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Video 1: trigger warning/framing Video 2: Somatic practice for working with ambivalence Gregory Pardlo, “For Which it Stands”
For a flag! I answered facetiously. A flag of tomorrow, fluent in fire, not just the whispers, lisps, not just the still there of powdered wigs, dry winds. Who wants a speckled drape that folds as easy over smirch as fallen soldier? This is rhetorical. Like, “What to the Negro is the fourth of July?” A flag should be stitched with a fuse. Jefferson said for each generation a flag. Maybe he said Constitution. I once raised a high-top flag of my hair, a fist, a leather medallion of the motherland. I studied heraldry and maniples (which are not what you might guess), little sails and banners down to the vane of a feather. Because his kids were rebel cities my father loved like Sherman. Because I wanted history I could touch like the flank of a beast. My wife’s people are from San Salvador. They sent us with a guard, his AK shouldered like a mandolin, among anil-tinted shawls and jerseys, across tiled and pocked concrete, and the gated stalls of El Centra. I felt sacred as a goat there, too, as I did below the Mason-Dixon where our only protection was the Fourteenth Amendment. Afraid our Yankee plates would be read aggressive as a Jolly Roger we rented a compact in Atlanta. Charleston, Savannah, Montgomery, and after Birmingham we were broke. Skipped Selma. Slept at B&Bs where my dreams power- washed layers of footnotes and Februaries, revealing the surreal sheen of Apollo Creed’s trunks, the apocalyptic Americana of Jacko moonwalking around a tinfoil Buzz Aldrin planting the corporate ensign. Years passed. I grew youthless in my dad-pants, but still puffed at pinwheels and windsocks, launched glyphs of grillsmoke and one day it came to me, as if commissioned, Theaster Gates’s Flag from old fire hoses, a couple dozen, like vertical blinds, no, like cabin floorboards of canvas colored rusty, brick dust, some cheerless drab-and-custard, beside a medley of vespertine blues, hoses evoking landscapes of sackcloth and gunny, texture of violence and tongues inflamed by shine, holy ghost. Ross, Duchamp, Johns, et al., are integrated here with officers of the peace, their dogs, and, in evidence, their pretend tumescence Gates has hung to cure like pelts or strips of jerky. How did it feel to shield spirit with flesh? I mean, what did it do to the body, water furry as the arm of an arctic bear? What thirst did it ignite? Gates’s salute is a torch song, a rhythm of hues marching over a pentimento of rhyme. I approve its message, its pledge to birth a nation of belonging and to teach that nation of the fire shut up in our bones. Gregory Pardlo, “For Which it Stands” from Digest. Copyright ©2014 by Gregory Pardlo. Reprinted with permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books, www.fourwaybooks.com. Maggie Smith, "Accidental Pastoral" I must have just missed a parade-- horse droppings and hard candy in the road, miniature American flags staked into the grass, plastic chairs lining the curb down this two-lane highway, 36 in the open country, briefly Main Street in town. When I was small, I sat on a curb only a dozen miles from here, my feet in the ashtray-dirty gutter, and watched stars-and-stripes girls wheeling their batons, slicing the sun-dumb air into streamers. I can still hear the click of cellophaned candies on pavement. I didn’t want to leave town, not then, and I never left. I am not a parade, my one car passing through Centerburg, Ohio, too late. The chairs are empty. The children are unwrapping golden butterscotches in the cool, shuttered houses. But look up—the clouds are stories tall, painted above Webb’s Marathon, and flat-bottomed as if resting on something they push against though it holds them. “Accidental Pastoral” appears in the collection Good Bones, published by Tupelo Press. Copyright © 2017 by Maggie Smith. Reprinted by permission of Tupelo Press. POETIC THEMES Memorial Day—the unofficial start of summer. The flavor of summertime is the taste of nostalgia, the season of childhood. No one (no, not even teachers) experiences summer freedom the way kids do. Kind of like a Memorial Day parade, which is as much about childhood memory as it is about who died for us… and also why. This is a holiday named for remembering, re-membering the lost—but without any formal recognition in the rites and rituals of our country’s military history. Nostalgia is a funny thing, etymologically rooted in the ache of homesickness (from the Greek nostos, to return home, and algos, pain). The tension between joy and violence, aggression and play, vitality and death, is a kind of ambivalence that colors memory itself. We remember the sounds and smells and thwonking hard candy of the parades from our childhood, alongside freedom from school, beach and pool openings, and the promise of summer hijinks. (Charles Wright somewhere describes helicopters “thwonking” back