da beach!

JUNE WEEK 1: DA BEACH!
 
Dan Albergotti, “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale”
Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life's ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you. 
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

Dan Albergotti, “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale” from The Boatloads. Copyright © 2008 by Dan Albergotti. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd. boaeditions.org.
 
 
Devin Kelly, “Conditionally”
 
Sometimes I remember summer in California,
just 12, army father, & the way he left me
alone at the hotel, & how, taken to nothing
but wanting love, I wandered the beach,
not knowing what to do with an ocean.
I wore socks with my sneakers & sat,
thinking myself older, clutching a book
I didn’t read, wanting to read, but not,
& then looking up, & wanting to read again.
A lot has changed since then, & nothing.
I don’t wear socks. I know what it’s like
to be high. Sometimes I have wanted
to know if there is an underside to life,
& if it is inverted, so that there, we live
inside of light rather than below it.
I have found it better to believe in everything
than nothing—like the old man each day
on the beach, scavenging with the metal
extension of his arm for gold or bits of
valuable scrap. Each day I thought him
doing something else: sometimes searching
or forgiving or even blessing, sometimes
longing for something more than this, & yet
something still, head turned toward this soft
ground that offered nothing but would or maybe.
 
“Conditionally,” by Devin Kelly, first printed in “The Slowdown” (July 22, 2022). Used by permission of the poet.
 
 
Donika Kelly, “The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.”
 
I am taken with the hot animal
of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs
and have them move as I intend, though
my knee, though my shoulder, though something
is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead
on the harbor beach: one mostly buried,
one with skin empty as a shell and hollow
feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft,
I do not touch them. I imagine they
were startled to find themselves in the sun.
I imagine the tide simply went out
without them. I imagine they cannot
feel the black flies charting the raised hills
of their eyes. I write my name in the sand:
Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls
skim the sandbar and lift low in the sky.
I pick up a pebble that looks like a green egg.
To the ditch lily I say I am in love.
To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, white
petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am
in love. I shout with the rough calculus
of walking. Just let me find my way back,
let me move like a tide come in.
 
Donika Kelly, “The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.” Copyright © 2017 Donika Kelly. Originally published in Poem-A-Day on November 20, 2017 by the Academy of American Poets. Reprinted with permission of the poet.
 
