The Paris Review's Blog, page 53

Playing Ball

Jamal with confetti. Rachel B. Glaser.

The collective dream is over. Squinting, we walk out of the playoffs and return to Life. Images linger—a giant holding a toddler in a storm of confetti. A shiny, exuberant, mantis-like man standing next to a trophy. The woman who sat courtside wearing red and white gowns. The inexplicable man-made-out-of-Sprite commercial. Duncan Robinson’s tough-guy face.

On Monday, after the great battle of Game 5, the Denver Nuggets won the NBA championship for the first time in franchise history. I was introduced to the on-court chemistry between Nuggets stars Nikola Jokić and Jamal Murray during the 2020 Western Conference Finals. Though they lost that series in five games to the Lakers (who would go on to win the championship after beating the Heat), they were great fun to watch. I found Murray’s smile infectious. He seemed unselfconscious and comfortable in his body. When he was having fun, I was having fun.

In 2021, Jokić received the first of two consecutive MVP awards. Right before the playoffs that year, Murray tore his ACL, missing the playoffs and the entire next season. Jokić carried the team without him, but in the 2022 playoffs, the Nuggets lost in the first round to the Golden State Warriors (who later went on to win the championship). While Sixers center Joel Embiid won this year’s MVP, most basketball fans believe Jokić is the better player. His performance in these Finals was sensational. His passes were gorgeous, his threes looked like afterthoughts. When the camera cut to him, he often seemed displeased. He was an unstoppable force, even when he wasn’t scoring. He made it look effortless. I thought of him as Paul Bunyan.

I liked whenever the broadcast cut to a room in Serbia, Jokić’s home country, where fans stayed up till dawn, watching the Nuggets game live. In the postgame interviews before the award ceremony, it was wonderful to see Jamal Murray’s teary-eyed smile as he spoke about the long journey coming back from his injury. And even a Heat fan could appreciate Jokić’s genuine disappointment upon learning that he’d have to attend a victory parade in Denver on Thursday when he was eager to fly home to Serbia to watch his horse, Dream Catcher, race on Sunday.

Though the series was tipping decisively toward Denver, Game 5 was close. Neither team ever led by more than ten points. Jokić’s early foul trouble gave the Heat some breathing room. Even small Heat leads felt luxurious to me and I tried to appreciate them, knowing they could be erased in mere seconds. Heat leader, Jimmy Butler had little swagger during the first three quarters, exhibiting his new tendency to drive to the basket and stall, as if afraid to shoot. It felt like he was unable to jump. My husband and I began calling him Brick-foot.

After witnessing Playoff Jimmy for much of the postseason, the mystery of his dead eyes and lack of energy gnawed at me during the last game. It looked like he had signed his soul to Ursula the sea-witch. Even when the Heat were ahead, part of me was troubled, trying to figure out what had happened to him. Probably his injured ankle from the Knicks series had gotten worse. Maybe it was fractured. Internet search results implied that his father might be sick.

For a brief stretch, Playoff Jimmy returned, hitting back-to-back threes, a jump shot, and scoring five points off free throws. The Heat led by one with less than two minutes to go, but a Bruce Brown layup put the Nuggets back in the lead. Then Jimmy drove to the basket, froze, and his pass to Max Strus was picked-off by Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. Caldwell-Pope was fouled and hit both free throws, sealing the Heat’s fate. Then Bruce Brown did the same, and Kyle Lowry was shaking hands with Nuggets players as the clock dwindled down its last seconds.

When I think of that last game, the most positive Heat memory I have is Bam Adebayo’s dazzling performance. Bam opened the game with a steal and a dunk, and he never relented. He looked lit up, activated. He played emphatically and with desire. To steal a term from the basketball writer and poet Ted Powers, Bam had the bodyjoy.

***

I used to experience bodyjoy when dancing, but these days it happens when I’m playing doubles tennis with my friends. When it’s good, nothing gives me more glee. It’s exhilarating to see a ball fly toward me and need to act fast to hit it. When else in life does something fly towards me? I jump through the air, my racket outstretched, unsure if I will reach it. When else do I jump through the air? Sometimes I totally miss, or it brushes the side of my racket and spins off at a funny angle. Or I hit it with gusto and it sails over the net and we all watch to see if it lands in bounds. It feels good to all be watching the same thing. The best is when we rally for so long the point seems to last forever. Our shots are solidly good and comically bad and by the time it ends we are laughing and have no idea what the score is.

Earlier this week, my husband read me the poem “Playing with the Children” by the unconventional eighteenth-century Japanese monk Ryōkan Taigu. In the poem, the speaker bounces a ball to some neighborhood children and they bounce it back, singing and playing. My favorite lines of the poem are: “Caught up in the excitement of the game / We forget completely about the time.”

People have been playing ball for thousands of years. Nausicaa was playing ball with her maidens when Odysseus first saw her in Homer’s The Odyssey. Balls connect children. They connect dogs and humans. Playing releases endorphins, which often leads to happiness. Taigu’s poem ends with: “Passersby turn and questions me:/ ‘Why are you carrying on like this?’/ I just shake my head without answering/ Even if I were able to say something/ how could I explain? / Do you really want to know the meaning of it all?/ This is it! / This is it! ”

 

Rachel B. Glaser is the author of the story collection Pee On Water, the novel Paulina & Fran, and two books of poetry. 

Making of a Poem: Richie Hofmann on “Armed Cavalier”

A draft of the first two pages of “Armed Cavalier.” Courtesy of Richie Hofmann.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking some poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Richie Hofmann’s “ Armed Cavalier ” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 244.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

As is so often the case for me, the poem began as another poem entirely. I was working on a poetic sequence that interposed my translations of Michelangelo’s homoerotic sonnets with several short, original haiku-like poems inspired by Robert Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids. Both artists were interested in beauty and torture. Mapplethorpe’s photographs are experiments in self-portraiture and bondage. In one of Michelangelo’s sonnets, the speaker confesses that, in order to be happy, he must be conquered and chained, a prisoner of an “armed cavalier” (the phrase puns on the name of the object of Michelangelo’s infatuation, Tommaso dei Cavalieri). Upon reading that phrase, I instantly wanted it to be the title for a new poem that would express the extremity of sexuality and the extremity of making art. 

From the sonnets of Michelangelo, I wanted to import a kind of violence of rhetoric (not unlike the dramatic conceits we find again and again in Petrarch). The poems are so desperate. Their pain is sculptural. From the photographs of Mapplethorpe, I wanted to import a violence of image. And the sense that everything—flowers in a vase, classical sculpture, BDSM—is part of a landscape of embodied beauty. Ultimately, as I revised the poem, and reworked it into “Armed Cavalier,” I wanted to express the ferocity of feeling in both artists’ works, but without any overt ekphrastic framing. 

Are there hard and easy poems?  

Yes. I love the easy poems, poems that reveal themselves immediately, that feel heard and merely transcribed and not labored over thanklessly. It’s hard to love the hard poems back. I have often found, as in the case of this poem’s origin, that sometimes the best revision of a draft is the writing of a new poem. 

Was “Armed Cavalier” hard or easy, then?

This was an easy one. As an exercise, I sometimes try to write in a sort of frenzy, to fight against my tendency toward elegance. Writing quickly, without pressure, allows me to encounter ideas and feelings I wouldn’t find acceptable or worthy or complete enough in my normal, judgmental mindset. I’m trying to let more of myself in to the poems—more ugliness, more hunger, more insight. This is how I drafted “Armed Cavalier.” I knew early on that it would be an important poem for me.

Did you show your drafts to other writers or friends or confidants? 

I show most of my drafts to other poets. Soon after I drafted this poem, I called my poet friend Christian Gullette and he helped me edit it into its final form: cutting some “tourists,” for instance, and getting right to the “galleries.” Later in the process, I called Kara van de Graaf and we agonized over two small but essential decisions: should a line read “I don’t want to” or “but I won’t”? And should the final line—with attention to grammar but also to voice and music—read “I sleep only in this bed now” or “I only sleep in this bed now”? Thank God for friends who care about this stuff!

When did you know this poem was finished? Were you right about that? Is it finished after all?

A poem feels finished when I can’t enter it again. Everything falls into place, each line feels balanced and complete, the shifts between lines and sentences feel shocking but also permanent and incapable of change. This poem is finished. I have to make something new. I have to be a different poet.

 

Michelangelo, The Punishment of Tityus, 1532. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Richie Hofmann is the author of two books of poems, A Hundred Lovers and Second Empire. His poetry has appeared recently in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Yale Review, and has been honored with the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship.

War Diary

Alba de Céspedes, 1965. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

On September 8, 1943, Italy surrendered to the Allies, and the Germans, who had already occupied the north of Italy, immediately moved to take over the rest of the country. Just days later, they invaded Rome. Meanwhile, British and American forces had landed in the south and were slowly moving northward.

The writer Alba de Céspedes and her companion (and later her husband), Franco Bounous, were living in Rome. De Céspedes had been jailed briefly by Mussolini for antifascist activities; Bounous was a diplomat and did not want to collaborate with the Germans. As conditions in the city worsened, becoming more chaotic and more dangerous, de Céspedes and Bounous decided to leave. On September 23, “secretly, at night,” they departed, “each with a suitcase,” de Céspedes wrote to her mother, “thinking we’d be gone a few days, that Rome would soon be liberated.” They escaped to a village in Abruzzo, east of the city, where they expected they would be able to wait in tranquility. But the Germans showed up, and they fled again, to a tiny village in the mountains nearby, Torricella Peligna.

This diary recounts the days between October 18, when they had to flee Torricella and go into hiding in the woods, and November 19, when they decided to try to get through the German lines to reach the safety of the Allied-occupied zone. De Céspedes later wrote, “Life had gradually become more unbearable, the Germans were coming at night, too. So we decided to risk it all and cross the lines, reaching the Anglo-American troops. And safety. We did that, walking at night, November 20”  Guided by a local farmer, Fioravante, they managed to cross the Sangro river, which marked the German front line, and arrive in the Allied zone. From there they were taken in a farm cart to Bari, where de Céspedes began broadcasting for the antifascist station Radio Bari. Eventually she and Bounous moved to Naples and, finally, returned to Rome, after it had been liberated by the Allies in June of 1944.

—Ann Goldstein, translator

 

October 18, 1943

We were still asleep this morning, sheltering in the dusty, desolate tax office in Torricella, when we heard frantic knocking at the door. The pale face of Carmela, the girl from downstairs, appeared, animated by a new fear: “Quick, get out right away, the Germans have surrounded Lama dei Peligni and taken the men, all of them. Now they’re on their way up here.” We dressed in a few minutes, maybe three or four, not even taking the time to grab some clothes, and we were gone, Franco, Aldo, and I, rushing down the stairs. Someone was already shouting, “Here they are, you can hear the truck.” We hurried along narrow stony streets, running amid other people running, me wanting to stop and catch my breath, then thinking, I have to make it, I don’t want to leave the others, and I kept running, with a stitch in my side. Some young people were fleeing with their few possessions salvaged in a basket, and we all looked to see if the white ribbon of the main road was stained with the yellow of German cars. Ears strained to the faintest hum. Squatting below the level of the main road, we let some armored vehicles go by, then we ran, crossing it quickly, almost in a leap, and were finally on a path through the fields. Aldo said: “We have to get to the Defensa woods, no one will come and look for us over there.” In less than three hours we had found shelter on Trecolori’s farm, an isolated place at the edge of the big woods. Trecolori is a sly, monkeyish old farmer who lived in Pennsylvania for twelve years. He didn’t have room for us; already, there were numerous relatives around the hearth who had come from nearby villages to escape the raids, some sitting on sacks of flour, others crowded on the floor, looking at us silently. “You can sleep in a stable, five hundred meters from here. Anyway, it’s just for one night.”

We’ve been here now for five days. We’re sleeping in a hut that’s half stable, half woodshed, with straw pallets on the ground, and at night we light a fire. A broken-down door barely hides a view of the sky. It’s very cold. Each of us sleeps wrapped in a blanket: even our heads are wrapped, to warm ourselves with our breath. Seven men are sheltered in this stable; I’m wearing pants and live with them like a comrade.

We’re attuned to the sound of a footstep, a rustling. If there’s danger, if the Germans come down to raid the farms, someone—there’s always a lookout—sends an agreed-on whistle, a word. The signal of alarm spreads instantly from shelter to shelter, all the way to us, here at the edge of the woods. Immediately, tumbling through the plowed fields, we reach the stream, cross it, go up into the woods, hide in the thicket of trees and brush. We stay there, silent, motionless, sometimes in the rain, for hours. I don’t know how we’ll manage if the cold gets worse. We don’t have coats, not even a wool sweater. The English are still at Termoli: the battle is really fierce. Sometimes, around sunset, Allied prisoners headed for the Sangro river pass through the countryside like shadows. They want to reach their lines, but it’s hard. We stop them, hoping for news. They’re surprised to find down here, in the middle of nowhere, someone who speaks their language, knows their countries. Then we follow them with our eyes as they grow distant, and it’s as if through them we were sending out a cry for help: Come! Free us! We have no comfort other than the news brought by mouth from Torricella, where someone hiding in a cellar listens to Radio London. Meanwhile the season is advancing—we’ll have to build a shelter in the woods if we’re going to spend many hours in the rain.

 

October 19, 1943

Peppino arrived last night running, terrified. He’d spent eight hours in a woodshed, scarcely breathing. The Germans showed up without warning in Torricella yesterday morning: they blocked the streets, seized all the men and loaded them on a truck, and drove off. Donato Porreca, the owner of the shop, tried to flee, but a machine-gun volley lashed him in the side, and he was killed instantly. Peppino described the agony of the women screaming as the truck left. Meanwhile the death bell tolled for poor Donato.

 

October 20, 1943

This morning we were all up at four, ready to flee. False alarm: it was a French prisoner passing through the fields, and a farmer fired in the air. Last night, while we were gathered around the fire at Trecolori’s farm, we heard shots nearby and women’s voices crying for help. A farmer arrived, running, with the message: it’s the Germans, they’re shooting. With Aldo and Franco, I rushed down the slope above the stream, the branches and briars dense, almost impenetrable. Behind us a woman’s crying could be heard, the lament of Sofia who was calling her husband. Around us other refugees were fleeing; a Russian shouted, “Where are you? Help me,” and risked getting us all discovered. I could have killed him to shut him up. Down the steep embankment to the stream, grabbing a tree trunk, scratched by thorns, through the creaking thicket of branches. We exchanged words muffled by fear: Off with the raincoats, they’re too pale, they can be seen in the shadows. Like blind men we went into the stream, the freezing water came to our knees; we crawled up the wooded embankment opposite on all fours. In the midst of the terrible fear I remembered stories I read as a child, the jungle stories. At every step you had to extricate your foot from the tangled vegetation of the undergrowth, make a pathway with your hands, eyes closed so that the thorns wouldn’t wound them. Franco’s eyes were protected by his glasses. At times I had a suspicion that we were doing all this for fun. I, Alba, couldn’t truly be in such a grave situation, on the point of being captured by German soldiers, shot, killed. The entire experience seemed stronger than me, than my capacity to endure. Whereas at other times, in the silent, insidious darkness, the danger seemed to me so close that there was no escape, no possibility of flight. It was over, we’d been captured. The grim, distant barking of a dog made my distress more acute. And over all was the humiliation of having to flee like a criminal, sampling the life of a murderer or thief, though I had committed no crime, only dreamed that my own country could be free and civilized.

Some two hours in the woods. Cold. Occasionally we’d start moving again, climbing uphill to get warm. All around were the innumerable sounds of the nocturnal life of the forest: the voice of an owl, a slow rustling in the dry leaves, a darting among the branches. The three of us sitting on the ground waiting. Finally we heard a distant, low whistle: the whistle of friends. It was as precious as suddenly recovering the taste of life.

