem I love because I feel like it breathes in the margins along its edges. It is — and wants to be — so full of life.

It reminds me of another poem — Chen Chen’s “Winter” — that feels different in form but similar in its approach to life — which is a thing that is full, so often, if not always, of so much. In that poem, Chen Chen begins:

Big smelly bowel movements this blue January morning.

From the living room TV, a commercial from our TV company: We’re the fastest, the only — 

Meaning, Love us above all others.

What makes poop more pungent on certain days?

There is sickness in Chen Chen’s poem, and poop, and lots of love, and politics, and criticism, and — I think — above all else, a willingness to engage with life for what life is: messy and beautiful and sad and complicated and real, very much real. A year or so ago, I taught a workshop titled Permission To Be Generous: On Excess and Allowance in Poetry. I wanted to prompt students to write into unknowing, to allow for the tangential, and the messy, and the vulnerable — the things that make up the stuff of life. I taught Chen Chen’s poem above for that reason. It’s generous in its willingness to be so wholly itself. And I see that same willingness at the heart of Mulalu’s work. It’s there right from the beginning of today’s poem:

nothing was fervent. nothing was budding. everything was
the sickness and then my bed. everything was all midnight all
touching myself in dark corners hoping for release. 

To begin a poem with such depth of sorrow and despair and nothingness is a kind of generosity. It’s a generosity because such depth of feeling is a part of life. It is real. There are those days of nothingness, days beyond rescue. I think for a long time I believed that generosity was something that had to lead to joy. But I think I have been wrong. It is a generous act to admit your despair, because despair — particularly now, particularly forever — is one avenue toward solidarity. To admit despair is to allow for others to feel seen in their own despair.

And so, when Mulalu writes these lines, I find a real generosity, because I know what it is like to long for this kind of sleep — the sleep of healing, the sleep of avoidance, the sleep of grief, the sleep of wanting-something-else:

how to sleep forever without dying. how to sleep for-
ever without depression. how to sleep forever but someone notices
long enough to come and wake you into spring.

On a craft level, what I love about the way Mulalu begins this poem is the unstoppable force of feeling that is enacted within each line and sentence. The poem begins with these blunt, absolute sentences — sentences that name the stakes of feeling. Sentences that begin with nothing. Sentences that make us aware of the level of sorrow. But then the feeling folds into the sentences, bleeds through the lines, and the mechanics start to unravel. One sentence tumbles forward, unpunctuated. One sentence fragments itself. A staccato rhythm emerges. And what I love about this is the way in which all of that — the bluntness, the contrast, the unfolding, the fragments — enacts the way it feels to feel. Despair can feel like that: sharp and blunt at the same time. Heavy and piercing. It can tumble us stumbling forward. It can stop us completely.

The poem introduces us to that heaviness and then names what could be:

everything I wanted was the birds bothering me with all
their muchness outside my window. 

I love these two lines with my whole heart. I love them not just for what they say, but for how it feels to encounter them after the massive weight of the lines that come before. The opening of this poem is such an intense and magnificent description of pain and suffering and the kind of despair one feels when it seems there is no way out of such feeling. And so, when the poem reaches this point of want, of longing, it arrives with such contrast to all that comes before. And then, when what the speaker wants is so gentle — birds! bothering me! with their muchness! — and tender, it just feels at once gorgeous and shattering.

Such an experience of contrast between grief and gentleness reminds me of Ross Gay’s “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian,” which ends:

there is a way
the fig tree grows
in groves it wants,
it seems, to hold us,
yes I am anthropomorphizing
goddammit I have twice
in the last thirty seconds
rubbed my sweaty 
forearm into someone else’s
sweaty shoulder
gleeful eating out of each other’s hands
on Christian St.
in Philadelphia a city like most
which has murdered its own 
people 
this is true
we are feeding each other 
from a tree
at the corner of Christian and 9th
strangers maybe 
never again.

