Tim Seibles' "Anymore"

Thoughts on living with it.

Anymore

Days when daylight 
carries a touch 
of night: the trees
late green with summer
whisper autumn    
as though the coming 
season were already here

and I guess we have 
reached the age
where loss makes a way
into every conversation—
friends, teachers
dead and gone—as if
calling it out

as if naming death
and its daily thievery
might somehow
make it stay away.

I’m almost
a child again:
The boogeyman
only comes
when you turn out
the light

but even with my TV
burning all night
I don’t sleep 
so well anymore. 

It’s like being caught
with the wrong thing on
for winter and nothing
else to wear.  For a while
I believed it was
the right-wing sickness
that had infected
my country.
For a while

I thought it was
just me getting
older: my parents 
recently gone, taking
their kindness with them.

Now I understand
it’s been like this
all along: the snap and trill 
of someone talking,
the tap of their good shoes
on the stairs

then silence—
with those of us left
unable to close our eyes
trying to find the hours
in which they once 
had lived.


first published in Only Poems (link here)

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There’s a poem, “There,” by Danusha Laméris, that I’d like to sit beside this poem today. It reads, in full:

When we arrive—if we arrive—
it's always the ordinary: dead leaves
on the drive, salamanders nesting
under the firewood stacked by the barn,
the barn's chipped paint, light falling
slant over the rabbited field. Once,
I thought there was a there, 
but there wasn't. Only this.
Let this, then, be there's eulogy.
Bury it in the hard earth of the once-was
orchard, drop it down the well,
send it down the creek on a raft
of kindling and flame. What's left: air
filling and unfilling the plush cavity
of your chest, a little wind in the alders,
the neighbor hauling tow-by-fours to the side
of the house, hammering them together,
that echo of metal against wood.

When Laméris writes “Let this, then, be there’s eulogy,” I feel it talking alongside Seibles’s lines from today’s poem:

Now I understand
it’s been like this
all along

That “this” that Seibles mentions — it’s the this of “light falling / slant,” as Laméris writes, and it’s the this of “daylight” that “carries a touch / of night.” It’s the this of a world that holds darkness and light at the same time, which is to say death and life, which is to say the candle that burns bright even as it extinguishes.

Lately, a friend of mine has been growing anxious about people dying. Not the sharp anxiety of someone particular dying, but the cloudy, harder-to-pin-down-which-is-to-say-harder-to-stop anxiety of knowing that the people you love will leave you someday, sometimes sooner than you could ever possibly expect. That kind of anxiety, the anxiety of coming to grips with the world, is an anxiety I reckon with every so often. It knocks me out. The last time I encountered it, a couple of years ago, I remember buying the Tao Te Ching, reading it before bed, and hoping beyond all hope that it would help me find a way of seeing the world that got me out of feeling all rickety and unstable, unable to reckon with a darkness I could never comprehend. It was lovely. But it didn’t help. Well, not immediately. But one day I breathed, and the anxiety had lifted. I don’t know how. But it did. And yet, I know it will come back. It always does. I think that’s part of life — or, at least, part of being aware of life. Knowing one’s fragility often brings humility, but I don’t think it always brings peace.

I’m thinking of all of that as I read today’s poem by Tim Seibles, and the accompanying poem by Danusha Laméris. This world feels, especially now, like the opening of Seibles’s poem:

Days when daylight 
carries a touch 
of night

The days feel, quite literally, like this right now. The days are so short that the early afternoon has that faint tinge of evening, a burnt orange that hums at the edges of every ray of light. Even morning carries the night a little longer. This morning, jogging to Central Park in the blue-black of before-dawn, it might as well have been midnight. The sky was a smattering of twilight and satellites. And when I finished my run, just before 7, daylight crept slow and low along the horizon, as if scared — in those first hours of the day — to be seen.

Strange world, where light is quick to leave and slow to arrive.

Sad world, too.

It’s a world that feels like the kind of place that Seibles clarifies later, a place “where loss makes a way / into every conversation.”

Inescapable, that sense of loss. Personally, politically, culturally. It is as if being alive in this moment means trying to figure out, as best one can, how to grieve and breathe at the same time, how to seek joy in the present amidst all that feels so desperately awful in the periphery of that joy, how to think about the future without succumbing to a despair that feels more honest than hope.

And, to add to that, as Seibles’s poem suggests — one must reckon, too, with the intimate losses at the same time. Yes, these intimate losses that occur at the same time — without warning, often — as the losses that we witness on a global scale (and which are, for those who experience them, intimate in their own right). All that to say: loss is part of what we both witness and experience. What we see and what we feel. We lose so much and so many. The friends. The teachers. Those “dead and gone.”