to marine bases, and that verb somehow for me captures the buzz and chaos of the parade and re-invents it darker.) That’s what happens, over time: as we learn more, our experience of childhood, like the Memorial Day parade… changes. Gregory Pardlo’s poem is really written for July Fourth, and its governing theme of fire depends on it. He asks, “Who wants a speckled / drape that folds as easy over smirch as fallen soldier?” He refers to another seething critique of “Independence Day” given by Frederick Douglass (which flatly declares, “your celebration is a sham”). But many folk feel that whether it’s in the heat of July or on Memorial Day, “A flag should be stitched with a fuse.” Like a tick-ticking time bomb, the poem marks the passage of time, held in the holiday, grilling along and puffing at pinwheels… until suddenly it catches the spark of a new, more appropriate national flag. Pardlo hits on Theaster Gates’ seminal artwork from 2011—eerie, dark flags made of decommissioned fire hoses, linked to the violent treatment of civil rights protestors. He refers to Gates’ work as a “torch song,” apt for a poem like this one, so “fluent in fire.” Memorial Day 2020, Minneapolis was in flames in response to the murder of George Floyd. In 2021, American support of Israeli military efforts contributed to the exploding violence in Gaza. In 2022, twenty-one people were killed in yet another school shooting in Texas. Nineteen elementary school kids blasted away. So when did you catch on to the mythos of 'Murica and who it's harming? Some of us have privilege, unlike Pardlo, where we don’t have to pray to the Fourteenth Amendment below the Mason-Dixon Line. “Accidental Pastoral” (which is actually also written about July 4th) is a nostalgic trip back to the childhood scene of a midwestern small town the poem’s speaker hasn’t felt the need to get far from—a dozen miles, to be precise. It’s unclear whether it’s ghost-town-creepy or sweet. The poem’s solitary car passes by horse droppings, empty plastic chairs, and “ashtray-dirty gutters,” while the kids suck on butterscotches and the houses are cool. Inside the hints of emptiness, there are multisensory echoes of the child’s jubilant view of summer: hard candy hitting the pavement and, perhaps the most beautiful line, the batons “slicing the sun-dumb / air into streamers.” The clouds at the end of the poem, “stories tall,” offer a pretty apt analogy for memory itself: we push against our stories, and yet they hold us (down? back? accountable? in tender embrace?). What is the fall from idealism when we try to recreate a moment from our childhood and find it changed, textured differently? Reading Smith’s poem after Pardlo’s, one might wonder—can flags staked into the grass and stars-and-stripes girls ever be innocent? If we are disenchanted with America’s story, do we, inevitably, also come to disbelieve the innocence or sweetness of our own? PRACTICE Is our childhood self attached to us, like some creepy Peter Pan shadow? Or is it an endless regress within us like so many Russian dolls? Or are we held in its atmosphere, like Maggie Smith’s flat-bottomed cloud? Where does memory live in the body? Does nostalgia share the same home, or is it different? How do we hold childhood memory alongside subsequent awareness of suffering? How do we hold space for ambivalence, for complexity, for our own contradictions? Is the pleasure and/or violence of remembering not something that can be housed, but instead an action; and if so, how does it move? Does re-membering something broken in our “inner child” ever fix her? What is the gestural language of that tender tending? Some different possibilities to explore in simple hand gestures: —squeezing out the dregs of memory, like squeezing out a toothpaste tube —holding, molding, parsing, blending (test the QiGong practice of separating the hands to feel for the energy between them, as if stretching bubble gum between the palms, feeling opposition - and then perhaps blending it by stroking the skin of your hands) —pushing away what doesn’t serve and gathering in what does (or supine crunches: extend head and limbs upward, then ball yourself up and clutch them tightly) —touching our history like the flank of a beast (experiment with a pillow—how do you touch your history? Do you honor its danger? Soothe its wild side? Or do you climb on to ride to battle?) —honoring with awareness the subtlety of body temperature: start simply by touching hands and feet and perceive whether there is hemispheric balance in your body temperature. Progress through simple self-touch to explore where you feel cool, shuttered safety and where you feel heat. Is this simply circulation, or does it correspond to areas of injury, associations with experiences of comfort or safety, or movement patterns that have built particular strength? Is there fire shut up in your bones, and how does that buried history relate to the tensions and contradictions wrapped up in Memorial Day?