 

October 21, 1943

Nothing new. Inert and discouraging wait. The English don’t arrive; according to the news from Torricella they’re in Istonio. Mariuccia, a sly, skinny woman of ninety, serves as a link between the town and us. She brings the news in a note written by Don Peppe, the notary in Torricella, and hidden in her corset or her bun. A lot of airplane activity. We’re starting to wear holes in our woolen socks, the only ones we have. Also the salt is gone. This morning, after long days, we went to wash in the brook. In the afternoon we studied positions for a shelter in the woods, choosing the most secure. The trees were illuminated by the setting sun, the fallen leaves were red and shiny. Clusters of pale cyclamens emerged from under the tufts of broom. I would have liked to make a bouquet, as I used to do in the woods in Ariccia as a child, but it seemed frivolous to be picking flowers while we were trying to choose the place for a shelter to save our lives. Franco and the others strained their ears at the crackle of a machine gun that could be heard coming from Montenerodomo, at the edge of the woods.

 

October 22, 1943

I’m writing on the rocks by the brook. We came to wash. Aldo and Trecolori are digging a shelter under a large boulder on the shore. We’re tired, nervous, mute. Sometimes we enter the state of mind of the criminal who can’t hold out any longer and hands himself over to the law. Peppino said I’m risking everything, but I want to go home, to San Vito. We take out our bad mood on the lack of food and the wretched bedding. If not for the ineffable solace of nature, life would be without dreams or joy, entirely harsh, to be endured, to be lived faithfully, with no escape.

I feel humiliated waiting to be freed by the English. Every day we wonder, almost impatiently, scanning the outlines of the hills: When are they coming? Reduced to waiting for the joyous arrival of foreign soldiers!

 

Later

I reread what I wrote above. It seems to me that I’m still bound to petty, limited principles. The fact that they inhabit a country divided from mine by a mountain range or the sea, that they speak a different language, shouldn’t create an obstacle between us. A common civilization, a Christian solidarity, should bind peoples: with these considerations it becomes easy for me to accept their help, wait for their arrival. And yet, in spite of myself, in this relentless struggle, through this consuming defense of ourselves, I sense a struggle for my country, a consuming defense of my country, this, Italy, this and no other, the Italy that made my heart beat faster when as a child I merely heard the name: this is what I defend. These fields, these trees, these farms, these backward villages of a poor and defeated country are mine and I defend them as I can with my hatred, my flight, my torn socks, the darkness that frightens me. I left Rome with the sole desire to preserve my freedom, moving abruptly from my pink room on Via Duse to the sight of burned-down houses, caves populated by refugees for whom life is reduced to eating and sleeping, and now I resist precisely to defend this poverty of ours, this pain of being humans who are banished, hunted, humiliated, and defeated.

 

October 24, 1943

Nothing reassuring for two days. We’re increasingly ragged, increasingly dirty. It’s hard to glimpse the possibility of holding out still longer without being able to change, always sleeping in our clothes, so tired, so nervous. In the evening a mortal sadness takes possession of us: around five, when it’s still day for those who live in cities, who can flick a switch, turn on the lights, pick up a book. Live. It’s night for us, forced to the weak light of the hearth or to walking silently in the dark. The days are uncertain, tedious, humiliating. They die leaving each of us with a more profound weariness and no hope for the new day. In the depths of this dark valley no one helps us or enlightens us. Every bush is a threatening shadow, the donkey chomping in the haystack is the sound of hobnailed boots on the path. It’s the safest time: at night the Germans are unlikely to risk the woods, they’re afraid of ambushes. And yet an invincible terror overwhelms us at that hour. Franco and I walk along the rocky path. We try to rediscover strength in ourselves. Instead we’re frail, a negative thought is enough to crush us. We’re motionless for hours, sitting on the ground, fascinated by the flashes from the artillery firing behind the mountains. Every day, we talk for hours about crossing the lines. Franco says: how is it possible with a woman? And Edoardo looks at Emilia—they often come to see us from the farm where they’ve found shelter—and repeats: it’s not possible. That humiliates me, depresses me. I’m sure I, too, would make it; like theirs, my shoes are heavy, hiking shoes. I proposed to Emilia that we let them go alone, and then follow, the two of us, leaving an hour later, without their knowing.

Three women stopped by the stable. One was carrying a sick child in a basket on her head. A stomach abscess. She had heard that there was a doctor among us, they had walked kilometers, hoping he could operate. But Mario wasn’t here, he was out looking for food. And, besides, he couldn’t operate, he has only a pocketknife. They waited for him silently, their faces already grim. Mario said later that the child will die.

 

October 25, 1943

Franco had a very high fever yesterday. I gave him my straw pallet. We have no more candles, no matches. After sunset we move around the stable groping, as if we were blind. The dark is a nightmare, it seizes us by the throat. And the woods, with the trees losing their leaves, no longer seems to want to offer us protection. We have nothing, we can have nothing. Even an old shepherd is terrified and doesn’t dare go to Torricella for medicine.

 

Later

I have a map of the area, and everyone comes to us to consult it. On the map, inset between three small circles that mark the towns of Buonanotte, Torricella, and Montenerodomo, and in a darker color since we’re at an altitude of a thousand meters, you can see the position of these woods. Three small Abruzzo villages whose existence I didn’t even suspect, and which I would never have known if this disaster hadn’t befallen Italy. Now, however, I hear their names from morning to night, and the contours of these villages on the distant horizon have become as familiar to me as the faces of my father and mother. My life now exists in this delicate tangle of lines that the area of a fingernail could cover. My past, my fairy-tale childhood, my work, my travels, the people I’ve met—all that I’ve lived, in short, was to lead me here, to these woods. And my future, my safety are entrusted to these trees. My life is entrusted to the leaves that don’t drop off, to the snow that doesn’t fall. Books read, faithful friends are no longer of use to me, everything is now contained within the woods called la Defensa. Defensa in Spanish means “defended.” On the big map of the world these woods are a speck of dust and I am an infinitesimal part of it, and yet it’s here that everything is decided for me.

No one knows that in this tangle of lines, in these woods in Abruzzo, there’s a woman named Alba, and that she’s still young and likes the colors of the sky and the woods, likes life immensely and still has many things to do and say, and yet tomorrow she may no longer exist.

No one knows anything. My mother is in Havana, and outside the door of our house there’s a big palm tree, my friend. My mother thinks I’m in Rome and maybe she goes out and talks to her friends while I’m lying on the ground in the mud, hidden behind a bush, or I’m poking at the fire, blowing hard, and Franco is sick, shivering, in the grip of malaria.

Oh, I wish the door would open now, and someone would come in and say the war is over, no one will be killed anymore, we can go out, speak aloud, be seen, be free.

 

October 26, 1943

I can barely write in this shoddy, beat-up notebook. I have to take it with me every time there’s an alarm, it’s unwise to leave it in the stable. Tonight it was crushed between two plants near the cave dug by Trecolori. Yesterday evening, at six, the alarm. We fled to that cave, Franco and I alone, with the blankets over our shoulders. We were buried in the darkness. Franco had a very high fever, he was trembling as he lay in the gloom of the cave: a profound and tenacious dampness rose from the earth despite the blankets. No sound except the tumbling of the stream, which at first seemed to us a hoarse drumroll. We went back up after two hours. The Germans are getting closer. The circle tightens. This morning we were in alarm for three hours, first in the cave, then in the woods. We’re reduced to nearly nothing. Franco has a fever again. They pass

 

October 28, 1943

The preceding journal entry was interrupted because of an alarm. The Germans were very close by. We fled into the woods, Franco feverish and extremely weak. We have no water, our underwear is torn, we have to jealously conserve the fire under the ashes because we have no more matches to light it again. The men are exasperated by the lack of cigarettes. Carmine, Trecolori’s son, got hold of some tobacco leaves. They crush them and then roll the tobacco in the German-language leaflets that the RAF pilots drop over the lines. We’re exhausted. The English are still distant, five kilometers from Vasto, it’s said. Meanwhile the Germans are sacking the villages all around, tonight it was Montenerodomo’s turn. Life has never been so serious for me. Only there’s a great sweetness in the innocent candor of Aldo, who regrets not having a cake today, for his birthday. Soon even the comfort of writing these notes will end; I have no idea how to get another notebook.

I’m writing on my knees while the others argue nervously and irritably about politics. The Poles came, too, three young students who for four years have been fleeing from town to town. We built two sawhorses from logs with the bark stripped off to sit on in the stable. Around sunset, people from all the shelters in the woods come to our hut, drawn by the warmth of the fire. There are Romanians, Russians, Yugoslavs, a German Jew, some former political internees. All bound by a human solidarity that abolishes borders and passports. We don’t ask names or political stripes, we only read in the eyes of the others the need for help in getting through these brutal hours of life. Here, in this remote stable, at an altitude of a thousand meters, it seems to me that the Italy we wanted is truly being born. My heart races at this sudden discovery. Here, right here, in this stable, worn out, hungry, with nothing, nothing that resembles civilized life, we begin again to live in a civilized manner. The Russian talks about his country, the Poles about their literature, the Jew no longer stares at the top of the hill with tormented eyes to see if the Germans are descending from there.

They go on talking. I like their voices, the hesitant Italian, the open discussions. Dear sweet country of mine.

 

October 30, 1943

Tonight a Sicilian student showed up, a thin young man with a boundless gaze behind large glasses. Voice and accent of Rodolfo. He was walking from Mantua, a month on the road, sleeping in haystacks, asking for a piece of bread at farmhouse doors. He stopped with us and looked in the direction of the Sangro, which he intended to cross under artillery fire. When I offered him soup he would have liked to devour it, but mastered himself to make the unusual pleasure last as long as possible. I invited him to stay; he hesitated a moment. He was exhausted, nearly ill, his bare, skinny legs of a livid white. “How much suffering,” he said, “for all of us, because of a single man.” There was no hatred in his voice, only the desolate, tortured resignation of the meek. He said goodbye to me soon afterward: having overcome his brief hesitation, he had decided to leave, heading straight to the valley of Buonanotte and the lines. He studied the map for a long time, as if he were reading a death sentence. Then he said: “If I live, I’ll send you a card, give me your address in Rome.” And he headed down the slope, leaning on his tall stick and moving unsteadily in the mud, his legs sticking out thin and pale from under his patched overcoat. I fear I will never get that card.

 

November 2, 1943

Days ago, in the devastation of Montenerodomo, the Germans destroyed Domenico’s shop—the sergeant whose shelter is a dark, smoky cave a few hundred meters from here, and who sometimes prepares us a disgusting piece of mutton burned on the hearth. He has a tubercular wife and a son covered with a repulsive rash. Today, while he was hiding with us in the woods, the Germans descended on his cave and carried off the pig, on a leash, like a dog. When we returned and Domenico found out that the pig was no longer there, he asked Annuccia for a flask of must and got drunk. Drunk, he wept and sobbed, rolling on the ground in the cow manure and calling his pig in a loud voice, like a beloved person. He has nothing now. He fought for many years of war: he was wounded, and is half-blind.

Now, while I’m writing, Sofia and Armida—Trecolori’s daughters—in red dresses lighted up by the sun are digging a pit behind the house to hide the linens. They work briskly, without grieving, as if they were turning over the earth for sowing. They protect themselves from the war, as from a natural phenomenon, cyclone or hail. They don’t know the reasons for the war, where Germany is, what Great Britain is. Here, even in peacetime, there were no newspapers, and, besides, they wouldn’t be able to read them. Mail was distributed once a week. One day the card that called up Domenico arrived. They know nothing, they aren’t to blame. And yet it’s they who pay, with burned-down houses, stolen animals. They stare at the Germans in astonishment, with no understanding of why they are doing them all this harm. The Italian people of the mountains, of the remote hamlets, of the isolated villages aren’t to blame. It’s we, we who are guilty. And they welcome us, shelter us, we who have been, first and foremost, their enemy.

 

November 4, 1943

I’m worried about Rome, my son, Aunt Maria, my house. Countless objects that have followed me everywhere with their stories, their marks: a Madonna bought on the Lungarno, a book found in Venice. I’m living entirely in the past these days: Havana, Paris, Papa. I have a tremendous desire to return to being young and happy, not to hear talk of wars, soldiers, not to be afraid anymore. Tomorrow the young Poles will leave with Peppino to cross the lines. Peppino made the decision, but now he’s depressed, drawn to and dismayed by the void he’s casting himself into. This morning Mario brought good news from his rounds: the German retreat is supposedly imminent. I don’t believe it. I no longer believe anything.

 

November 5, 1943

I want to write a long story that tells about these woods. Which appeared friendly at first: our salvation, our escape. And now they’re our nightmare. They’ve become the mirror of our consciousness. To save ourselves we have to flee, at risk of our lives win the right to peace and freedom. We have no one to believe in, no one to follow. All Italy has taken refuge in us: each of us, inside, is all that remains of our country. A farmer promised me a notebook. The Poles are no longer leaving: the news arrived that you can’t get through the lines. In the midst of these changing events the woods are unmoving. Oh, I’ve found the story of the woods!

 

November 11, 1943

Antonio Piccone Stella, who is living on the Tre Confini farm, less than an hour from here, came to see me. He, too, wants to cross the lines. How distant literature is. We talk only about this now; we’re impatient, we can’t endure the waiting. I want to go, too. Everyone says: She won’t make it. And I foam with rage: I’ve climbed so many mountains, to so many mountain huts. I’m not afraid. Better to die here on the lines, better to be carried away by the Sangro. Emilia, too, has said she will follow her husband. Every day we calculate kilometers, trace routes on the map. The Sangro is swollen with the rains. You have to know where the banks aren’t mined.

 

Later

They’ve cleared out Pennadomo and Fallascoso. The towns are burning, the odor of ash reaches us on the cold breath of the wind. The natural Germanic fury is unleashed everywhere. My thoughts turn constantly to America. It’s as if emerging from these oppressive and treacherous woods I had no escape but a harbor in America, the white harbor of Havana.

 

November 13, 1943

There’s a white ribbon on the door of Trecolori’s farmhouse. Anna Maria was born, daughter of refugees. Around us the towns are burning, in Annuccia’s house they are wailing and weeping for the women driven out of Pennadomo. And this child is born. Emilia and Edoardo wanted to flee this morning, then they gave up. One can’t go, when everything around is so beautiful, when a new life opens up, with its endowment of dreams and hopes, when the maples in the woods are bright red, and the fields, with the shoots poking up, are green as in spring. One can’t say: Tomorrow, perhaps, I will no longer see all this.

 

November 15, 1943

Every attempt to write is interrupted by the alarm.

We have no more strength. It’s cold, pouring rain, the slopes are muddy, slippery, going down to Trecolori’s farmhouse is an undertaking, we fall down and get up, discouraged. A little after four, we’re prisoners of the darkness, blind, shadows. With the darkness comes an intense depression that thickens the air, like a suffocating fog. We’re silent, humiliated around the hearth. What time is it? Always too early to eat, too early to throw ourselves clothed on our pallets. My clothes are a perfect imitation of a tramp’s. I have no underwear or socks to change; my raincoat, which still serves as a pillow, is black with dirt, mud, grime. Will I ever have another? Will I find my house again? And my books? And our life?

 

November 17, 1943

News arrived of a massacre at S. Agata. The Germans entered a farmhouse suddenly, seized the men, threw them against a haystack, mowed them down with machine guns. The women, all, were spared.

This possibility of being saved owing to the sole fact of being a woman humiliates me deeply. It seems to me that my solidarity with Franco, and our other comrades, can’t be complete, since, at the last moment, I would be unable to sustain it. When we flee all together or are crouching down, holding our breath, it seems to me that mine is an easy game. I’ve decided, if they capture us, to shout, ceaselessly, “Down with Germany, long live Italy!” so that they don’t take pity on me.

 

November 18, 1943

We can’t go on. We have to decide. From this morning at seven we were in the woods, now bare of leaves, lying on the ground under the blankets. We returned to the stable, then went up to Annuccia’s to beg from her generosity a bit of polenta, but soon afterward we had to flee again, still hungry. The Germans discovered our shelter. They entered the stable, dug around in the straw, were made suspicious by those pallets, and remained in ambush nearby, hoping to surprise us like animals returning to their den. We saw them from the woods; some of us were armed, it would have been easy to fire, we saw them very clearly, we saw their legs opening like scissors, they were an easy target. We couldn’t shoot; if we had, after two hours other Germans would have descended to burn and destroy all the farms within a radius of two or three kilometers. We wouldn’t have run any risk: we could easily move to the opposite side of the woods, camp there. But the farmers, those who have welcomed and protected us, would pay for us, as has happened elsewhere. The Germans would burn the farmhouses, kill even the women. We could only spy on them with hatred, the whole wood was still and silent, an immense eye that looked at them with hatred.