POETIC THEMES
            As the springtime buzz gives way to summer chill, it’s time to come unsprung and slow down the doing. Come walk along the shore and bury your feet in the sand. What if we take a moment to imagine that what we’ve done is enough? Or maybe the truth is that the world is enough not because of what we have or have not done. It grows in its enough-ness in proportion to our growing attention. These three poems mark a progression in the work of slowing down, beginning with a kind of listless discomfort, giving way to hopeful reverie, which then starts to glimmer enough that we can really attune to it, until it finally peels open to pure presence.
            The first poem is the darkest. In the belly of the whale, we can just catch a glimpse of sky through the spout. By this dim glow, the other senses come alive: when we can “be very quiet, and listen for the sound of gears / and moving water. Listen for the sound of [our] heart.” The beach is something we only dream of, remember vaguely, nostalgically. Albergotti’s list of ThingsToDoWhileNotDoing is randomly assembled, because that’s how it goes in free-float. And that’s how it is, in this cultural moment of reckoning, where we are in between what’s dying and what is yet to emerge. In the blind bungling in between, our attention meanders from reviewing our life’s “ten million choices” to categorically destroying the “evidence of those before” to listening for our heartbeat and back again. It would be lovely to write these wisdom nuggets on sticky notes to hang around the house: “Be nostalgic.” “Try to be very quiet.” “Call old friends.” But also: “endure self-loathing”! It’s not easy, thinking of all we did and could have done. All of us are Jonah in our own deep sea.
         Albergotti’s image of being swallowed captures the sometimes-claustrophobic experience of tapping into the intense emotional world of the body. The image of being “here, swallowed with all [our] hope” is like being dropped into our own belly, one holding environment where we harbor all the ancient, early lessons of not-enoughness (perhaps even generational lessons that predate our birth). Think of what we learned in Covid lockdown: the shifts between claustrophobia, on the one hand, and the feeling being held in a safe, warm, structured place. Over the course of each long day, sometimes we were grateful for permission to “rest and wait,” and other times the emptiness was excruciating. I’d put one last sticky note right on the bathroom mirror with the marvelous final lines, reminding us of our ability to tread water. It’s a pretty scary place to be, in the middle of the ocean at night, dark and still. But we continue the pedaling action of our legs, “toes / pointing again and again down, down into / the black depths.” We are reaching down into the darkness with our feet, some of the most sensitive receptors we’ve got, keeping us afloat.
            Enter Devin Kelly, whose writing has broken me and my understanding of masculinity in sixteen different ways. His poetry describes something “inside of every man,” like Albergotti’s Jonah, lying “still at night waiting for change”—and yet the image of pedaling feet make me think instead of Kelly’s devastatingly vulnerable essays about endurance running. Running, he confesses in “Running Dysmorphic,” saved his life in fifth grade when his mother left his father to raise two boys alone. That’s the 12-year-old kid depicted in “Conditionally,” left at the hotel by his father and faced with the enormity of the ocean, lost.
          The poem focuses on his feet. Jokingly, he claims the only thing that changes with his adulthood is that he no longer wears socks with his sneakers. But between the ground floor of his running shoes and the adult knowledge of “what it’s like / to be high” he plays with flipping the world on its vertical axis: “Sometimes I have wanted / to know if there is an underside to life, / & if it is inverted.” He turns this into useful spatial paradigm to explore the existential-ish notion of living “inside of light rather than below it,” where it’s “better to believe in everything than nothing.”
Flipping the light around, as a mysterious underground glimmer we need to root around to find, gives way to the mythical figure of the old man on the beach, “scavenging with the metal / extension of his arm for gold or bits of / valuable scrap.” The preadolescent boy projects into the old man’s divining rod the tasks of “searching / or forgiving or even blessing.” These three primary functions of the heart lead to a fourth occupation: “longing for something more than this, & yet / something still, head turned toward this soft / ground that offered nothing but would or maybe.” This is the final labor of the heart: turning downward to hunt for the possibility of gold that might be right under our feet. The conditional promise of this poem points the heart downward toward the earth and beneath it.
            Enter Nietzsche, one of Eve Sedgwick’s favorite Queer thinkers, who imagines the “genius of the heart” (with all the attendant freight of the otherworldy, spritely genii bouncing around the 19th-century imagination)—as a divining rod!
…the genius of the heart, which imposes silence and attention on everything loud and self-conceited, which smoothes rough souls and makes them taste a new longing—to lie placid as a mirror, that the deep heavens may be reflected in them;—the genius of the heart, which teaches the clumsy and too hasty hand to hesitate, and to grasp more delicately; which scents the hidden and forgotten treasure, the drop of goodness and sweet spirituality under thick dark ice, and is a divining-rod for every grain of gold, long buried and imprisoned in mud and sand; the genius of the heart, from contact with which every one goes away richer; not favoured or surprised, not as though gratified and oppressed by the good things of others; but richer in himself, newer than before, broken up, blown upon, and sounded by a thawing wind; more uncertain, perhaps, more delicate, more fragile, more bruised, but full of hopes which as yet lack names…
(Beyond Good and Evil, article 295 trans. Helen Zimmern, Project Gutenberg).
Yay to the heart’s genii, smoothing our souls with the longing to lie placid. Yay for the divining rod that perceives the mortal body as a mirror for the divine, then drops right on through it to go down, down, to long-imprisoned underground riches. Yay for the generous, unspecial, connected, blown-open soul. Yay for new, broken, delicate, bruised, fragile, hopeful regeneration into forms for which we don’t yet have names.
            Enter Donika Kelly, who brings us back into the living, thriving, loving present moment. Albergotti perceives a tiny porthole of light above a sea of darkness, our toes pointing downward to keep us afloat. Devin Kelly imagines this worldly plane as light, rather than the sky above, a premise as tenuous as the possibility of finding gold under the sand, but one that enables heart behaviors like forgiveness, blessing, and longing. Nietzsche turns this around: the behavior of the heart is the divining rod, and through its capacity for finding gold in the muck, we become placid, hopeful, still, new, delicate—a mirror for the heavens. But to this vertical cosmology Donika Kelly adds time and horizontal space. No longer are we dreaming of some past or future beach, or recollecting childhood heartbreak to redefine our present.
The first words of this poem are “I am.” The poet’s name, the thrice-repeated fact of her present-moment-being-in-loveness, stand out in italics as though written in the sand of the poem. There’s no love object in the poem, besides the hot animal of her skin. The magical ability to move her limbs rises above her injuries. She doesn’t linger long enough with death to touch it, instead turning her attention to seagulls above and pavement below and green egg pebbles in her hand and roses and gold all around. Walking like water, she asks only to find her way home. The movement of a tide come in takes everything in its wake, black flies and ditch lilies and all, sweeping everything back to the sea of now.
In spite of it all, inside it all, there’s the ability to “have a lot of feelings,” in the language of the facetious title that refuses to take life and love too seriously. We might translate the message written in the sand of the poem to read: we can, like Donika Kelly on the particular day of this poem, insist on existing inside the state of loving. We too can mark the present moment with our existence, walking forward like a high tide that can hold it all. We can be/persist in/within… love. Happy Pride y’all.
 
 
PRACTICE
           The video I've offered here is a polyvagal practice I've set to lines from "Things to Do..." But there are so many somatic practices embedded in these poems! Exploring them with other beings and other bodies, my students found different physiological entry points for light. We played with treading-water-walking, pointing our toes as thought bicycling into each step. Moving into the floor in slow motion from the pointed toes through the balls of the feet to the heels definitely slows down the autopilot and gives the fresh experience of “dipping a toe in” to each step. Someone suggested that we visualize a footprint of phosphorescent light left behind. We experimented with myriad divining rods: sitting with one hand on the chest and the other on the earth, as though a current were running between them. One begins to sense that the heart could see, feelingly, through the extended arm and into the ground. Experiencing the actual sternum as a divining rod required a bit more gymnastics, and we experimented with how to both be close to the ground and also stand the breastbone upright. Some movements were yoga backbends: bridge, bow, upward-facing bow, and fish, which definitely gives the heart a rush of something like optimism or light. My personal favorite for experienced yogis is dolphin pose, supported by a yoga block wedged between the upper back and a wall. From a kneeling position, place your elbows shoulder-width on the ground, right up against the baseboard, with the forearms reaching up the wall. Hold a block between your palms, vertically up the wall. Then tuck your toes and straighten your legs to lift your hips, pressing the thoracic spine up against the block. Be sure the head is suspended or at least bearing no weight at all.
           If you want something more impressionistic, try going for a Donika Kelly walk: what does it mean, in your particular body, to “move like a tide come in”? Perhaps it’s not a physical action but a more subtle shift of focus, sweeping everything you pass into the wake of your attention. Whatever you do, consider making yourself some Albergotti-style sticky notes afterward. What might be your ThingsToDoWhileNotDoing?