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Paisley Rekdal, “Happiness”
I have been taught never to brag but now I cannot help it: I keep a beautiful garden, all abundance, indiscriminate, pulling itself from the stubborn earth: does it offend you to watch me working in it, touching my hands to the greening tips or tearing the yellow stalks back, so wild the living and the dead both snap off in my hands? The neighbor with his stuttering fingers, the neighbor with his broken love: each comes up my drive to receive his pitying, accustomed consolations, watches me work in silence awhile, rises in anger, walks back. Does it offend them to watch me not mourning with them but working fitfully, fruitlessly, working the way the bees work, which is to say by instinct alone, which looks like pleasure? I can stand for hours among the sweet narcissus, silent as a point of bone. I can wait longer than sadness. I can wait longer than your grief. It is such a small thing to be proud of, a garden. Today there were scrub jays, quail, a woodpecker knocking at the white- and-black shapes of trees, and someone’s lost rabbit scratching under the barberry: is it indiscriminate? Should it shrink back, wither, and expurgate? Should I, too, not be loved? It is only a little time, a little space. Why not watch the grasses take up their colors in a rush like a stream of kerosene being lit? If I could not have made this garden beautiful I wouldn’t understand your suffering, nor care for each the same, inflamed way. I would have to stay only like the bees, beyond consciousness, beyond self-reproach, fingers dug down hard into stone, and growing nothing. There is no end to ego, with its museum of disappointments. I want to take my neighbors into the garden and show them: Here is consolation. Here is your pity. Look how much seed it drops around the sparrows as they fight. It lives alongside their misery. It glows each evening with a violent light.\ Paisley Rekdal, “Happiness” from Animal Eye, by Paisley Rekdal, ©2012. Reprinted by permission of The University of Pittsburgh Press. A.R. Ammons, “The City Limits” When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold itself but pours its abundance without selection into every nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them, not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen, each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise. “The City Limits” copyright ©1972 by A.R. Ammons, from The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons, Volume 1 1955-1977, edited by Robert M. West. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. POETIC THEMES I’d like to use this week’s entry to mark the seasonal shift from springtime flowering into something mulchier. What new habits, projects, connections, and modes of being have we been growing, and what is ready to return to the earth? “City Limits” shines an unflinching light on the darker side of nature, shifting the way we see the exploding blossoms on May bushes. A sharp, intense, transcendentalist-style “radiance” is the subject of every other stanza. The light is doing the action here. Radiance “does not withhold itself,” but rather “pours its abundance without selection into every / nook and cranny.” This flashlight of attention shines on bird bones, guts of a slaughter, and coils of shit. Ammons is challenging us to see our mortal coils, employing a laser beam that “will look into the guiltiest / swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself against them, / not flinching into disguise or darkening.” In our attempts to grow something new, maybe there are also old habits, outdated modes of being or behaving, that are dying. Ammons offers that we open to shining a light on these inner demons. Our capacity is limited; we can accept into ourselves only “as much light as [we] will take.” But if we can build the resilience to shine a light on our darker side, the poem assures us that the “heart moves roomier.” The promise goes something like this: when we let the light in to reveal and maybe aerate our guilty heart-swervings, they are returned to their rightful place in the category of the transcendent. The final stanza—wherein the “leaf does not increase itself above the grass”—alludes to the pun of Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” (leaves as pages of writing, and also the blades of grass they describe). The man perceives self-referentially the limits of the written word to capture the beauty it describes. We feel “in the deepest cells” of our body, rather than the leaves of our poems, the processes of deterioration happening secretly within the May bushes. Our body is one with it all, everything in Ammons’ Whitmanian list: “air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen.” I’d like to add daffodils to this list, as an early spring blossom that's already prepping to mulch in May. Paisley Rekdal’s mention of the narcissus seems to give a visual for the dying yellow stalks and the newly living green tips snapping off in her hands. It’s no accident that this lover of Ovid uses the term “narcissus,” a myth illustrating that “There is no end to ego, / with its museum of disappointments.” What is the lesson of the daffodil according to the teachings of biomimicry? I’m no gardener. Both my thumbs are black. From my friends’ reports, although cutting back the stems and leaves of daffodils after the flowers are spent makes the garden tidier, they shouldn’t be cut back until late in the spring when they have turned yellow. This is because the leaves continue to photosynthesize, producing energy that will be stored in the bulb for the following year. The life cycle of daffodils creates some unsightly dead stuff around this time, which gardeners strategize to hide. This mash-up of light and dark, life and death, echoes Ammons’ unflinching acceptance of the whole of nature. And the title “Happiness” must be partly ironic, for a poem that progresses from the image of a gardener wildly ripping out the living and the dead, to the offended, angry neighbors stalking away, to the seeds dropped around battling sparrows. This gardener shows open disdain for the dudes coming around to seek her pity, one “with his stuttering fingers” and another “with his broken love.” This naked (and not-so-tacitly gendered) view gives way to more savage accuracy in the lines to follow. Gardening might look like pleasure, but in this poem it’s fitful work, executed “by instinct alone.” The speaker chooses to work instead of giving her neighbors their “accustomed consolations.” She makes a case for the right to “only a little time, a little space.” Against the expectation that vitality should “shrink back, wither, / and expurgate,” she sets a modest plea: “It is such a small thing / to be proud of, a garden.” Even if there is pride, there doesn’t seem to be much peace for this gardener. Hers is a burning, dark intensity of view, where the grasses turn color like “a stream of kerosene being lit.” Still, she distinguishes between the unconscious working of bees and the compassion for others made possible by gardening. It’s not, the poem seems to say, that we can’t empathize, it’s that we can’t do it incessantly! We need time and space to regenerate, like the daffodils. The consolation to be found in the garden is the simple fact of life’s dogged continuance alongside human misery. The poem’s ending somehow rhymes with Ammons’ image of bird bones lying “low in the light as in a high testimony”: in the final line, the garden becomes something eerie and a little sinister: “It glows each evening with a violent light.” If this is happiness, it’s got teeth. Maybe the point here is that we not be too aggressive in our pruning. It’s akin to all the familiar analogies we’ve heard before: a snake doesn’t just rip off its skin on a whim, and butterflies need to strengthen their wings before they can come free of their cocoon. Our foibles and learned habits and little stucknesses can be fodder for new growth. The daffodil lesson: don’t sweep away your ugly dead leaves; they need to be broken down, taken apart, their life energy extracted, to pass on to the next generation. PRACTICE Here’s one way to embody mulchification: reclining supine, rapidly flex and point the feet so that the back body scrubs up and down. Let your parts jiggle—that’s part of it. You’ll tap in to the root system of the feet, ankles, calves, and the musculature surrounding the shins. Imagine the sticky, garbagy habits and mishaps and blunders sifting down and mixing up with your magic and beauty. Generative moments of cluelessness are fodder for new stuff. Let them lie fallow for a bit before rising to greet whatever is rising to greet you today. Or, if it’s bedtime, try meeting each thought of regret or shame with an act of turning your body in the bed, as though mixing the mulch pile of your psyche. Ada Limòn, “The Raincoat”