Tonight we organized watches: every two hours two of us went up to the ridge of the farmhouse, as sentries, protecting the sleep of the others. But, just the same, the others can’t rest. One thinks: and what if they fall asleep? Or don’t see them? I had my watch with Franco and Edoardo, from two to four, it was a white night, foggy. Now Corrado and Aldo are out looking around. Franco gave up making himself a cigarette: he can’t do it, there’s too little paper. I have to protect this notebook from the smokers. We have nothing anymore, the woods are wet from the rain, we can’t light a fire, there’s only a lot of bitter smoke in the stable. We’ve even lost our only treasure, the pocketknife. I have to endure, continue to be strong. We’re cold. Trecolori looked at the sky and said that in two days we’ll have snow: so the Germans will follow our tracks. Edoardo and Franco want to cross the lines. They still seem uncertain when they look at us, at Emilia and me, but I know we’ll go. We have to go. Not to escape the Germans, not to reach the English: to win by ourselves, across the lines, over the torrential stream, the right to be free. Tomorrow Piccone, who wants to cross with us, will come. Edoardo and Franco went to talk to Fioravante, who will guide us for a stretch. Now they’re studying the map, they repeat yet again the usual names: Monte Pallano, Colle dello Zingaro, and then that bitter and fascinating word Sangro, Sangro, Sangro … Then they say: Trenches positions mined fields—they trace the route. And I who have always hated these words, always hated war, never understood volunteers, heroes, now I, too, have been won over by this spirit, my only desire is to go toward all this. Maybe I won’t get there, won’t write anything else. But we have to try.

 

November 19, 1943

A few seconds to write. We’re leaving to cross the lines. Franco, Emilia, and Edoardo are ready in front of Trecolori’s farmhouse, I went back to the stable on the pretext of getting the canteen I’d forgotten but in reality to be alone, to write a few words. I’m wearing pants and my raincoat and, on top, pulled over my head through a hole made in the center, a dark blanket that will serve to camouflage me. The edges are pinned with two safety pins. It’s really heavy, I don’t know how I’ll walk like this. Over my shoulder I have another blanket rolled up the way soldiers do.

All our friends have come down from the shelters to say goodbye. Tonino, nerves shattered, weeps uncontrollably leaning against a tree, the Russian rolls on the ground in pain from his ulcer. We shake hands, kiss rough cheeks. Worried, moved, they look at us as if seeing us for the last time. This morning we, too, were nervous, silent, we didn’t speak to each other, we four, in order not to exchange impressions about the decision we’d made. And now instead I feel light, light, smiling, as if I were leaving on a festive journey. There’s a little sun, in the doorway the cherry tree positions itself lightly, as in an arabesque. I wrote something on the wall of the stable with tincture of iodine, I wanted to be alone for that, too. I don’t know what, exactly, “the lines” are, I’m afraid only of setting off the diabolical mechanism of a mine with my own foot. I have money hidden in my breast, I’ll also hide the notebook. I want to write this, very clearly: I’m not afraid, I feel only this enormous, perhaps nervous joy. And the sense of playing a trick on the Germans, by fleeing, the desire not to be found here by the English, four healthy Italians, waiting idly. I feel only hatred and joy. If we were to die, our companions in the woods wouldn’t even know it right away. My son, my aunt, would continue to live as if I were still alive. My mother—who can say when she would find out.

The sky is getting foggy. It’s three thirty. Fioravante said that before dawn we should be at the Sangro.

 

Alba de Céspedes (1911-1997) was an Italian-feminist writer whose novel Forbidden Notebook ,  was published earlier this year by Astra House, in a new translation by Ann Goldstein and with a foreword by Jhumpa Lahiri. De Céspedes’ experiences of the war as described in these diary pages had a profound influence on the writing of Her Side of the Story, which will be published in November 2023, in a new translation by Jill Foulston and with an afterword by Elena Ferrante.

The Bible and Poetry

Initial S: A Monk Praying in the Water, Getty Center. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

We do not read the Bible as it is meant to be read. Theology always risks leading us astray by elaborating its own discourse, with the biblical texts merely as a point of departure. The presence of poetry in the Bible is the key to a more pertinent and more faithful reading.

There are many poems found in the Bible. We know this, vaguely and without giving it too much thought, but shouldn’t we be rather astonished by the role of poetry in a collection of books with such a pressing and salutary Word to express? And shouldn’t we ask ourselves if the presence of this writing—so much more self-conscious and desirous than is prose of a form it can make vibrate—affects the biblical “message” and changes its nature?

It is unsurprising that the Psalms are poems, given their liturgical purpose and the abyss of individual and collective emotion that they explore. At the heart of the Bible and yet also apart from it, they lay out, we might suppose, for both the individual and the community, the lived experience of religion that other biblical books have the task of defining. We can accept the Song of Songs as a love poem, Jeremiah’s Lamentations as a sequence of elegies, Job as a verse drama, and we discover without too much surprise a considerable number of poems in the historical books: the song of Moses and Miriam, for example, in Exodus 15; the canticle of Deborah and Barak in Judges 5; the lament of David for Saul and Jonathan in 2 Samuel 1. And yet when we think about the presence of all these poetic books in a work in which we expect to find doctrines, and about the turn to poetry in so many of the historical books of the Bible, it gives us reason to think again. And how should we react to Proverbs, in which wisdom itself is taught in a poetic form? Or to the prophetic books, where poetry is sovereign, where warnings of the greatest urgency, for us as well as for the writers’ contemporaries, come forth in verse?

Isn’t this curious? And poetry appears from the beginning. In the second chapter of Genesis (verse 23), Adam welcomes the creation of woman in this way:

Here at last the bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.
This one shall be called woman, for she was drawn forth from man.

These are the very first human words reported; it is tempting and perhaps legitimate to draw some conclusions. By this point Adam has already named the animals, but the author only indicates this, without recording the spoken words; in the world of the beginning, from which the author knows himself as well as his readers to be excluded, he probably recognized that there must have existed an intimate relationship between language and the real, between words and things, that we are incapable of regaining. But when Adam does speak for the first time, he is given an “Edenic” language, one which our fallen languages can still attain in certain moments: thus Adam literally draws woman, ’ishah, from man, ’ish. Hebrew, thanks to the pleasure it takes in wordplay—in the ludic and deeply serious harmonies between the sounds of words and the beings, objects, ideas, and emotions to which they open themselves—is a language particularly and providentially skillful at suggesting what would be a cordial relation between our language and our world, and a meaningful relation among the presences of the real. It is skillful in affirming the gravity of the lightest among the figures of rhetoric: the pun. Most importantly, as soon as the first man opens his mouth, he speaks in verse. Did the author think that in the world of primitive wonder language was naturally poetic? Is this why Adam, immediately after eating the forbidden fruit, responds to God in prose: “I heard your steps in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself” (Genesis 3:10)? We cannot know, but that first brief, spontaneous poem of Adam, which we seem to hear from so far away and from so close, solicits our attention and calls for our thought. If language before the Fall was poetic, or produced poems at moments charged with meaning, does poetry represent for us the apogee of our fallen speaking—its beginning and its end, its nostalgia and its hope?

In paging through Genesis, a book of history and not a collection of poetry, we encounter an impressive number of poems. It is in poetry that God gives the law on murder and its punishment (Genesis 9:6), that Rebecca’s family blesses her (24:60), that Isaac prophesies the future of Esau (27:39–40), and that Jacob blesses the twelve tribes of Israel (49:2–27). Given the occasional difficulty of identifying which passages are in verse, it may be that others will be discovered. The Bible de Jérusalem (I am reading from a 2009 edition) presents God as speaking in poetry several times in the first three chapters, beginning with the creation of man, as the Word of God gives birth to the only creature endowed with speech:

God created man in his image,
in the image of God he created him,
man and woman he created them.

In approaching the Bible’s beginning, we must often change our listening, our rhythm, our mode of attention and of being, in order to understand and receive a different language.

There are fewer poems in the New Testament, but they give even more food for thought. The Gospel of Luke introduces, from its first chapters, three poems: the canticles of Mary, Zachariah, and Simeon. Thus the Savior’s life begins under the sign of poetry. The book of Revelation, at the end of the Bible, contains additional canticles, as well as lamentations on Babylon, in poetry that appeals to the visionary imagination. In the name of Christianity, it returns to the extravagant poetry of the prophets. The first letter of John develops its thought with such felicity of rhythmic phrasing and close-crafted form that the Jerusalem Bible translates it completely in verse. These same translators have Paul’s letter to the Romans begin and end in verse, thus using poetry to frame a doctrinal exposition animated by an inflamed but in principle “prosaic” process of reflection, analysis, and synthesis.

Jesus himself seems at certain moments to speak in verse, as in the Beatitudes (Matthew 5, Luke 6) and the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6, Luke 11). In the Jerusalem Bible, the Gospel of John, which begins with a long poem and in which John the Baptist on two occasions speaks in verse (1:30, 3:27–30), suggests that Jesus the teacher—or rather, the divine educator—addressed his listeners most often in poetry.

It is true that the border between verse and a cadenced prose is not easy to determine in either the Hebrew of the Old Testament or the Greek of the New: translators judge it differently. It may also be that the poems spoken by Jacob, Simeon, and many others come not from them but from the authors of the books in which they appear. The result is the same. We find ourselves constantly in the presence of writings that invite us into the joy of words, into a well-shaped language, in a form that demands from us the attention that we give to poetry and awakens us to expectation.

***

Certain scholars of the Bible have long known that the poetry is not there simply to add a dash of nobility, or sublimity, or emotive force to what the author could have said in prose. They learned from literary critics what the critics had learned from poets: poetry is in itself a way of thinking and of imagining the world; it discovers with precision what it had to say only by saying it; the meaning of a poem awaits us in its manner of being, and meaning in the customary sense of the word is not what is most important about it.

Should we not ask ourselves if the presence of so many poems changes not only the way in which the Bible speaks to us, but also the kind of message, announcement, or call that it conveys? How must faith perceive biblical speech? What does this continual turn to poetry imply about the very nature of Christianity?

We can start to respond to these questions by giving some thought to how we usually read poetry. We do not paraphrase poems, extracting a meaning and leaving aside the redundant form. It is the very being itself of the poem that matters, the sounds and the rhythms that animate it like a living thing, the relations that the words stitch among themselves through their memory and their history, and the connotations that they disseminate.

However, while we read a poem of Keats, or of Baudelaire or Ronsard, in this way, we easily forget our customary attention to the life of the poetic word when reading, for example, a Psalm, from which we want to draw a teaching, a lesson. We need to be reminded of two well-known pensées of Pascal: “Different arrangements of words make different meanings, and different arrangements of meanings produce different effects”; “The same meaning changes according to the words expressing it.” Indeed, the meaning changes, and not only in poetry: Pascal speaks here of prose. The second fragment continues: “Meanings are given dignity by words instead of conferring it upon them.” I know no better formula for suggesting the inseparability of words and meanings. And if it is important not to depart from a biblical text written in prose, all the more so should we remain as close as possible to a biblical poem, knowing that poetry, which does not permit paraphrase, also does not convey propositions—or it conveys them in a context that gives them their specificity. It seems to me that we do not have to draw doctrines from the Bible other than those that the biblical writers themselves found there, for we cannot touch bottom in these deep waters; the world that is revealed to us entirely exceeds us. We can understand only what God reveals to us. The intelligence that he has given us allows us to reflect on what we read, but any attempt to go further—above all, systematic theology, whether it results in the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas or the Institutes of the Christian Religion of Calvin—seems an error.

To believe in the Bible—or, rather, to believe the Bible, and to allow oneself to be convinced that it is the word of God, in whatever way one considers it—is to believe what it says, with a supernatural faith that resembles, at an infinite distance, the confidence with which we read a poem, accepting that its reality is found in it and not in our exegeses. This allows for adhering to the truth that is at once included in the words and liberated by them, whatever the difficulty posed by the Flood, for example, or the Tower of Babel. We do not necessarily know the exact nature of the truth that is revealed to us, but we know where to look for it, just as we do not necessarily understand a poem but we look for the answer to our questions in the poem itself, without adding or subtracting anything.

Poetry attracts our attention to language and to the mystery of words, to their capacity to create, almost by themselves, networks of meaning, unexpected emotions, rhythms and a music for the ear and for the mouth that spreads through the entire body and all one’s being. It acts similarly on the world, by finding, for the presences of the real, new names, and associations of words, of cadences, of sounds, that give to the most familiar beings and objects a certain strangeness that is both disturbing and joyous. It burns up appearances, it uncovers the invisible, it opens, like a little casement or a great window, onto the unknown, onto something else. The shade of trees that invites us in the midst of strong heat is transfigured when Racine’s Phèdre cries:

Dieux! que ne suis-je assise à l’ombre des forêts!
(Gods! why am I not seated in the shade of forests!)

Reason or good sense might object that one cannot be seated in the shade “of forests,” but only in the shade of a tree, or, if one pictures it in the mind, in the shade of a forest, in the singular. These plural forests constitute a world seen anew, recreated by the imagination, a world of great beauty that is almost cerebral, but that at the same time in no way loses contact with reality. We are attracted by the grave sonority of “ombre,” which contrasts with the i sounds that precede it: “que ne suis-je assis …” The coolness of this shade, under forests that have become protecting and enveloping, creates for Phèdre an eminently desirable place, apt to save her from her burning unavowable love for Hippolyte and from the terrible gaze of the gods. The beneficial shadow trembles with a devastating passion; the imagined place is filled with human guilt.

The “meaning” of the famous verse depends on the imagination that inhabits it, and on the emotion that animates it, which would not be fully present without its grammar and without the sounds that it makes. The forests, real, surreal, and resonating with the character’s desire, shame, and aspiration, represent, in a sudden vision, the true world: loved, lost, possible. And I do not exclude the likelihood that these “forêts” are imposed on Racine by the necessity of rhyming them with “apprêts” at the end of the preceding line, and by the impossibility of writing the four syllables “de la forêt.” The arrival of poetry for a prosaic reason is not at all shocking: essential words and ideas frequently arrive in an oblique manner.

As Henri Brémond writes, poetry produces in us “a feeling of presence.” The world is there, not under its usual guise but in a language that alone can give it immediacy. The poetic act draws close to the real and, in order to go to the depth of things, it recreates them for us by welcoming them in sounds, rhythms, and unlimited ramifications of meanings, and places these recreations in the domain of the possible. In its own way, and without at all being supernatural, poetry too is a revelation. The Bible as revelation and as poetic speech gives equally and above all onto something else. Clearly, it does not develop exclusively in poems, but its writings often turn into verse, as if it tended toward poetry by supposing poetry to be the speech most appropriate to the strangeness, to the transcendence of what it manifests. And let us think again of the words of Jesus. He speaks quite often in parables, in order to present complex truths in the form of stories and within the life of a few characters, and in order to provoke his listeners—and us, his readers—to search, each time, for meaning in the multiple facets of a fiction. His affirmations in prose are equally poetic in that they are not understood right away; they ask that we receive them as we receive poetry, by becoming conscious of the mystery that accompanies them. For example, in hearing “The kingdom of heaven is very near,” or “This is my body,” or “I am the truth,” we feel, I believe, that they are something other than propositions, and we recognize behind these very simple words a sort of hinterland of meaning that we must explore as one explores the depths of a poem.

“I am the truth” escapes from all the modes of thinking in Western philosophy.