One sensation that I did not foresee about adulthood was the way in which getting older would come to feel like charting a path through some unmapped land, where news arrives with a kind of strange weight from the place where I once was, a place which I sometimes forget exists until memory brings it out of the past and back to my present. I learn that a mother of a friend I knew, who I hadn’t seen in years, passed away. I hear from someone else that someone I had briefly forgotten is suffering. I am sitting alone and then a name arrives from the distant reaches of my mind along with a wondering: where are they now? All that once was seen, never to be seen again. Loss and wondering; wondering and loss — like mailmen coming out of the fog to let me know that the place where I live is bigger, and yet smaller, than I ever could have fathomed.

In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, there is a moment when Solzenitsyn focuses on a character, Yefrem Podduyev, who has delayed treatment on a tumor that has festered in his jaw. He writes:

The whole of his life had prepared Podduyev for living, not for dying. The change was beyond his strength, he did not know how to go about it; he kept pushing it away by staying on his feet, going to work every day as if nothing had happened, and listening to people praising his will power.

In other words: it’s hard. Wildly so. So hard that we ignore it. That we push it away. That we try and confuse ourselves into an idea of life that is filled with so much life that it absolves us of loss. Life feels more — for Podduyev, for you, maybe, and certainly for me — like a living thing, not a dying one. And yet, as Seibles writes, “it’s been like this / all along.” And will always be. Like this. What I love about Seibles’s poem is how he conveys the difficulty of bearing the this-ness of this, this place where life and loss happen at the same time. I notice it here:

the tap of their good shoes
on the stairs

then silence—

Here, and throughout today’s poem, Seibles allows the white space between his stanzas to hold so much. In this moment, that white space acts as a massive pause. One could breathe there. One could even fill that space with a minute, an hour, a day, the makings of a life. In that space, in fact, is life: the space between the sound of someone’s shoes and the fact of their passing. I feel Seibles breathing in these spaces. I feel him coping. I feel him coming to an understanding. I feel time passing. I feel life happening.

We have those same spaces in our lives. Those blank spaces between language, those moments of breath, of turning, of realizing. Those moments right before or right after interruption, when someone enters the room in the middle of your thought. When a phone rings. Right before the news is good. Right before the news is bad. And after. Notice the language that Seibles gives us after some of those blank spaces. I guess. I thought. Now I understand. There is a way in which this poem enacts a kind of openness to the parts of life that are the hardest to hold at once, the living and the losing. Notice how there is no immense realization, nothing that arrives at the end of the poem to erase the pain of loss. No, there is just the loss itself and the life that goes on and the breathing in between the lines. There is a poem that looks like a life does. Confused sometimes. And trying. And hurting. And living. And breathing. And remembering. And going on.

I think, finally, of these lines in today’s poem:

but even with my TV
burning all night
I don’t sleep 
so well anymore

For a long time, when I lived alone, I slept with my computer next to me, as it ran through episodes of Seinfeld or cycled through live newscasts on CNN or some local channel I could pull up on a janky website. Even with the city around me — the trucks that barreled down 116th Street at two in the morning — I wanted some kind of intimate noise, something right next to me, that let me know the world was a living thing, that nothing had disappeared, that someone, somewhere, was alive. I slept fitfully all those years, waking in a dark room to find my computer had died. Our lives are, I think, a hopefully long journey towards a loneliness that is irrevocable. Both the loneliness of our leaving, and the loneliness our leaving leaves on others. I think we cope with that by turning toward other people, and not away from them. By mimicking the great and beautiful stupidity of hope, briefly, before the leaving comes. It’s one of our great gifts, I think. How we know, and how we still do knowing’s opposite. Which is to say: believing. Which is to say: now that you are here, beside me, if I hold your hand, could I hold your hand forever?

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Some ongoing notes:

1. If you are interested, I will be teaching a second section of online class with the Adirondack Center for Writers on getting away from a prescriptive language when it comes to reading and writing poetry. Thank you to those who signed up for the first section. Details to come on dates for the second! It will most likely begin in March, and I’ll post a link here very soon to register (I know I said this week, but still trying to finalize!). Here’s a class description from the first section of the class that will apply for the future section: A poem is an offering. In this five-week class, poet and critic Devin Kelly will introduce students to a language of generosity for modern poetry. Instead of talking prescriptively about a poem’s quality (“good” or “bad”), students will take an expansive and holistic approach to engaging with poetry and crafting their own. Works by Larry Levis, Mary Oliver, Ross Gay, W.S. Merwin, and many others will serve as models for developing and practicing what Kelly calls “a vocabulary of grace”. Think of a poem as a window, a room, or a landscape—something that expands the more you pay attention to it. Students will discuss and write new poems weekly, and twice over the course of five weeks everyone will receive one-on-one feedback from Kelly on their work.

2. You can find a list of the work that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing to build solidarity among writers in support of Palestinian and against their consistent oppression here.

3. Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

4. 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.