When the doctor suggested surgery and a brace for all my youngest years, my parents scrambled to take me to massage therapy, deep tissue work, osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine unspooled a bit, I could breathe again, and move more in a body unclouded by pain. My mom would tell me to sing songs to her the whole forty-five minute drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty- five minutes back from physical therapy. She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang, because I thought she liked it. I never asked her what she gave up to drive me, or how her day was before this chore. Today, at her age, I was driving myself home from yet another spine appointment, singing along to some maudlin but solid song on the radio, and I saw a mom take her raincoat off and give it to her young daughter when a storm took over the afternoon. My god, I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel that I never got wet. Ada Limón, “The Raincoat” from The Carrying. Copyright © 2018 by Ada Limón. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Milkweed Editions. milkweed.org. Jason Schneiderman, “In the End You Get Everything Back (Liza Minnelli)” The afterlife is an infinity of custom shelving, where everything you have ever loved has a perfect place, including things that don’t fit on shelves, like the weeping willow from your parents’ backyard, or an old boyfriend, exactly as he was in your second year of college, or an aria you love, but without the rest of the opera you don’t particularly care for. My favorite joke: Q: You know who dies? A: Everyone! Because it’s true. But ask any doctor and they’ll say that prolonging a life is saving a life. Ask anyone who survives their surgeries, and they’ll say yes, to keep living is to be saved. I do think there’s a statute of limitations on grief, like, certainly, how someone died can be sad forever, but who can be sad simply about the fact that Shakespeare, say, is dead, or Sappho, or Judy Garland, or Rumi. There’s a Twitter account called LizaMinnelliOutlives, which put into the world a set of thoughts I was having privately, but the Twitter account is kinder than I had been, tweeting things like “Liza Minnelli has outlived the National Rifle Association which has filed for bankruptcy” and “Liza Minnelli has outlived Armie Hammer’s career” to take the sting out of the really painful ones, like “Liza Minnelli has outlived Jessica Walter,” or “Liza Minnelli has outlived George Michael” or “Liza Minnelli has outlived Prince.” In my own afterlife, the custom shelves are full of Liza Minnellis-- Liza in Cabaret, Liza in Arrested Development, Liza singing “Steam Heat” on The Judy Garland Christmas Special, Liza on the Muppet Show, Liza in Liza’s at the Palace, and because this is heaven, Liza won’t even know she’s in my hall of loved objects, just as I won’t know that my fandom has been placed on her shelf for when Liza Minnelli has outlived Jason Schneiderman, waiting for Liza Minnelli when Liza Minnelli has outlived Liza Minnelli, which is what fame is, and what fame is not, and if Jason Schneiderman outlives Jason Schneiderman, and your love of this poem waits for me on one of my shelves, and will keep me company for eternity, thank you for that. I promise to cherish your love in that well-lit infinity of forever. In one theory of the mind, the psyche is just a grab bag of lost objects, our wholeness lost when we leave the womb, when we discover our own body, and so on and so on, our wholeness lost and lost and lost, as we find ourselves smaller and smaller, which is why heaven is an endless, cozy warehouse, where nothing you loved is gone, where you are whole because you get everything back, and by everything, I mean you. “In the End You Get Everything Back (Liza Minnelli)” © Jason Schneiderman, first printed in American Poetry Review, Nov/Dec 2021. Used by permission of the poet. POETIC THEMES Mother’s Day. This week our culture celebrates the maternal powers of birthing, nurture, and attention. It attempts to mark the near-impossible demands of contemporary mothering (I think of Billy Collins’ poem “The Lanyard”—as if one holiday, like his useless bit of plastic, could make up for the societal lack of structural support for mothers). Mothering feels to me, at least, depleting, disorienting, and impossible to do with elegance or finesse. The canned sentimentality of this holiday fetishizes biological mothering over all other maternal expressions. And oh my God the guilt! If there’s any way to make guilt beautiful and moving, Ada Limòn’s “The Umbrella” accomplishes it. The speaker’s childhood voice, unspooling like her spine, sings to us of the protective shelter that we all want to have and to be. In fact, we crave this maternal cover so hard that we make ourselves crazy. Sometimes I wonder if this holiday might cause more hurt than it’s worth. But rather than claiming to speak for a collective, I’ll “mind my own business” as Rev. angel Kyodo williams teaches, and split into a picture of my own annual experience: Every Sunday I wait for my children to be returned to me. And so I wait now, pausing for a drag before vacuuming up last week’s lice, and the grass that came in clinging to their perfect, rounded toes. grass at the prow of my new orange electric mower