Jesus, who is the Word, speaks, indeed, and does not write. Everything he says follows from a particular situation, from a lived moment. And so many books of the Bible began by being spoken, or were destined, like the Psalms, to be said and sung, or they  gather the words of an orator, like Ecclesiastes, or presuppose a dialogue, like Job or the Song of Songs. The Bible engages us constantly in listening, in becoming sensitive to their ways of writing, to images that do not explain, and, ideally, to the music of thought. It is true that most of us do not have access to the original texts, but wasn’t that foreseen? There are ways to understand, even at a distance, how Hebrew and Greek function, and it is up to us to seek, in a simple translation—on the condition that it is poetically faithful—the animation of the speech and the way and the life of the truth.

Reading the Bible is a “poetic” experience. It offers us a theology according only to the etymological sense of the word: speech concerning God. For the Bible, which puts us in front of something else, is itself other. Have we, in Europe, truly grasped the nature of Christianity? Haven’t we instead assimilated to our categories of thought and our habits of reading a religion that comes to us from the Middle East? Its Jewish origins in no way signify that Christianity lacks a universal bearing, but they must not be neglected. God chose to reveal himself first through a people that had, century after century, their own way of thinking and writing, and the religion they transmitted bears the marks of this genesis. The Bible asks us to recognize the strangeness, the foreignness of Christianity, and to put in question our European manner of approaching it. Recovering this Christianity that comes from elsewhere would change our reading of the Bible, and doubtless our way of proclaiming the Gospel.

 

Adapted from The Bible and Poetry by Michael Edwards, translated by Stephen E. Lewis. To be published by New York Review Books in August.

Michael Edwards is an Anglo-French poet and scholar. Born in Barnes, London, he is the author of twenty books and the first English person ever to have been elected to the Collège de France and to the Académie Francaise.

Stephen E. Lewis is a professor of English at the Franciscan University of Steubenville and a translator of French literature.

James Lasdun, Jessica Laser, and Leopoldine Core Recommend

Joxemai, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Julian Maclaren-Ross’s 1947 novel, Of Love and Hunger, is a defiantly unedifying English comedy about a vacuum-cleaner salesman trying to keep his chin up in the gloom of prewar Brighton. Its not-quite-forgotten (if never-exactly-acclaimed) author has been on my radar ever since I learned that he was the model for the bohemian novelist character X. Trapnel in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. That monumental roman-fleuve of English life happened to be a significant inspiration for a project of my own—a novel about the seventies London I grew up in, an excerpt of which appears in the new Summer issue of the Review—so when I found myself trying to think of a book that one of my middle-aged characters might have read in her youth, the Maclaren-Ross novel sprang to mind, and I finally read it. As it turned out, I don’t think my character, a tortured soul who tends to find everything “ghastly,” would have enjoyed it. She would have found the seedy boarding houses and tearooms and pubs that comprise its setting “ghastly”; she‘d have found the petty swindling and debt-dodging antics of the protagonist and his fellow salesmen “ghastly,” and she’d have found his unapologetic romance with the wife of an absent colleague “too ghastly for words.” But I couldn’t get enough of it. There’s nothing obviously brilliant about the writing or plotting, both of which tend toward the studiedly humdrum. (“Two more cars passed, then a bus.”) But somehow its little throwaway visions of fleeting bliss snatched from abiding squalor got under my skin. I haven’t enjoyed a novel so much in ages. 

—James Lasdun, author of “Helen”

I asked my musician friend JJ Weihl why so many analog demos sound like they were recorded at the bottom of the sea. She told me that if they’re recorded on a cassette there’s “far less frequency range—everything sounds warm and muffly.” She described something she experiences sometimes called demo-itis, when she gets so attached to the demo that it’s hard to recreate it later: “chasing the blurry undefined feeling,” she said.

Recently, I’ve been listening to old demo tapes by the Cure on repeat. I like hearing the rough and sometimes fragile beginnings of their songs. A demo feels more like it’s breathing—it’s not fixed. It has been through fewer hands and there’s something enthralling about that. The song is still thinking. The demo for “Six Different Ways” sounds underwater but the essence is there—maybe even more than in the finished song. There is a thinness, a wobbliness, and a directness to the recording—a distinctly temporary quality—not perfection—not in tune always. More the act of making a root.

My dog likes this instrumental demo of “Pictures of You”; he falls into a deep relaxed sleep whenever I play it. Robert Smith’s voice is there even when it’s not. Every performance of that song seems to have its own persuasive life force. Maybe more than one can be the one.

—Leopoldine Core, author of “ Ex-Stewardess ”

“My buckle makes impressions / on the inside of her thigh,” begins a Tyler Childers love song in which no one’s pants come off. “If I’d known she was religious / then I wouldn’t have came stoned,” he continues, and who wouldn’t forgive his honest mistake? He’s clearly hell-bound (“working on a building out of hand-hewn brimstone,” he sings in “I Swear (to God)”), until another song has him wondering whether God might let “free will / boys mope around in purgatory,” a place he describes as “a middle ground I think might work for me.” “Born Again,” which he has called “a redneck commentary on reincarnation,” repeats the phrase “once I was” (“a dying breed,” “a broken heart”), until it becomes simply: “once I was / and you were too.” It’s as though the clause thought it needed an object to become a full sentence, before realizing, in its journey toward enlightenment, that it was already complete.

In high school on the South Side of Chicago, I would say things like “I’ll listen to any music, just not country,” as if country were the only sure marker of bad taste, probably because of an unnamed association I had made, or that had been made for me, between the genre and white ignorance, unexamined patriotism (it is called “country,” after all), guns, Christianity, and the confederacy. In adulthood, I covered my burgeoning love for country music with the safer, cooler, more presentable term Americana. Until I fell for Childers, I didn’t see that term as a euphemism.

“As a man who identifies as a country music singer,” Childers said in his acceptance speech for the 2018 Americana Music Honors and Awards’s Emerging Artist of the Year, “I feel Americana ain’t no part of nothing and is a distraction from the issues that we’re facing on a bigger level as country music singers.” In 2020, he released Long Violent History, an album of old-time fiddle music accompanied by a six-minute YouTube statement in which he speaks directly to his “rural white listeners.” He asks them to “stop being so taken aback by Black Lives Matter: if we didn’t need to be reminded, there would be justice for Breonna Taylor,” and to “start looking for ways to preserve our heritage outside of lazily defending a flag with history steeped in racism and treason.” His most recent record, Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?, does some of that heritage-preserving. It is a triune gospel album that plays the same eight songs three different ways—an acknowledgment of tradition, and that things change.

—Jessica Laser, author of “ Kings ”

Molly

If you are contemplating self-destruction, please tell someone you trust. Immediate counseling is available 24/7 by dialing 1-800-SUICIDE or 988.

 

A Sunday afternoon in early spring. We’d spent the morning quiet, in separate rooms—me in my office, writing; Molly on the bed in the guest room, working too, so I believed. I’d pass by and see her using her laptop or reading from the books piled on the bed where she lay prone, or sometimes staring off out through the window to the yard. It was warm for March already, full of the kind of color through which you can begin to see the blooming world emerge. Molly didn’t want to talk really, clearly feeling extremely down again, and still I tried to hug her, leaning over the bed to wrap my arms around her shoulders as best I could. She brushed me off a bit, letting me hold her but not really responding. I let her be—it’d been a long winter, coming off what felt like the hardest year in both our lives, to the point we’d both begun to wonder if, not when, the struggle would ever slow. I wished there could be something I might say to lift her spirits for a minute, but I also knew how much she loathed most any stroke of optimism or blind hope, each more offensive than the woe alone. Later, though, while passing in the hallway in the dark, she slipped her arms around me at the waist and drew me close. She told me that she loved me, almost a whisper, tender, small in my arms. I told her I loved her too, and we held each other standing still, a clutch of limbs. I put my head in her hair and looked beyond on through the bathroom where half-muted light pressed at the window as through a tarp. When we let go, she slipped out neatly, no further words, and back to bed. The house was still, very little sound besides our motion. After another while spent working, I came back and asked if she’d come out with me to the yard to see the chickens, one of our favorite ways to pass the time. Outside, it was sodden, lots of rain lately, and the birds were restless, eager to rush out of their run and hunt for bugs. Molly said no, she didn’t want to go, asked if I’d bring one to the bedroom window so she could see—something I often did so many days, an easy way to make her smile. I scooped up Woosh, our Polish hen, my favorite, and brought her over to the glass where Molly sat. This time, though, when I approached the window, Molly didn’t move toward us, open the window, as she would usually. Even as I smiled and waved, holding Woosh up close against the glass, speaking for her in the hen-voice that I’d made up, Molly’s mouth held clamped, her eyes like dents obscured against the glare across the dimness of the room. Woosh began to wriggle, wanting down. The other birds were ranging freely, unattended—which always made me nervous now, as in recent months a hawk had taken favor to our area, often reappearing in lurking circles overhead, waiting for the right time to swoop down and make a meal out of our pets. So I didn’t linger for too long at the window, antsy anyway to get on and go for my daily run around the neighborhood, one of the few reasons I still had for getting out of the house. I gripped Woosh by her leg and made it wave, a little goodbye, then hurried on, leaving Molly staring blankly at the space where I’d just been: a view of a fence obscured only by the lone sapling she’d planted last spring in yearning for the day she wouldn’t have to see the neighbors. 

*** 

I corralled the chickens to their coop, came back inside. In Molly’s office, where I had a closet, I sat across from her while changing clothes in preparation for my daily run. Molly spoke calmly, said she’d just finished reading the galley of my next novel and that she liked the way it ended: with the book’s protagonist suspended in a stasis of her memories, forever stuck. I felt surprised to hear she’d finished, given her low spirit and how she’d said she found the novel difficult to read, because it hurt for her to have to see the pain behind my language, how much I’d been carrying around all this time. I told her I was grateful she’d made it through, that I wanted to hear more of what she thought after my run, already anxious to get on with it, in go-mode. My reaction seemed to vex her, causing a little back and forth where we both kept misunderstanding what the other had just said, each at different ends of a conversation. She remained flat on the bed as I kissed her forehead, squeezed her hand, then proceeded through the house, out the front door. Coming down the driveway, I took my phone out to put on music I could run to and saw I’d received an email, sent from Molly, according to the timestamp, just after I had left her in the room. (no subject), read the subject, and in the body, just: I love you, nothing else, besides a Word document she’d attached, titled Folk Physics, which I knew to be the title of the manuscript of poems she’d been working on the last few months. I stopped short in my tracks, surprised to see she’d sent it to me just like that, then and there. Something felt off, too out of nowhere—not like Molly, or perhaps too much like Molly. I turned around at once and went inside. 

***

During my brief absence, she’d already risen from the bed, up and about for one of only a few times that day. I found her in the kitchen with the lights off, standing as if dazed by my appearance, arms at her sides. She seemed to clench up as I came near, letting me put my arms around her but staying taut, hand on my chest. She hesitated when I asked if she’d finished her manuscript, wondering why she hadn’t mentioned it. Yes, she said quietly, she guessed it was finished, a draft at least but no big deal. I told her I was excited to get to read it either way, that I was proud of her, and squeezed her tightly one more time, then let her go. She seemed to hover there in front of me a moment, waiting mute for what I’d do next. I asked if after my run we could go to Whole Foods, pick up something to make for dinner together, and maybe watch a movie, have a nice night here at home. She said yes, that sounded good, and I said good, I’d see her soon, then one last hug before I left her standing in the kitchen in the dark. 

*** 

On my run, I followed my usual route around our neighborhood without much thought. I’d always liked the way the world went narrow in this manner during exercise, as if there could be nothing else to do but the task at hand, one foot in front of the other, counting down without a number. I don’t remember seeing any other people, then or later, though I must have; in retrospect, the smaller details would fade to gray around the corridor of time sent rushing forward in the wake of what awaited just ahead. Near the end of the run, I decided to extend my route, turning around to double back the way I’d just come, adding on an extra half-mile on a path that took me past the entrance to the gardens where Molly and I would often walk in summers. The sidewalks in this part of the neighborhood were cracked and bumpy, requiring specific care not to trip. I pulled my phone out to see how far I’d gone and saw a ping from Twitter telling me that Molly had made a post, just minutes past—a link to a YouTube video of “The Old Revolution” by Leonard Cohen, including her transcription of the song’s opening line: “I finally broke into the prison.” I liked the tweet and thumbed the link immediately, opening the song to let it play, happy to imagine her selecting the closing soundtrack for my run home, just a couple blocks away now. “Into this furnace I ask you now to venture,” Cohen sang, backed by a doomy twang. “You whom I cannot betray.”

*** 

The song was still there with me in my head as I arrived back at our driveway, where looking up from halfway along the path toward the stairs to our front porch, I saw a shape against the door, covering the spy hole—a plain white envelope, affixed with tape. My body seized. From early on in our relationship I’d had visions of Molly picking up and leaving just like that, deciding on a whim and without warning that she preferred to be alone. Running up the steps, already flush with adrenaline, a pounding pulse, I saw my first name, Blake, handwritten in the center of the envelope’s face in Molly’s script. Immediately, I wailed, devoid of language, too much too fast, real and unreal. Inside the envelope, a two-page letter, printed out. I stopped cold on the first lines: 

Blake, 

I have decided to leave this world. 

Then there was nothing but those words—words to which I have no corollary, no distinct definition in that moment, as simple as they seem. Every sentence that I’ve tried to put here to frame the moment feels like a doormat laid on blood, an unstoppable force colliding with an intolerable object in slow motion, beyond the need of being named. Before and after.

***

Out of something akin to instinct, I forced my sight along the rest of the letter, not really reading it so much as scanning for a more direct form of information, anything she’d written that might tell me where she was—which, near the end of the second page, I found: I left my body in the nature area where we used to go walking so I could see the sky and trees and hear the birds one last time. Then: I shot myself so it would be over instantly with certainty and no suffering whatsoever. This time when I screamed it was the only word that I could think of: No. I must have sounded like a child jabbed in his guts, squealing. I knew exactly where she meant—I’d run right by it, just minutes before, perhaps a couple hundred yards away. I might have even crossed her path while on the way there had times aligned right, had I known. A sudden frenzy of possible options of what to do next swarmed my brain, none of them quite right, devised in terror. 

***

At the edge of the sidewalk, I stopped and tried to think if I should go inside and get my keys and drive to where she might be, or if I should run there fast as I could, still in my running clothes, already half-exhausted and slick with sweat. Each instant that I didn’t do exactly the right thing felt like the last chance, a window closing. Finally, I took off running at full speed along the sidewalk, shouting her name loud as I could, begging her or me or God or whoever else might be able to hear me: No, please, Molly. Not like this. No matter what I said, there was no answer; no one on the street around me, zero cars. Ahead, the sidewalk seemed to stretch so far beyond me, no matter how fast or hard I ran, as if growing longer with every step; all the houses shaped the same as they were always, full of other people in the midst of their own lives. As I ran, I tried to scan her letter, held out before me with both hands, already wadded up in frantic grip, scanning through fragments of despondent logic that felt impossible to connect with any actual moment in the present as it passed. “Everyone’s life ends, and mine is over now,” she’d written in present tense about the future, which was apparently in the midst of happening right now—or had it already happened? Was there still time? I felt embarrassed, sick to my stomach, to feel my body’s power giving out no matter how hard I tried to maintain the sprint, forced instead at several points to slow down against the burning in my muscles, sucking for air with everything I thought I knew now on the line. 

***

I couldn’t find her in the fields. The grass was high and muddy, and my running shoes kept getting stuck, sucking half off me, as I worked my way along the path between the unkempt plots of wild grass left overgrown through the winter and the vacant patches where in the spring ahead flowers would bloom Everything felt blurred, moving much faster all around me than I could parse. I was still screaming her name, begging her to answer, to be okay, but my voice just disappeared into the strangling silence. I searched the spots where last summer we’d returned daily to watch a mother duck care for her newborn flock; the bank of reeds where hundreds of frogs would often sing till you got too near; the grown-together pair of trees Molly said she thought would resemble us in our old age someday. I kept calling her number, listening to it ring and ring until the default voicemail recording came back on, asking in an android woman’s voice for me to leave a message. Maybe in the memory on Molly’s phone now there’s a recording of me huffing and howling, just before I really understood that there was no way to go back, that nothing I could say or want or do could reverse what had taken place.