Within Gay’s poem — as well as Mulalu’s — is a recognition of complex truths simultaneously existing and sometimes unequally weighted. The sorrow that runs manifold through the opening lines of today’s poem is contrasted by a longing for something as kind and simple as the muchness of birds. Later on, the poem mentions, this love for the “birds and the bees” is what holds together the fragility of a person’s life. And I’m thinking of that. I’m thinking of how the other side of despair — despair caused by grief or loss or things so systemic and brutal that they seem sometimes to loom large above us and swallow us whole — can be something as gentle and simple as the longing for light. Or birds. Or a window to look at it all. What to make of that? That what hurts us can be so heavy and what fills us can be so light? What to make of the fact that what we need does not need to be so much?

I think one great difficulty of life is the way that we have to reckon with these unequal contradictions and weights, that we have to make sense of so much while we move through so much. It’s there at the end of today’s poem:

somewhere else
an ocean roars I do not see it I do not hear it, I brush my teeth.

So much happens while the everyday carries on. Somewhere an ocean roars. Somewhere, someone feels more than they know how to hold. Somewhere the light angles through a window as one brilliant beam, and holds up the dust of skin and ash and dirt and memory. Somewhere someone cries. And meanwhile, somewhere, always, someone is brushing their teeth. Is pouring water into an empty glass. Is tying a shoe. Is trying on a sweater to see if it still fits. This is a kind of holding that we do everyday. That we get used to. We move through the mundanities of life while carrying our grief, our rage, our anger — all that we hold whether or not we are able to, whether or not anyone asked. We hold it anyway. We are good at this, I think. And it is sad and difficult that we are good at this. That we cannot sleep for forever even when we must. We are good at walking the tightrope of the ordinary while balancing the anxiety and weight of loss that feels extraordinary.

There’s another poem in Mulalu’s collection that gets at this. It’s titled “Not a snow day.” It reads, in full:

Please stop. Enough froth over this land
and the traffic fills with impatient radio—  

or radio’s the only pinprick of voice 
nearer now than skin. A child asks to touch me 

and I tell her not to. She pokes me.
I swab the itchy lengths of my nostrils and God 

says again, do you like it when I touch you 
like this? Everything familiar and awful always

and the test tube carries me to a lab. This morning, 
the shower’s water is careful and warm. But the air—  

I walked in late to school and the same child here
waiting just outside the door, sleepy and shivering. 

I sanitized her hands. I teach her how to divide. 

I am sitting with this poem now not just because it speaks so much to my experience as a teacher, but also because it illustrates that same strange and absurd and yet stuff-of-life contrast that we balance on a daily basis: Everything familiar and awful always.

I remember those years — in many ways still ongoing — of being in the classroom in the midst of the pandemic, of wondering whether or not we would have to sanitize each piece of paper we passed out, of arriving early to open pack after pack of tests in the hallway outside of my room, arranging the prepackaged swabs and tubes on a desk I dragged out of the classroom. I remember doing all of that and then teaching — or trying to teach. I remember wondering so often — why. Sometimes how. I remember the walk from the subway to the school. Everything the same and so terribly different. We were called resilient, and strong. But I didn’t feel like that. I felt like grief incarnate. I felt strange. I felt like someone walking through a dark room once familiar, bumping into furniture that had been rearranged.

Out of habit, nearly every time I enter a classroom, I reach my hand to the side of the door and hold it under one of the automatic hand sanitizers that our school placed by the entrances to each classroom years ago. Sometimes, the sanitizer makes a sound. It recognizes my hand. But lately and often, no liquid comes out. They’re all empty. I think of these little machines as tired, falling into some long sleep. We don’t get that luxury. To be empty and unused. When we are empty, we often are asked to be full. In our sorrow we are sometimes asked to smile. In our grief we have to remember to refill the sanitizers, to brush our teeth. To balance. To live. I’m wondering again: what to make of this? I’m thinking of the birds and their muchness. The little light of joy amidst the heavy weight of sorrow. I would like a bigger window. I would like a flock of birds alighting just outside, and then taking off in flight.

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