before forecasted rain grow my basil some roots (maybe me too) find capillaries into earth’s lung to breathe me new Let it wash all this: the cigarette stink the crayola contract never to smoke again so mommy won’t die the now-useless blood one moon closer to dry the promise of the crone in me a second coming. Mothering is by far the hardest work, and I can only hope my kids become my best friends, as my own mother has become mine. But if they do, it’s by pure luck, not by virtue of my maternal capacities, which I prefer to imagine as a creative power available to anyone—a kind of witchy, mysterious, two-way sorcery, as in Sharon Olds’ “The Enchantment.” For sure it’s transformative to become a mother—that crazy deep, crazy-making form of human love. But also many of us find the thorniest deep-dives into the shadowy parts of our psyche through our relationship to other mother figures. Writ large, the nurturing, life-giving figures in our lives are our heroes, whose consciousness is blended in with our own. In an attempt to explode the boundaries of how we configure the maternal figure, I’d like to offer Jason Schneiderman’s poem for this week’s meditation. This homage breaks the conception of influence and nurture as a one-way street, even as it expands the strictures of mortality, selfhood, linear time, and the fourth wall between poet and reader. Our wholeness is lost at birth, along with our dear, wrinkled, weird placenta, “lost and lost and lost.” Our selfhood shrinks into the size of a figurine that might fit on an afterlife shelf, and that’s a comfort. The second-person address of the final line gathers us under the umbrella of this poem because of our love for it! What could be more nurturing than the notion of maternal care as an endless regress, or a forward proliferation, of the capacity to just love stuff? If we hone this capacity, and promise to cherish one another’s love as Jason does, we will keep one another company for eternity. PRACTICE There’s a Buddhist meditation Eve (Sedgwick) taught me and wrote about someplace, where you imagine everyone everywhere, at one point or another, in one lifetime or another, as having been your mother—or your child! This meditation seeks to cast a spell of tenderness between us and anyone, cultivating an instinct of care toward all people, alive and “in that well-lit infinity of forever.” Maybe that is the loveliest power to celebrate on Mother’s Day. Or, if this feels disembodied and abstract, to explore the seat of creativity in the physical body—any physical body, any way it’s gendered—we might focus on the pelvic bowl and low belly. Any form of caretaking has its demands and its costs. You might toy with contracting the abdomen, Martha-Graham-style, while stirring the cauldron of the belly. Sweeping one hand like a scoop to the belly embodies not just cauldron-stirring but also the way we actually carve out of our bodies what’s needed to generate beauty, contribute to new worldings, or nurture life—not just with biological wombs and breasts, but also with the daily rhythm of doling out our life force. You might close by testing out the magic of yoni mudra (thumb and pointer fingers join, extend in opposite direction, with the other fingers interlaced and tucked into the palms), placed in front of low belly, pointer fingers facing down. Consider jotting down what’s behind the feeling in your wombed-up fingers—what and whom are you gestating, at present? What and [RH17] whom are you cherishing with your nurture, what’s the endless regress of figures contributing to your magic, and how can you cultivate the trust that you will get all of you back, whole? Patrick Rosal, “Brokeheart: just like that”
When the bass drops on Bill Withers’ Better Off Dead, it’s like 7 a.m. and I confess I’m looking over my shoulder once or twice just to make sure no one in Brooklyn is peeking into my third-floor window to see me in pajamas I haven’t washed for three weeks before I slide from sink to stove in one long groove left foot first then back to the window side with my chin up and both fists clenched like two small sacks of stolen nickels and I can almost hear the silver hit the floor by the dozens when I let loose and sway a little back and just like that I’m a lizard grown two new good legs on a breeze -bent limb. I’m a grown-ass man with a three-day wish and two days to live. And just like that everyone knows my heart’s broke and no one is home. Just like that, I’m water. Just like that, I’m the boat. Just like that, I’m both things in the whole world rocking. Sometimes sadness is just what comes between the dancing. And bam!, my mother’s dead and, bam!, my brother’s children are laughing. Just like—ok, it’s true I can’t pop up from my knees so