***

The longer she failed to turn up, the more I felt a desperate possibility that it wasn’t already too late—that she was out here somewhere, and I could save her, and yet no matter where I turned or how I shouted, nothing changed. I realized I should call 911, holding the phone up to my face while rushing through the mud into the far end of the gardens, clogged with the trees. After what seemed endless ringing, an operator’s voice came on the line, firm and professional, and asked for my emergency. I heard the words come out of my mouth before I thought them: My wife left me a suicide note and I can’t find her. The operator asked me where I was, how they could reach me, and I kept trying to explain, uncertain how to be specific with the location of the gardens, of no immediate address. I can’t find her, I need help, I kept repeating in frustration when I couldn’t seem to get it right, please come and help me. The operator reassured me the police were already on their way, someone would be there very soon. In the meantime, she stayed with me on the line as I hurried through the trees to where the gardens reached their end amid a sort of bog, studded with thickets and obscured patches, brambles, shrubs, so many possible places to end up. Every time I called her name, it felt a little less like her; as if what those syllables had meant to me for so long no longer bore resemblance to itself, and in its place, a widening hole, larger than all else. 

***

Reaching the end of the bog area, I turned around and started back toward the street. Close to the entrance, along a patch of land where some local group had planted food, I saw two women coming down the slope toward me, one near my age, the other probably her mother. I could see at once they looked concerned, had come down to the area for a reason. “Did you hear a gunshot?” I begged of them in a pinched voice, desperate to hear a different answer than what I thought. Yes, they said, they had—and I felt something deep within me break—ambient anguish so overwhelming I should have fallen to my knees but could no longer remember how. Like having the skin ripped off your head and being asked to run a marathon on live TV where the finish line ends in a lake of burning bile. It’s not that time stands still in such a moment—it’s that there’s nothing you can do to make it stop, and every second lasts forever even as it’s over, as if what you’d once thought must be impossible has become the organizing principle of who you are. With someone else speaking for me now, I asked how long ago they’d heard the gunshot. They said ten minutes. I asked in which direction, and they pointed back the way I’d come. “Are you missing your dog?” the younger woman asked, as I turned to hurry where she’d pointed. “My wife,” I said, over my shoulder, and heard her groan, say, Oh my God. 

***

I was completely frantic now, even more incensed with the task of finding as the world surrounding bent to blur; all possible locations interlacing in my periphery like abstract glyphs, beneath one of which, somewhere, was Molly’s body. Between my clearer memories of this transition in time’s fabric, huge, wide blank patches, a jagged space in how I’d been that simply no longer exists. I remember moving away from where those women were as through a vortex, past cracks widening within my vision, the sound of my inhale like a black hole. As I hurried back along the gardens’ path again, expecting at any second to come stumbling onto blood, I noticed another form there with me parallel, a man hurrying along the massive drainage pipe that laced the property, trying to help. Back near the far end of the trees, he shouted at me for her phone number so he could call, too, as if she’d answer him instead of me. The only numbers I knew by heart were mine and my mother’s, I realized, stopping to stand there scrolling through my contacts till I found hers, then shouting it across the thickets for anyone to have. Right then, standing in the middle of a forest with my phone out, I felt as far as I have ever felt from salvation; like all the minutiae life is made of was nothing more than illness and detritus, empty gestures, worthless hope. What if I never found her, I imagined, already able to imagine countless variations of the desolation just ahead; what would life be, in this hole, where space-time seemed stretched far beyond the point of breaking, no longer even scrolling forward, but just flapping, tearing skin off, empty space? I could already imagine it just like that—the nature of reality, comprised in violence made so innate you don’t even need to find your loved one’s body to realize, with every passing moment, that you can’t go back, and that what’s ahead is little more than an endless and excruciating blur. I could barely think to lift my feet, but I was moving, through somewhere so far beyond adrenaline it felt like the world had finally actually gone flat, my blood replaced with poison, choking on it, being dragged. Somewhere above me, though, if something was watching, it would have appeared like I was strolling by now, taking care to admire the minor aspects of the terrain, laying my wide eyes on anywhere the weeds and branches might obscure the truth from being found, a secret place that so far only Molly knew the shape of. 

***

Then I saw. There in the wild grass, just off the path obscured by saplings. Her body on her back facing the sky. Eyes closed. Completely motionless. A handgun clenched between her hands against her chest. Hair pulled up in a bun. Her favorite green coat. Her face blank of expression, already paling. A tiny, darkened wound punched in her chin, near to her throat. A single fly already circling the hole, lurking to feed. I knew at once that she was gone. Something else about me in my brain replaced the rest then, taking me over in that instant, clobbered blank. As if the atmosphere had been ripped off and all the air sucked out around us. Like the world was just a set that’d been abandoned long ago, and I was the only one still down here wandering around. I heard me tell the operator that I’d found her, that she wasn’t breathing. My voice was steady, somehow, already cleaving onto facts. I heard me say that I was not allowed to touch her, right, because this was a crime scene. Because she was without a question dead. My wife was dead. Molly was dead. The operator told me yes. She told me they were having trouble placing my location, but someone would be there soon, so just hang on. I took a step back from Molly’s body, standing over it for just a moment before putting my hands over my face, turning away. I didn’t need to look any longer to see the way it was, now and forever—her image scraped into my brain, drained of all light. I tried to take a knee and instead fell on all fours, no longer screaming but just wailing, for her, for Mom, for God, but choking on it, out of breath, as meanwhile the white-hot silent sun above us burned, an open all-unseeing eye. 

***

I have no idea how long I lay alone there in the dirt—forever, it would have felt like, but also as if no time at all, as time meant nothing now that there was nothing left to fear. Nothing left, either, to hide me from the blank above, all one long clear pale blue, the surrounding land flat and sandwiched in around me, as in a hole cut through a map. This can’t be real, I kept insisting aloud to no one, simultaneously devastated and enraged, moaning for help and for erasure, anything that could intercede. I felt a sudden buzzing near my right eye, then, the hum of wings and then a landing, and a pinch. I slapped back at the place where I’d been stung, on my right eyelid, inadvertently hitting my own face in place of the bee, already moving on now, having delivered its weird joke. I’d never been stung before but as a child, too young to recall but by my mother’s story of the memory—how I’d stepped on a dead yellow jacket and lost my mind, more scared than hurt. I think I howled then, almost like laughing, pawing at the expectation of a swelling while looking back at Molly’s corpse, as if this was some strange punchline we might share—something just stung me, what the fuck—not yet having felt it sunken in yet that she could no longer respond. “A bee sticks the young king’s hand for the first time,” I’d realize later she’d once written in a poem, as if already having known. “Alone on a slope where apples are rotting / under boughs in a sweet acid smell // and he’d like insects to cover him / for the effect it had on the other children. In rain / minnows feel the pond grow.” 

*** 

When the cops arrived, they found me on my stomach, talking to myself. There were two of them, a medic and an officer, and at first they maintained a distance, testing me out, as if I were a criminal or wild animal. Without needing to be asked, I aimed my arm at where Molly’s body was and the officer went to it, the other staying with me, not kneeling down but standing over, asking questions I can’t remember to repeat. Something else was speaking for me now, a part of me that didn’t need the real me to keep going; as if I wasn’t really there, but in a maw. I heard myself call out after the officer to verify what I felt certain I had seen: That she was dead, right? Were they sure? Calmly, clearly, he said yes, simple as that, a legal fact. Was she pregnant? the medic asked, nodding just so when I said no. I could tell they could tell I wasn’t in my right mind when I asked if they could tell where she got the gun from, and if so, would they please be sure to let me know, please? As if there were anything that I could do about it now, or as if at any second someone might come up and tap me on the shoulder, apologize for the confusion, and lead me back to my real life. Instead, by now, other police had begun arriving, masses of them, so it seemed, coming as if out of nowhere to take part in the production, right on cue. Someone put up the yellow CRIME SCENE tape around her body. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to turn my head, to have to remember her there with all the cops huddled above her with their tools. Everybody else around me was all business, working around my open moaning, bawling, barking, with eyes averted, as if at once trying to give me space and do their job. I felt so helpless there in my detainment, never officially told to stay in one place but also knowing that I must, sitting on my ass in the dirt weeping through hubbub, no certain guide but by the law. These people are just at work, I remember thinking, They must feel so thankful they’re not me. What else was there to say? I knew they knew, as best they could, how no consolation could change the fact, and that therefore there was no reason to try to touch me, offer warmth. We were just here to take part today in what the day had produced all on its own—a kind of programmatic existential framework I imagined Molly finding sick satisfaction in, another brutal lesson from the void. 

***

I wasn’t sure who I could call—for years, my go-to would have been Molly or Mom. The absence of both options doubly underlined the absence of any place to call my own, right then and there. It felt insane, pathetic even, to call our therapist, and so that’s exactly what I did, unable to imagine any other person who’d be the one to force out of my mouth for the first time the awful truth.. Against my ear, my phone felt like a wormhole, sucking my air out as it attached me to the world beyond my reach. Maybe if nobody heard the news, it would undo itself, go back to how it’d been just hours earlier. But our therapist picked up—only my therapist now, no longer ours, I understood, trapped in the midst of the ways words sometimes alter their intentions, right in stride with all the other shifting details of your life—and I heard the words I didn’t want to have to say come flooding out: Hello, it’s me, Blake; I’m very sorry, but I didn’t know who else to call; Molly shot herself today; Molly is dead. I don’t remember what she said, quite; only the texture of the saying, the sound of the voice there on the line held far away, someone who knew us both and understood the impact of those words more than the other people all around me. I could see my body moving and hear the sounds that left my mouth, left with nothing else to do but play the role of my new self. I should call my sister, we concluded, after talking it through, like jumping forward through the hoops of future time arriving, point by point, like any day, though once I’d done that, sharing the news with someone hundreds of miles away, I feared it would become realer somehow, a final terrible seal forced popped. People would know soon, then it’d become gossip, old news, word of mouth. There’d no longer remain any way, then, that I could hold off reality from taking course, filling in around me where I was not. 

***

I wasn’t allowed to leave the scene. Instead, I was asked to tell and retell my story of what happened over and over, first to one detective, then another, then another, like hellish Matryoshka dolls with badges and guns. I could feel their eyes searching my eyes, reading me as I told the story as best I could. They asked if I’d had any sense that this could happen, which made me feel embarrassed to say yes, trying to explain in so many feeble words Molly’s persona, her personal history, her cryptic poetry. “I like poetry too,” one detective interrupted with a grin, somewhere between considerate and dense, like we weren’t really talking about what we were talking about. I had to hand over Molly’s letter, which I’d been clutching this whole time, messy with mud and crumpled up, now considered evidence. This letter was my last link to her mind, I felt, therefore to any frame that might be found to explicate her reasoning, and now I had to hand it over, following procedure like some suspect on TV. I begged them to be sure to return to me, to not let it end up missing, aware at the same time in my periphery of the handling of the body of my wife, the hunt for facts, none of which could ever change what had just happened, much less whatever might come next. 

***

I was busy reiterating my story for another detective when across the mud I noticed Matt, one of my oldest friends, running toward me. The look on his face, the sound of his voice, the way he hugged me to him: now there was no mistaking what had occurred, no way to keep it separate from the whole rest of my life. I felt my limbs go limp to be embraced, as all of what had kept me upright no longer needed to hold on. At the same time, still in shock, I felt my body holding back there on the cusp, not letting me implode yet, as somehow the world continued on. I could touch my face and feel it there, part of my body, but who was I, and why, and how? Had what just happened actually happened, or was I living in a hell world, an exact model of how it’d once been with just this one major detail brought to change? Like any second everybody would start laughing, including Molly, who’d get up and come to take me in her arms, without a need for explanation besides to say that she wasn’t really gone. Then they’d roll the sky back, too, and show me everything else I hadn’t known yet about my life, about existence. Instead, I listened in as Matt spoke up on my behalf, asserting that I should be allowed to leave as soon as possible and go home. Hearing him say home, however, reminded me that the word already clearly no longer meant the same as it last had, and in a way, that felt more frightening than standing out here in broad daylight at a crime scene, where at least there was a formal process underway. What choice did I have, though, but to keep going, unless I was ready, willing, and able to die too? Yes, that made sense. Molly was my wife, my love—shouldn’t I go with her, having failed her? Why should I be allowed to survive beyond this day? Already, in thinking back, I felt an undeniable desire that instead of doing the right thing calling the cops, I’d instead taken the gun from Molly’s hands, laid down beside her, and, as if somehow in her honor, doubled down. At my most dire, any other option outside of that, now and for some time, would bear the tint of a pitiful formality, tempered only by conditioning, as if all we really are is just the shadow of what we’re not. 

***

I didn’t want to get mud all over the inside of Matt’s car. I remained formal and polite even in zombie-mode, relieved at least to have something else to do. Back at our address, I trudged up the same set of concrete steps where I’d only just been standing when I discovered her suicide note taped to the door, a hanging haze there like the fumes after explosion. The front face of our house looked like a facsimile, designed to trick me into believing I existed—a secret feeling shared between me and it alone, as to most anybody else, outside my mind, it was just another piece of property. I imagine that’s how haunting works—only those who know can parse the signal linking the residue of history to how we are, what we’re becoming amid our slow transition, step by step. I sat on the stoop with my head in my hands, trying to remember how to think, or not to think. I was focused, mostly, on her letter, getting it back, so I could read it in full, over and over; as if, like Molly, only work could save me now. Matt volunteered to go back down and ask for information, if I’d be okay on my own, and I told him that was fine, that it might be good for me to have some time alone now, so I could feel the way I felt beyond the reach of other eyes. I was well-accustomed to this aloneness, this want for independence, having already accepted as natural law that no one could ever reach me but myself, the bells and whistles of attention that made most others seem to feel better were for me more a nuisance than a balm. As he drove off, I went inside and closed myself inside the bathroom, walking right past my reflection without looking, not wanting yet to have to see, and past the mostly pastel-colored painting Molly had made in college and hung here, as if for forever, having planned this ending to our story all this time. I stripped my muddy running clothes off and turned the shower on hot and lay face down on the tile beneath the spray. I can’t remember what words I made, only the texture of my voice, mumbling in monotone under my breath as if to anyone who still might hear me from Beyond, the same way that I had once, as a child, tried to comfort myself mimicking Mom’s lullabies.

***

When Matt got back, he handed me a brown paper bag containing Molly’s letter and her phone, along with the business card of the investigator for the Medical Examiner’s Center and a second note by Molly found on her body, scrawled on the back side of a small envelope: 

VOLUNTARY EXIT. 

I am an organ donor. 

My husband Blake Butler 

(my phone number) 

I took Molly’s letter into my office, closed the glass doors. I knelt on the floor and read it from beginning to end once and then immediately again, trying to find some kernel of her voice there, something alive. These were Molly’s final words, I realized, believing in them as some form of access to her brain—despite how out-of-sync they seemed, like a lost child trying to figure out how to explain her situation to herself while standing front and center in harm’s way. Here was what she had left for me to hear. A widening terror within me renewed itself with every breathless word and hard return, underlined by an undeniable form of failure, hers and mine. If only I had one more chance to hold her, I imagined, to tell her everything she meant to me no matter what. If only I could tear this paper up, as if it alone had been the cause and not the receipt. Any chance to contradict her logic, though, to reach beyond it, had been not only lopped off at the hilt, but imminently infected by the violent silence of the world—including the matted, jagged sunlight pouring in now through the windows, getting all over everything we’d ever had, nowhere to turn but toward the absence. 

 

From  Molly , to be published by Archway Editions in November 2023.

Blake Butler is the author of nine book-length works, including Alice Knott, 300,000,000, Sky Saw, There is No Year, and Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia. In 2021, he was long-listed for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He is a founding editor of HTMLGIANT.

The Action of Love: A Conversation with Charif Shanahan

Charif Shanahan and Morgan Parker. Photographs by Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

I read Charif Shanahan’s Trace Evidence two ways: first as a new work by a friend, written through and about what I know to have been some of his most harrowing years, during which he recovered from a near-fatal bus accident in Morocco, and also as the second collection of a phenomenal early-career poet with a dangerously skilled command of craft. I read it as an intimate reader, and as a distant one, and both times, I experienced a sense of introduction. When we talked on Zoom, Charif told me the book “feels like a birth,” and that feeling of birth, or rebirth, permeates Trace Evidence, as a deepening and an extension of the questions in Shanahan’s first collection, and as an announcement of self and purpose that feels brand new.

—Morgan Parker

PARKER

I love the last line of “Trace Evidence,” the book’s titular poem: “For us here now I will be the first of our line.” It’s such an exhilarating sentence. Can you tell me about that idea of deciding to be a beginning?

SHANAHAN

It is only we who get to tell others who we are, even when—and perhaps especially when—we are inside a system that empowers those around us to tell us who we are. Put another way, choice and agency are questions I’m thinking about in this book. I think the agency here, inside that pronouncement, is in moving deeply into what had already been waiting for me. One could call it an acceptance, but it required first a clearing of the fog such that I could see this reality and not exactly choose it, but choose to name it and step into it and inhabit it. One of the things you and I have talked about a lot is how layered my family story is as regards race. It wasn’t just white parent, Black parent; it wasn’t just light-skinned, dark-skinned; it wasn’t just American Blackness, non-American Blackness; it was all these things at once. That was part of what was so challenging while growing up. But it’s also the beauty of how my family holds race. For me to be able to say that it is beautiful is, I think, a mark of tremendous evolution and growth.

PARKER

There’s so much in your first book and in Trace Evidence about passing publicly—passing to white people and passing to Black people. But underlying that is the passing or not-passing that you have done in your family. Can you tell me a little more about those family dynamics?

SHANAHAN

Well, as you know, I was born to an Irish-American father and a Moroccan mother. In simplistic terms, we’re a mixed, Black-white family. However, for many reasons to do with the layers of empire in the North of Africa, my mother identities as an Arab, and not as African or Black, though she is perceived as both. And so my brothers and I—and I should speak for myself … I wasn’t exactly caught between “whiteness” and “Blackness,” growing up, but between whiteness and a Blackness that didn’t recognize itself as such. Many of the poems emerge from that dissonance, and I think it’s important to be vocal about that racialized experience, despite the privilege I possess. Privilege is where the narrative ends for a lot of people. People might say, “You’re light enough to pass, so what are you talking about?” But I want to put forward a narrative like that in Trace Evidence because racialized experience is so much more complicated than we seem to think. If you have a body, you are racialized. Everybody is having a racialized experience. There are trends within those experiences, of course. Primary narratives. And if Black people are being tried and killed in the street, that obviously needs our urgent examination and action. But I think we can most effectively reckon with race if as many narratives are on the table as possible. Take, for example, the racial violence I’ve experienced in my life. Folks might think, “Who’s going to profile you? What kind of violence are you experiencing?” But it’s a disservice to the complexity of the conversation to assume that violence is only, or even primarily, bodily, or that it comes only when race is optically perceived.

PARKER

So are we talking about racial individuality? The importance of the individual experience within what is usually regarded as collective, categorical experience?

SHANAHAN

Yes—and about how an individual’s pathology is shaped around race, not only in terms of implicit bias and the associations one is conditioned into believing, but also in terms of what one recognizes as belonging within a racial category in the first place. I was Zooming with a white mentor of mine whom I help with her poems—she’s a critic by training and is writing poems about her whiteness and very movingly working at decolonizing her mind, at more than seventy. It’s amazing to witness. I’m honored. It’s holy. I raised with her one day the fact that race has no basis in biological or scientific fact, even though it firstly is about the body and the way that the body presents. As I put language to this point, Morgan, I am acutely aware of you. While I think of us as two Black people, it’s also true that each of us is having very different racialized experiences, due not only to phenotype, but to other aspects of embodiment and selfhood, and I’m sensitive to the differences … But what I had wanted to explore with my mentor is the idea that we are taught to see in a way that is particular to our cultural context, such that it’s possible for somebody to look at me and say, “That is a Black man, period” and for somebody else to look at me and see something else. Of course, I am who I am, to myself, in every room I enter, so I have had to learn how to hold both mes at once—who I know myself to be and the self I become in another’s imagination.

PARKER

Can you tell me about how you use metaphor in this book? How do you think it connects with the content?

SHANAHAN

The way I think about metaphor, about figuration in general, is less about equation than about seeing how far apart the two things can be while still having a tether, still having some connective tissue. At its most compressed, narrative can function as metaphor. The opening poem, “Colonialism,” for example, comes from memory, and its narrative is unresolved. It ends with the mother’s question—“Elesh, mon fils? Why // Would you do that to me?—”—which might appear to be the exact question a mother would ask in that situation, but because the title demands that you read the scene in relationship to, or within, a colonial or a postcolonial context, the question deepens. The narrative becomes a metaphor, a conceit even.

PARKER

I would also point to the poem “In the Basement of Sears & Roebuck When for the First Time I Pulled My Hand from Her Hand and Fled,” where the metaphor doesn’t appear on the line level but on the poem level. It’s the narrative. The child running away from his mother and hiding, as that poem’s literal scene, is emblematic of the adult-child’s individuation around core identity questions—which I think has to do with how philosophical your poetic voice is. How does your intellectual self jut up against your experience, when you write a poem?

SHANAHAN

What I’m trying to do is identify, distill, and reimagine experiences that may represent a particular set of existential or social circumstances so as to foreground the speaker’s interiority in a way that is inseparable from those circumstances. And I’m writing as a way to work against our separateness, by demonstrating the effects of that separateness. I believe the lyric poem can take you to languagelessness—that, ideally, is where it would leave you—and that we can be unified in or even by that “silence.” The paradox of the lyric poem is that the medium is language or breath, but it takes you to a place that we can’t exactly language. I believe that in my bones.

PARKER

Is that state bodiless?

SHANAHAN

It’s egoless. In the encounter of the poem and the reader, who brings their own history and imagination to the text, a connection is formed. The reader plugs into an experience that is born out of a subjectivity that is not their own, which might be completely different from what they know. And yet, if the poem does its work and takes you to that place where you are without language but inside feeling, then there’s some kind of merging or bridging that’s happened. That feels important to me, both as a poet and as a reader of poetry. I look for poems that can give me, or take me to, that experience. It’s like that Anne Sexton poem that we’ve talked about …

PARKER

“The Truth the Dead Know”?

SHANAHAN

Yes! There’s a phrase—

PARKER

“Gone, I say!” I can’t believe I don’t have that tattooed yet.

SHANAHAN

That’s the next one. But there’s another line in that poem, “and when we touch …”

PARKER

“… we enter touch entirely.”

SHANAHAN

Exactly. That’s what happens, right? Or can. Entering your feeling, your experience—I am entering yours, and then we are there together as one somehow. And it’s brief, it’s fleeting. Then we walk away from the poem and return to our ego and our self and our life—to the dishes, or the emails. For me, this experience is powerful, but particularly because the subjects that I’m exploring exist to divide. The very function of race was to separate, to classify, to hierarchize in the service of capital—I don’t mean to be reductive, but it all depended on a compartmentalization of the species, right? So how can poems, especially poems that emerge from our separateness, manage to bring us back to that sense of connectivity and oneness? That they can and do seems miraculous to me.

PARKER

Do you see that as part of a purpose of not just your poems but your life?

SHANAHAN

I do believe that talking about these nuanced dimensions of race is part of my life purpose. At least that’s what I believe right now. I don’t mean to say that no one else is doing that, but it’s part of what I can do in this life, in this body. I’m working on a nonfiction book to extend the work that I’m doing in the poems, through prose, with hopes of reaching a wider audience.

Thinking about purpose, there’s a poem in the book, “Thirty-Fifth Year”—the one that starts, “Dread remains. I keep looking / for a thing I can’t name, though I try / ‘purpose,’ ‘meaning,’ ‘presence.’” Purpose is the first item on that list. What else are you going to do with all this but try to make it meaningful by making it known to people outside of your particular experience? I remember at one of the Cave Canem retreats—during my first year actually, when I was writing some of my first poems about these themes, which went into my first book—I read that poem “Clean Slate.”

PARKER

I was there. I remember sitting on the bench and feelings were occurring!

SHANAHAN

 Yes! And afterward Toi Derricotte came up to me by the food table. She looked at me plainly and said, “Baby, you were extraordinary.” And I was like, “Thank you, Toi. Oh my God, that means so much!” Then she gets real, Toi. She turns into the Oracle, takes my hand, leans in and says, “And what else are you going to do with all that pain, baby? What else are you going to do with all that pain?” And walked away. And I was so open and porous and unapologetic about my healing and where I was in my life that I fully received her words. Even as the work was never exclusively motivated by pain and isn’t at all anymore.

PARKER

Thinking about Toi and our Cave Canem brethren and sistren, a lot of what we shared was, “I already have this pain. Let me show it to you so that maybe you can see yours in a different kind of way.” And that, especially in the context of race in the U.S. and what it has done to us interpersonally, is all we can do. You know what I mean?

SHANAHAN

I do. I will never forget the opening circle that first time I was at the Cave Canem retreat with you. Everybody was going around, introducing themselves, and when you introduced yourself, you said, “I’m just trying to get out from under.” Twice. And that stayed with me because what you were saying—or what I heard—was, This poetry thing, this practice, is part of something larger, part of a healing that is pursued and expressed, holistically, in different avenues of my life. And this is just one piece.

PARKER

Generally, that is what it is—so let’s find the avenues in which to do that. No one can say more than me about how only therapy is therapy. I haven’t written a poem in a while, but I’m doubling up on the therapy. The idea of writing saving you as you’re going through something I don’t believe in at all. Even though Trace Evidence is such an accomplishment of so much physical and intellectual and spiritual struggle and pain, I don’t think that you would say that the writing of these poems was what got you through, would you?

SHANAHAN

No. You know what got me through? Love. And love is the thing I believe I’m trying to touch, walk us around, in my poems. Love in various expressions. Maternal love. Love of self. Love of community. Love of culture. Even country, potentially, in the case of the mother figure, who has fidelity to her country of origin. Love got me through that bus accident, the surgeries, the months of convalescence. It was astounding to see: the way that Black poets from the Cave Canem community all over the globe rallied around me; the way that my ex-partner, Nik, and his mom and friends in Zurich took turns visiting me in the hospital; the way that my buddy, Alan, flew his ass from Brooklyn to Zurich to hold my hand at the fucking hospital bed. That.

It’s easy to say these are poems of identity. But for me, what’s inside that—and it’s related to the lyric poem being able to bring us to one another—is that love is the cost. The cost of our separateness is the loss of love.

PARKER

It’s striking that all this was born out of incredible trauma.

SHANAHAN

Yes, the occasion of that rallying around me in love was my nearly dying. But tomorrow’s Monday, and what’s stopping us all from doing that for one another again? What is in the way? In-it-togetherness is a core value for me. And I think it extends from the ways I experienced a kind of psychological exile in early life, as if I were nowhere and no one. There’s that short poem in the first section of the book, called “Exile,” in which I write, “You think I take from you? I do not take from you, I am you.” I couldn’t believe that more powerfully or more deeply.

Let me just say one last thing about purpose as it relates to love. When I was on that bus and it lifted onto its two left wheels, and I thought I was at the end of my life … The first thought I had—and this is in the long poem “On the Overnight from Agadir”—the first thought I had was, “My work. I haven’t done my work.”

PARKER

No flash before your eyes?

SHANAHAN

None. I was like, wait, my contribution! And maybe that’s love. In the form of books, friendship, mentorship, partnership, ordinary empathy and compassion—all the forms it can take. There is something specific and particular that I have to do here and I haven’t done it yet.

PARKER

Maybe purpose, then, is the action of love?

SHANAHAN

I like that a lot.

Charif Shanahan is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently Trace Evidence. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and a Fulbright Senior Scholarship to Morocco, he lives in Chicago, where he is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University. Morgan Parker is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On? and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. Parker lives in Los Angeles with her dog, Shirley.

The Action of Love: A Conversation between Charif Shanahan and Morgan Parker

Charif Shanahan and Morgan Parker. Photographs by Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

I read Charif Shanahan’s Trace Evidence two ways: first as a new work by a friend, written through and about what I know to have been some of his most harrowing years, during which he recovered from a near-fatal bus accident in Morocco, and also as the second collection of a phenomenal early-career poet with a dangerously skilled command of craft. I read it as an intimate reader, and as a distant one, and both times, I experienced a sense of introduction. When we talked on Zoom, Charif told me the book “feels like a birth,” and that feeling of birth, or rebirth, permeates Trace Evidence, as a deepening and an extension of the questions in Shanahan’s first collection, and as an announcement of self and purpose that feels brand new.

—Morgan Parker

PARKER

I love the last line of “Trace Evidence,” the book’s titular poem: “For us here now I will be the first of our line.” It’s such an exhilarating sentence. Can you tell me about that idea of deciding to be a beginning?

SHANAHAN

It is only we who get to tell others who we are, even when—and perhaps especially when—we are inside a system that empowers those around us to tell us who we are. Put another way, choice and agency are questions I’m thinking about in this book. I think the agency here, inside that pronouncement, is in moving deeply into what had already been waiting for me. One could call it an acceptance, but it required first a clearing of the fog such that I could see this reality and not exactly choose it, but choose to name it and step into it and inhabit it. One of the things you and I have talked about a lot is how layered my family story is as regards race. It wasn’t just white parent, Black parent; it wasn’t just light-skinned, dark-skinned; it wasn’t just American Blackness, non-American Blackness; it was all these things at once. That was part of what was so challenging while growing up. But it’s also the beauty of how my family holds race. For me to be able to say that it is beautiful is, I think, a mark of tremendous evolution and growth.

PARKER

There’s so much in your first book and in Trace Evidence about passing publicly—passing to white people and passing to Black people. But underlying that is the passing or not-passing that you have done in your family. Can you tell me a little more about those family dynamics?

SHANAHAN

Well, as you know, I was born to an Irish-American father and a Moroccan mother. In simplistic terms, we’re a mixed, Black-white family. However, for many reasons to do with the layers of empire in the North of Africa, my mother identities as an Arab, and not as African or Black, though she is perceived as both. And so my brothers and I—and I should speak for myself … I wasn’t exactly caught between “whiteness” and “Blackness,” growing up, but between whiteness and a Blackness that didn’t recognize itself as such. Many of the poems emerge from that dissonance, and I think it’s important to be vocal about that racialized experience, despite the privilege I possess. Privilege is where the narrative ends for a lot of people. People might say, “You’re light enough to pass, so what are you talking about?” But I want to put forward a narrative like that in Trace Evidence because racialized experience is so much more complicated than we seem to think. If you have a body, you are racialized. Everybody is having a racialized experience. There are trends within those experiences, of course. Primary narratives. And if Black people are being tried and killed in the street, that obviously needs our urgent examination and action. But I think we can most effectively reckon with race if as many narratives are on the table as possible. Take, for example, the racial violence I’ve experienced in my life. Folks might think, “Who’s going to profile you? What kind of violence are you experiencing?” But it’s a disservice to the complexity of the conversation to assume that violence is only, or even primarily, bodily, or that it comes only when race is optically perceived.

PARKER

So are we talking about racial individuality? The importance of the individual experience within what is usually regarded as collective, categorical experience?

SHANAHAN

Yes—and about how an individual’s pathology is shaped around race, not only in terms of implicit bias and the associations one is conditioned into believing, but also in terms of what one recognizes as belonging within a racial category in the first place. I was Zooming with a white mentor of mine whom I help with her poems—she’s a critic by training and is writing poems about her whiteness and very movingly working at decolonizing her mind, at more than seventy. It’s amazing to witness. I’m honored. It’s holy. I raised with her one day the fact that race has no basis in biological or scientific fact, even though it firstly is about the body and the way that the body presents. As I put language to this point, Morgan, I am acutely aware of you. While I think of us as two Black people, it’s also true that each of us is having very different racialized experiences, due not only to phenotype, but to other aspects of embodiment and selfhood, and I’m sensitive to the differences … But what I had wanted to explore with my mentor is the idea that we are taught to see in a way that is particular to our cultural context, such that it’s possible for somebody to look at me and say, “That is a Black man, period” and for somebody else to look at me and see something else. Of course, I am who I am, to myself, in every room I enter, so I have had to learn how to hold both mes at once—who I know myself to be and the self I become in another’s imagination.