quick these days and no one ever said I could sing but tell me my body ain’t good enough for this. I’ll count the aches another time, one in each ankle, the sharp spike in my back, this mud-muscle throbbing in my going bones, I’m missing the six biggest screws to hold this blessed mess together. I’m wind- rattled. The wood’s splitting. The hinges are falling off. When the first bridge ends, just like that, I’m a flung open door. Patrick Rosal, “Brokeheart: just like that” from The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems. Originally in Poem-A-Day on April 18, 2014. Copyright © 2014, 2021 by Patrick Rosal. Reprinted with permission of Persea Books, Inc (New York), www.perseabooks.com. All rights reserved. Craig Santos Perez, “Ars Pasifika” when the tide of silence rises say “ocean” then with the paddle of your tongue rearrange the letters to form “canoe” Copyright © Craig Santos Perez. Used by permission of the author, all rights reserved. Lucille Clifton, “blessing the boats” (at St. Mary’s) may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that Lucille Clifton, “blessing the boats” from How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton. Copyright ©1991 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boeditions.org. POETIC THEMES May Day, the celebration of all things sensual, is essentially the victory of life against death. The central way to celebrate the holiday is by dancing. The language of “Brokeheart” is a mature maypole dance, all rhythm section, beating out the dance of sliding “from sink to stove in one long groove / left foot first then back to the window side / with my chin up and both fists clenched….” It’s not until late in the poem that the dancer confesses he’s older than he’d like to be. In the first half, we’re just let loose and lost in the movement with sassy lines of slippery enjambments interspersed with staccato end-stops like “I’m a lizard grown / two new good legs on a breeze- / bent limb.” “Just like that” keeps operating like the high hat, breaking up the tongue-twister consonance. But then—“bam!”—it all comes flooding in. The sadness, the age, the vulnerable, injured, falling-apart self who can’t sing and has no mother. This “grown-ass man / with a three-day wish and two days to live” reveals his aching, throbbing hurts and limitations, because, as the poem so succinctly points out, “Sometimes sadness is just / what comes between the dancing.” But what’s perfect is the way we have been suspended in the music of the poem enough to forget our own aches and pains, and when we are reminded of them, maybe we can still feel these lines from the inside: “but / tell me my body ain’t good enough / for this.” And speaking of good-enough bodies, what a wonderful message of solace in the “Just like thats” of becoming water and boat and both, just rocking. Be your own boat! To bring home Rosal’s comforting boat-ification, I’d like to synch it up with these two short boat poems, by Lucille Clifton and by Craig Santos Perez. Santos Perez instructs, lovingly: when you feel thrown around by the rising tide, rearrange “with the paddle of your tongue” the letters of the word “ocean” to form “canoe.” Clifton gives us a blessing. Less than 60 words, in small letters with no punctuation, just the lulling repetition of “may the…” “may you…” “may you…”—like waves on the ocean. And in a time when the future is uncertain, this symbol of eternity is welcome, this “water waving forever.” She gives us four simple blessings: that we be carried beyond fear, kiss the wind and trust it, open our eyes, and sail. This is past the lip of our understanding, she says. We are innocent, she tells us. There is another shore, she tells us. We will make it, she tells us. The feeling of the wind in our sails. Open heart, brave face to the wind, all. PRACTICE To embody a flung-open door, we could try to open every little molecule of the torso to breath. Cracking the heart open, could we create enough space to feel that strange ache behind the sternum? You might lay yourself out supine on pillows, so your chest is buoyed and your head is slightly higher, feet together with knees open, and imagine your body as a boat, rocking on water. Three-part breathing gives the impression of a watery wave. As though filling up the container of your torso, breathe one third into the pelvis and low belly, two thirds into the upper abdomen, and fill up to the notch of the throat, and empty out each chamber sequentially from the top to the bottom. Moving from the bowl of the hips, the seat of water, on up to the base of the breastbone, it’s lovely to visualize the bob of the sternum on your breath, like a canoe on the waves. |
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