PARKER

Can you tell me about how you use metaphor in this book? How do you think it connects with the content?

SHANAHAN

The way I think about metaphor, about figuration in general, is less about equation than about seeing how far apart the two things can be while still having a tether, still having some connective tissue. At its most compressed, narrative can function as metaphor. The opening poem, “Colonialism,” for example, comes from memory, and its narrative is unresolved. It ends with the mother’s question—“Elesh, mon fils? Why // Would you do that to me?—”—which might appear to be the exact question a mother would ask in that situation, but because the title demands that you read the scene in relationship to, or within, a colonial or a postcolonial context, the question deepens. The narrative becomes a metaphor, a conceit even.

PARKER

I would also point to the poem “In the Basement of Sears & Roebuck When for the First Time I Pulled My Hand from Her Hand and Fled,” where the metaphor doesn’t appear on the line level but on the poem level. It’s the narrative. The child running away from his mother and hiding, as that poem’s literal scene, is emblematic of the adult-child’s individuation around core identity questions—which I think has to do with how philosophical your poetic voice is. How does your intellectual self jut up against your experience, when you write a poem?

SHANAHAN

What I’m trying to do is identify, distill, and reimagine experiences that may represent a particular set of existential or social circumstances so as to foreground the speaker’s interiority in a way that is inseparable from those circumstances. And I’m writing as a way to work against our separateness, by demonstrating the effects of that separateness. I believe the lyric poem can take you to languagelessness—that, ideally, is where it would leave you—and that we can be unified in or even by that “silence.” The paradox of the lyric poem is that the medium is language or breath, but it takes you to a place that we can’t exactly language. I believe that in my bones.

PARKER

Is that state bodiless?

SHANAHAN

It’s egoless. In the encounter of the poem and the reader, who brings their own history and imagination to the text, a connection is formed. The reader plugs into an experience that is born out of a subjectivity that is not their own, which might be completely different from what they know. And yet, if the poem does its work and takes you to that place where you are without language but inside feeling, then there’s some kind of merging or bridging that’s happened. That feels important to me, both as a poet and as a reader of poetry. I look for poems that can give me, or take me to, that experience. It’s like that Anne Sexton poem that we’ve talked about …

PARKER

“The Truth the Dead Know”?

SHANAHAN

Yes! There’s a phrase—

PARKER

“Gone, I say!” I can’t believe I don’t have that tattooed yet.

SHANAHAN

That’s the next one. But there’s another line in that poem, “and when we touch …”

PARKER

“… we enter touch entirely.”

SHANAHAN

Exactly. That’s what happens, right? Or can. Entering your feeling, your experience—I am entering yours, and then we are there together as one somehow. And it’s brief, it’s fleeting. Then we walk away from the poem and return to our ego and our self and our life—to the dishes, or the emails. For me, this experience is powerful, but particularly because the subjects that I’m exploring exist to divide. The very function of race was to separate, to classify, to hierarchize in the service of capital—I don’t mean to be reductive, but it all depended on a compartmentalization of the species, right? So how can poems, especially poems that emerge from our separateness, manage to bring us back to that sense of connectivity and oneness? That they can and do seems miraculous to me.

PARKER

Do you see that as part of a purpose of not just your poems but your life?

SHANAHAN

I do believe that talking about these nuanced dimensions of race is part of my life purpose. At least that’s what I believe right now. I don’t mean to say that no one else is doing that, but it’s part of what I can do in this life, in this body. I’m working on a nonfiction book to extend the work that I’m doing in the poems, through prose, with hopes of reaching a wider audience.

Thinking about purpose, there’s a poem in the book, “Thirty-Fifth Year”—the one that starts, “Dread remains. I keep looking / for a thing I can’t name, though I try / ‘purpose,’ ‘meaning,’ ‘presence.’” Purpose is the first item on that list. What else are you going to do with all this but try to make it meaningful by making it known to people outside of your particular experience? I remember at one of the Cave Canem retreats—during my first year actually, when I was writing some of my first poems about these themes, which went into my first book—I read that poem “Clean Slate.”

PARKER

I was there. I remember sitting on the bench and feelings were occurring!

SHANAHAN

 Yes! And afterward Toi Derricotte came up to me by the food table. She looked at me plainly and said, “Baby, you were extraordinary.” And I was like, “Thank you, Toi. Oh my God, that means so much!” Then she gets real, Toi. She turns into the Oracle, takes my hand, leans in and says, “And what else are you going to do with all that pain, baby? What else are you going to do with all that pain?” And walked away. And I was so open and porous and unapologetic about my healing and where I was in my life that I fully received her words. Even as the work was never exclusively motivated by pain and isn’t at all anymore.

PARKER

Thinking about Toi and our Cave Canem brethren and sistren, a lot of what we shared was, “I already have this pain. Let me show it to you so that maybe you can see yours in a different kind of way.” And that, especially in the context of race in the U.S. and what it has done to us interpersonally, is all we can do. You know what I mean?

SHANAHAN

I do. I will never forget the opening circle that first time I was at the Cave Canem retreat with you. Everybody was going around, introducing themselves, and when you introduced yourself, you said, “I’m just trying to get out from under.” Twice. And that stayed with me because what you were saying—or what I heard—was, This poetry thing, this practice, is part of something larger, part of a healing that is pursued and expressed, holistically, in different avenues of my life. And this is just one piece.

PARKER

Generally, that is what it is—so let’s find the avenues in which to do that. No one can say more than me about how only therapy is therapy. I haven’t written a poem in a while, but I’m doubling up on the therapy. The idea of writing saving you as you’re going through something I don’t believe in at all. Even though Trace Evidence is such an accomplishment of so much physical and intellectual and spiritual struggle and pain, I don’t think that you would say that the writing of these poems was what got you through, would you?

SHANAHAN

No. You know what got me through? Love. And love is the thing I believe I’m trying to touch, walk us around, in my poems. Love in various expressions. Maternal love. Love of self. Love of community. Love of culture. Even country, potentially, in the case of the mother figure, who has fidelity to her country of origin. Love got me through that bus accident, the surgeries, the months of convalescence. It was astounding to see: the way that Black poets from the Cave Canem community all over the globe rallied around me; the way that my ex-partner, Nik, and his mom and friends in Zurich took turns visiting me in the hospital; the way that my buddy, Alan, flew his ass from Brooklyn to Zurich to hold my hand at the fucking hospital bed. That.

It’s easy to say these are poems of identity. But for me, what’s inside that—and it’s related to the lyric poem being able to bring us to one another—is that love is the cost. The cost of our separateness is the loss of love.

PARKER

It’s striking that all this was born out of incredible trauma.

SHANAHAN

Yes, the occasion of that rallying around me in love was my nearly dying. But tomorrow’s Monday, and what’s stopping us all from doing that for one another again? What is in the way? In-it-togetherness is a core value for me. And I think it extends from the ways I experienced a kind of psychological exile in early life, as if I were nowhere and no one. There’s that short poem in the first section of the book, called “Exile,” in which I write, “You think I take from you? I do not take from you, I am you.” I couldn’t believe that more powerfully or more deeply.

Let me just say one last thing about purpose as it relates to love. When I was on that bus and it lifted onto its two left wheels, and I thought I was at the end of my life … The first thought I had—and this is in the long poem “On the Overnight from Agadir”—the first thought I had was, “My work. I haven’t done my work.”

PARKER

No flash before your eyes?

SHANAHAN

None. I was like, wait, my contribution! And maybe that’s love. In the form of books, friendship, mentorship, partnership, ordinary empathy and compassion—all the forms it can take. There is something specific and particular that I have to do here and I haven’t done it yet.

PARKER

Maybe purpose, then, is the action of love?

SHANAHAN

I like that a lot.

Charif Shanahan is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently Trace Evidence. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and a Fulbright Senior Scholarship to Morocco, he lives in Chicago, where he is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University. Morgan Parker is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On? and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. Parker lives in Los Angeles with her dog, Shirley.

The Green and the Gold

Photograph by Sheila Sund. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 2.0.

Four weeks sharing a room in San Francisco, four weeks since I decided not to go back to England. Gabe wasn’t sleeping. A quarter tab of acid for his breakfast. Spliffs throughout the day, booze and blue raspberry C4 preworkout all through the night. He was recording an album, working on his set, making a website, building a 24-7 open-source radio live-stream at a free hackers’ space, and not finishing anything.

I was trying to write but spending a lot of time crying on the hot roof of the apartment building when he wasn’t around. He found me up there one afternoon at the end of one of his twelve-hour stints at the hackers’ space. Two straw hats, a beer, two cups. “I know you like to drink out of little cups!” He smiled and the inside of his mouth was blue from the raspberry preworkout. How do you hate someone as much as you love them? He said he’d been looking for me because he had a great plan. A childhood friend in the city was driving down to their hometown and we could get a ride. I could meet Gabe’s parents; go to the beach; see the fields, wildflowers, and back roads. So beautiful this time of year. I wondered if it might save us. “It’s God’s country,” he said.

We arrived at his parents’ the following morning, after a four-hour drive south. A low ranch-style house on a wide road of low ranch-style houses. Gabe said it was too nice a day to be stuck inside, so he took me around the side and we climbed straight up onto the roof: “I know you like roofs in California!” I did like roofs in California. The front and back yards of gravel, wood chip, and pebbles, interspersed with the occasional palm tree or redwood. At the end of the road was the main street, a couple of stores, a steak house, and a taqueria. Beyond, fields of lemon trees and mustard grass and farmland that stretched a few miles inland, up to a range of golden hills. Above us, the sun shone like the grill of a new truck.

The house was full of knickknacks and shells and crystals and string lights. A “Be Grateful” sign by the coffee maker. A “Be Grateful” mat by the front door. A canvas in the kitchen printed with a picture of three fluffy ducklings and the words “I have joy down in the bottom of my heart.” It was hard to make out how many cats there were. And then Birdie, the overweight chihuahua, waddled in from the hallway and charged at Gabe, baring his red gums and gnashing tiny, pointed teeth. Gabe told me the dog was the spawn of the devil and the root cause of all the issues that existed between him and his parents. I already knew that the issues between Gabe and his family had begun when Gabe had gone to college in Santa Cruz five years before, found drugs, wouldn’t get a real job, and kept having to move back home when he ran out of money.

His parents were musicians who’d met in Santa Barbara in the seventies. She’d sung in one band and he’d played guitar in another. They’d both worked in the same hippie jewelry store downtown before marrying and moving to a smaller town up the coast. I met them that morning when they followed the pets into the kitchen. Lou was short and round with a kind face, freshly shaved with a peaked cap on his bald head and a smart cowboy shirt tucked into chinos. He gave me a warm hug that smelled of Irish Spring. He picked up Birdie and fed him some bratwurst from the fridge. Julie went straight to the coffeepot. She wore a blue shirt with cropped leggings and had her blond hair put up neatly in a clip. She had the same unblinking stare as Gabe.

Lou left to work his shift at a music shop in the next town over and Julie said she needed more coffee before her pain medication kicked in and she could talk properly. She had arthritis and had pain from a series of botched surgeries. The pain was the worst in the morning, but she was managing it with physical therapy, swimming, and half a pill on the bad days. She spent the next hour pacing around the house, telling me about all the things she needed to do—pay the bills, fill out paperwork, physical therapy, feed the dog, feed the cats—only to be derailed from doing any of it by the pets, or the phone ringing. She kept apologizing for being so busy, but she couldn’t seem to get anything done. The bills stayed untouched in a pile that took up most of the kitchen table, the phone rang and rang. There were Post-its all over the house: “Put coffee out,” “Tell Dad to clean sink,” “Ask Gabe where he is living in SF,” “Be Grateful.”

Gabe derailed her the most, as he tried to make breakfast and clean up after himself. Mother and son knocked around the place, from the coffeepot to the piano to the back door, to the front door to the coffeepot again. They both had the habit of getting lost midaction and the same strange sweetness. At one point, just after getting at him about putting the dishes away in the wrong place, she went into the living room and sang out with joy. When she came back into the kitchen she was smiling. She put her arms around her son. He rested his cheek on the top of her head and closed his eyes.

Gabe and I spent the afternoon walking around town. Not a place built for walking but it had its charm, the slanting golden light making even the Vons supermarket look beautiful. We bought three beers for five dollars at the Stop and Shop and watched the sun go down as we sat against a fence by a dusty abandoned lot. He told me that the most famous thing about this town was a Dorothea Lange photograph of migrants from the thirties.

For dinner Gabe made sandwiches and, to his mom’s exasperation, moved the bills off the dinner table and told everyone we were going to sit down. They were very good sandwiches, pastrami and banana peppers and mayo with a steak seasoning, on thick slices of bread. He made a sandwich each for his parents, and two types for me and him to share. “Me and Helen share everything,” he announced. “We’re in love.”

After a few bites, Julie started talking about how hard it was, living with her husband, how she loved him but needed him to leave. “I keep telling him, but he won’t go. He does nothing around the house, just eats and spends and plays his guitars.” She said that when she married him, he was already deep in debt. He’d never told her how bad it was. Then she said to me, “I love my son, but I’d understand if you wanted to leave him. Don’t make the same mistake I made.” Lou didn’t say anything in response, just happily ate his sandwich and seemed to be somewhere else. Gabe went to the fridge and popped a Corona.

The next day was a Saturday. We borrowed Lou’s car and spent the day in the ice-plant dunes of Grover Beach. When the sun set, we snuck into a motel jacuzzi. Crouched in the bubbles, Gabe said he’d told his dad that he’d marry me if he had a dollar. “I dunno about marriage,” I told him.

Lou was in the kitchen when we got back, enjoying a Corona Familiar in a frosted glass. He was in a good mood from playing a gig at a wedding where he’d devoured a seafood-platter buffet. “I tell you … those crabs. All that fish. Mountains of it.” We sat at the counter with him. Over more Coronas, Julie cackling along to Scrubs on the TV, he told me about his first love. At one point he made the mistake of asking Gabe what his plans were. Gabe said he was going to start an open-source 24-7 radio station that spread empathy across the world and freed a billion people. He already knew his mission on Earth, God had told him. His parents didn’t need to worry. Lou turned to me with a smirk. “I told Gabe to experiment with LSD. I didn’t realize he’d be experimenting every day for five years.”

They drove us to the train station in San Luis Obispo the next afternoon. Another sunny day but things felt different. Now I knew that this impossible person had a mother and father and that he made some kind of sense beside them. When his parents hugged us goodbye his dad whispered something in Gabe’s ear. “If I had a dollar,” Gabe said.

We found a booth with a table in the train’s observation car, beside a window. Lou and Julie spotted us as they were driving out of the parking lot and circled back through three or four times, waving as the train left the station. Leaving San Luis Obispo, the train wound around and between the Pacific Coast Ranges. The slopes reached up on either side, rolling above the windows. Gabe leaned on my shoulder while I read him a story I’d written about my alcoholic dad. It made him cry. I told him not to move yet—a girl in another booth was painting a picture of us. I could see it in the corner of my eye, strokes of yellow and green and gold.

***

Six months later, Lou was diagnosed with stage four cancer. A melanoma that had not been removed properly in the spring had spread to his organs by September. Gabe and I were living in Chicago by the time Lou began chemo, sleeping on a futon at an event studio that my sister ran and earning a bit of money setting up and cleaning up after baby showers and photoshoots during the day and after parties and music videos at night.

The family told Gabe not to come back yet. So we stayed in Chicago for September and into October. Gabe’s desperate restlessness and acid-fueled benders had subsided, and the deranged passion that had brought us together had calmed to a more dependable, if rocky, companionship. We kept our clothes in a cupboard and pretended to the people who rented the space that we didn’t live there. When the studio was in use, we visited my sister and her son, or wandered around Lincoln Park, or walked along Lake Michigan, waiting for the call from his family to say that he needed to come home. Sometimes Gabe brought his guitar and I brought my notebook and we’d sit playing and writing, cooling our feet in the lake. Other times we had long, agonizing arguments walking around the humid parks. He said I was unloving and spiritually dead inside. I said he was cruel and overbearing, that we were two very different people from different worlds and it would never work anyway, it was doomed. He said that only proved how godless and unloving I was. What was cruel was how little I believed in us. All that needed to happen was for me to find faith. We were twenty-seven. We could move off the grid, have lots of children, and raise chickens. I wanted to get on a plane and go home. Whenever we had an especially bad argument, he stormed off to the hot-dog place around the corner from the studio, where the staff was famous for insulting its customers. He made friends with the people who worked there. “The only real people in this city,” he said. Baby Jesus Ted Bundy was one of the names they called him. He would come back in the best of moods. He was on one of those hot-dog runs when his sister called and told him the doctor said it was a matter of days. He spent his entire savings, four hundred dollars, on a flight for the next morning. I packed up the futon and moved into my sister’s apartment. He called after two weeks at home. His dad really was dying now and he needed to see me. Please could I come? My sister found me a flight from Chicago to LA for fifty dollars for the following week.

***

The Amtrak train from Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo goes up the Pacific coast, at times along the beach and at others high in the cliffs. Gabe was waiting for me on the platform, wearing a black hoodie and a black cap with a small red-and-white mushroom on the front. He called it his mourning costume. In the car he gave me a paper bag. Inside was a bar of chocolate wrapped neatly in tissue paper. As he drove out of the lot a full moon appeared over the trees.

We arrived at the house to find Lou sitting on a red La-Z-Boy, watching Blazing Saddles, Birdie on his lap. The dog jumped off when he saw us coming and charged at Gabe’s ankles. Gabe picked him up, thrashing, and plopped him outside, slamming the screen door. Lou had almost halved in size, his face completely sunken, his arms and legs, bluish and pale, poking out of a baggy T-shirt and shorts. I tried to hide my shock but it must have been apparent. People had been coming over all week to say their goodbyes.

When Gabe had first told me they’d put Lou on home hospice, I’d assumed it meant he would be home under regular medical care. What it really meant on his low-cost insurance was a hospital bed in their house, medication, and thirty-minute visits from a nurse twice a week. The rest of the time it was up to Gabe, his mother, and his sister to look after Lou. By the time I arrived, the home hospice had been going on for two weeks and they’d stumbled into a rhythm. Lou slept in the Blue Room (blue walls and carpet), which had once been Gabe’s bedroom, then the bedroom of a series of lodgers, then a room for Julie to stretch in. Now it was the room where Lou was going to die. There was the hospital bed in the center and a folding table against one wall, covered in a red paper tablecloth, pieces of hospital equipment, dozens of pill pots, and Gabe’s junk. Gabe and his mother took turns administering a regimen of medication every few hours: liquid morphine, vitamins, blood pressure pills, pills to help his organs deal with all the pills. There was a mattress in the corner covered with a Lion King quilt where Gabe had been sleeping. Lou had a little bell by his bedside that he rang when he needed something.

I was tired from the travel, so Gabe set me up a bed in the Green Room next door. It had a single bed, another folding table, and a few blankets laid out for the cats to sleep on. Gabe gave me his pillow and the Lion King duvet and put on another hoodie over the hoodie he was already wearing. We sat down on the bed for a moment and he rested his head on my shoulder. From the next room the little bell rang and he shot up. I curled up and drifted off.

The next morning Gabe woke me up at nine o’clock with a mug of creamy coffee. “Get up! We’re going to the store!” His dad wanted egg bagels. They’d already given Lou his medicine, taken him for a shower, and rustled up a small first breakfast of eggnog and toast. It was only a quick drive to Vons but Gabe drove very slowly, all the windows open, lighting one cigarette after another.

We returned to the sound of the little bell ringing. Lou wanted to sit out on the lounger. He wanted a coffee. Gabe helped his dad outside and made the bagels. I did the dishes and Julie put on another pot of coffee while telling me how much pain she was in, her arthritis, her hip —she was falling apart.

I soon discovered that the most demanding part of the home hospice was Lou’s appetite. Over the next week we went out three or four times a day to find whatever thing he craved. The bell would ring and Gabe would go running. “My dad wants a steak dinner!” We’d jump into the car to go pick up a steak, then sushi, then burritos.

Julie was paying for these elaborate requests with envelopes of cash she’d saved over the years, each one labeled with a particular purpose. Every time she pulled out a new one from the back of a drawer, my heart sank: forty dollars for Gabe’s birthday, a hundred dollars for a plumbing emergency, a hundred for yard work—all gone.

As the morphine doses got larger and Gabe more sleep-deprived, nights and meals and dreams collapsed into hallucinations. Lou would wake up, feel hungry, and ring his bell. Gabe would help him into the kitchen and cook whatever Lou instructed. I’d hear all about it in the morning. Clam chowder from a can with packet noodles. Chicken soup with pork gyoza and taquitos. Gabe told me that sometimes he’d drift off in the middle of cooking, laying his double-hooded head on the kitchen counter.

I slipped by the Blue Room one morning, sheepishly hoping I could just make a coffee and bring my book out into the backyard. “The English Muffin!” Lou called out. “I want an English pot roast. Can you do that?”

I returned to the doorway. Birdie, who was more or less living on Lou’s chest by this point, greeted me with a growl.

“Yes!” I said. “I think I can.”

Waiting for the coffee to brew, I googled English pot roast. It seemed to be something to do with potatoes and meat, a stew. I couldn’t find Gabe anywhere.

“Lou …” I said, eventually going back into his room. “What do you mean by English pot roast?”

“I mean Henry VIII creamy banquet pot roast. Pig’s blood! Potatoes! Lots of meat. Don’t forget the meat!”

I called for Gabe all over the house, in the front yard, the backyard, down by the shed. Finally his voice came down from the sky.

“I’m up here!” he said. I couldn’t see him, but some branches moved at the very top of the thirty-foot redwood.

“He wants me to make a medieval pot roast,” I told Gabe when he came down.

“He’ll go back to sleep. I need to give him some more morphine now anyway. He’ll forget all about it.”

Gabe was right. While Birdie barked and tore at his fingers, he fed his father the liquid morphine, and Lou fell back to sleep. Gabe took a nap. An hour later the little bell rang again.

“Blueberry pancakes!” I heard. “Can she do blueberry pancakes?”

I found a mix for blueberry muffins in the cupboard. It was the middle of the day by the time they were done. One came out with a funny face. Two freeze-dried blueberries for wonky eyes and a crease below them like a sideways smile. I thought it looked a bit like Gabe. I showed his mother and she agreed. Excited, we woke Gabe up with the muffin doppelgänger on a plate.

Hold it up to your face, we told him. Do your wonky eyes. Smile sideways a bit. See?

Julie brought a muffin cut up in four with a pile of butter to Lou on a little plate. He put the whole lump of butter on one quarter, had a bite, and put the plate down on his lap, exhausted. “Do you like your muffin, Dad?” Gabe said. Lou didn’t respond. I felt that in some great way I had failed.

***

Gabe’s sister, Joni, lived in the next town over. She had a two-year-old girl, Sofia, and was heavily pregnant with her second. She’d bring a meal or some shopping over every few days and spend a few hours with her dad. When she and the little girl spilled in through the front door, the whole house seemed to calm.

One afternoon, Lou and Joni were stretched out on the sofa, the patio doors letting in a warm breeze. Sofia was running around, looking for the cats. Julie was out in the hammock. I was sitting next to Gabe on the piano bench. He started playing a peaceful, sweet song. I asked Joni what Sofia’s birth had been like. She said it had been an amazing experience. She said she went full wild woman. At the moment of the birth, she’d been on all fours and felt her whole heart open wide to God. There was no pain, no body, no one else, just her baby and God. Lou said that was the way he felt about death. When the moment came, he was going to go into it with arms open to God. He held his arms out wide as he said it.

Later, Joni’s husband, Joe, came over. They got out some guitars from the garage, brought them into the Blue Room, and sang songs around Lou’s bed. Nineties folk—The Moldy Peaches, Bright Eyes—and then an amazing rendition of “O Holy Night,” Joe on the harmonica, Gabe on the guitar, and Joni singing. I sat on the mattress and watched them. I wanted them to keep playing—no more talking, talking, talking. “O night divine, o night …”

At the end of the song, Julie came in. She said it was late, Dad was tired, she was tired, we were all tiring him out. Gabe said, “Wow Mom, you even managed to ruin this.” Joni snapped at Gabe, “Don’t talk to her like that.” Gabe said, “Yeah, yeah, it’s all my fault.” Joni’s husband asked no one in particular if they’d noticed that the moon’s face had changed. “They’ve done something to the moon’s face,” he said. “I swear …”

“He’s tired,” Julie said, turning to Lou. “Are you tired, sweetie? Tell them you’re tired. No one believes me. Someone’s gotta look after him. He needs his rest. Tell them for once. I know how tired you are. He’ll never say it himself …”

“All right, Julie. I’m tired.”

I followed Gabe out to the backyard with a beer and a cigarette and found him up in the redwood again. I coaxed him down with my offerings and convinced him not to climb all the way up the tree in the dark.

***

Lou’s body was shutting down. His legs and arms were swelling and leaking fluid. He had to carry paper towels around with him to mop up the mess, but he never complained. We took turns massaging his legs to ease the pain. When it was my turn, I made a bit of conversation, asked him about his life. He didn’t want to go into any of that. He just smiled and told me to massage with all the strength my skin and bones could muster.

Amid all this, Gabe wanted to have sex whenever he had a minute free. When his dad was sleeping he’d usher me into the Green Room or drive us out to the back-road fields and pull over on the side of the road. At night, with the hills behind us, the hum of cars in the distance, a light breeze through the grass, it was kind of spectacular. But I was never in the mood. So often we would go all the way out there for me to freeze over. “You’re removed,” he told me. “Checked out. A sandbag.”

“Well, sorry,” I said. “But I massaged your dying dad’s legs earlier. I’ve come all the way here. I’m doing what I can do. Right now all I can be is a sandbag.”

“I’m exhausted and I need love.”

“We just had sex.”

“Oh yeah. ‘We just did this, we just did that. I gave you a blowjob last week …’ ”

“I know you’re sad but you’re being a dick. How can you not see that?”

“I don’t want to talk.”

“You were the one who started the conversation. I was just lying here.”

“Exactly.”

***

The days went on and Lou held on. One evening I noticed a slice of a moon through the kitchen window and realized it had been two weeks since I’d arrived. Despite the pain, Lou still wanted to move around, take a stroll with his walker, barbecue pork, play guitar on the patio with his son. “This is not how normal hospice patients behave,” Julie said. We were standing in the kitchen, looking at family pictures. In many of them the whole family and some friends were sitting around jamming, having a good time. Not that long ago—five years, maybe.

“Most people just lie in bed. But my husband—he’s on his feet demanding fine dining! I don’t want to complain, but it makes me think—miracles can happen. And if he does get better, things would have to change around here. There’s no money. We can’t live like this. Steak-dinner takeout! We’d lose the house.”

I nodded and made to say something, but she carried on.

“Sometimes I think I might be an alien,” she said. “I’m not like other people. Like lying—people lie so easily but I can never lie. Neither can Gabe. We’re both like that. I can see how hard it is for him in the world. We just don’t make sense here! He needs to get a job, get a car. Get going with his life. You’re so good for him. He listens to you. I always told him, If you wanna just do what you want, then find a groupie. You’re no groupie. You’re like an angel sent here. I mean it. I prayed to God for you and you came. But you’ve got your life ahead of you.”

Gabe must have been listening because he ran out of the Blue Room at that point.

He took my hand and peeled me away. “We’re going on a walk now, Mom. She doesn’t wanna talk anymore.”

“See,” Julie said. “He’ll do anything for you.”

***

Lou was still ringing his bell on his sixty-fifth birthday, November 16, a milestone that had seemed unthinkable a month before. We arranged a small party for his family and a few of his music buddies. Gabe spent the morning setting up the backyard with microphones and guitars. He even put a TV and VCR on a cart on wheels to play home videos. We drove out to the Mexican supermarket and bought carnitas and a case of mini Corona bottles. On the way out he impulse-bought a ceramic Day of the Dead guitar to give his dad. When the friends arrived at the house, Julie took the opportunity to go have some time alone and run errands at Vons and CVS.

The men barbecued pork, and I made pico de gallo, according to Joni’s instructions. It was a hit. The men in their cowboy getups were shocked that the English girl had prepared it. The sun was shining, people were sitting out, eating the barbecue. Gabe tried his best to get people to play music but it wasn’t happening. How do you celebrate the birthday of a dying man? I couldn’t figure out what to do with myself. At one point, Gabe gave his dad the ceramic guitar wrapped up in Christmas wrapping paper. “Día de los Muertos,” said his dad. He held the guitar in his palms, disgusted.

The men got it together and started playing “The Cowboy Who Started the Fight.” Lou watched on in his wheelchair. He closed his eyes as they sang “screamed through the veins of the street.” They sang a few more songs. Gabe and I took a break to catch the sun go down over a field of tomato vines. In the ten minutes that we were out, Lou stood up with a guitar to play a song with them. He was just sitting back down as we came in the door. Soon after, the guys all left.

“Man plans, God laughs,” Gabe said.

Julie was gone for most of the day. She returned from her errands with a gift for Gabe. She was so excited about it, she wanted to give it to him straight away. Out of a green and white paper bag, Gabe pulled a fluffy llama with wonky eyes. He squeezed it and the llama squeaked.

“It’s a dog toy,” he said, sounding like his father when he held the Day of the Dead guitar. Julie laughed and laughed. She said it reminded her of Gabe and the blueberry muffin. I laughed too. Gabe grimaced.

“Oh no … I think he’s angry,” Julie said.

“Here,” I told Gabe. “Don’t be angry. Squeeze your dog toy.”

He took the llama in both hands, crossed his eyes, stuck his tongue out, and let it rip.

***

November 18 was the eighth anniversary of my own father’s death. I woke up feeling sad and drained. At this point, I thought to myself, Lou needed to die or someone else would. I spent the morning swinging in the hammock by the redwood at the bottom of the garden, hiding from everyone. I heard Gabe and Julie calling for me from the house. Lou wanted a massage, they said. His legs were hurting. I couldn’t face it. Gabe called my phone. I ignored it.

When I went back inside, the two of them were maneuvering Lou into the living room. Gabe almost dropped him and he fell back on the sofa with a cry of pain. “You’re not helping!” Julie screamed at Gabe.

“Mom. I am midhelping. You’re brain-dead from your painkillers.”

“Enough!” Lou’s voice boomed from the sofa, where he was half-collapsed, falling off the side of it. “Stop it! Both of you!”

Julie and Gabe stopped, ashamed.

“Now, son.” Lou took in a quiet, pained breath. “Can you help me off this damn sofa and take me back to bed?” Gabe pulled him up by the armpits.

That night Lou could only manage a spoonful of canned tomato bisque.

“I think he’s going to die today. The same day as your dad. If our dads die on the same day that’s God talking. We’ll have to get married.”

Later, Gabe slept next to me in the Green Room while his mom was with Lou. I dozed while I listened to Julie talk to Lou, telling him about their life together. “We’re good people,” she told him. “Weird people.” She could have been saying anything really, the hum was so soothing. “There’s no one around here like us.” It kept sending me back to sleep.

I woke up to Lou’s voice crying out: “Help! I can’t breathe!” I pushed Gabe and he bolted into the Blue Room. Julie woke up too. “I’m coming!” she called out.

I stayed in bed, listening. They were arguing about how much morphine to give Lou. Julie said Gabe was giving him too much. Gabe said it wasn’t enough. She ran to get the phone to call the nurse. Lou was desperately trying to get words out. He couldn’t breathe. And then a desperate gargling, drowning on thin air. Gabe was saying, “It’s okay Dad. I’m right here. I’m right here,” all through the gargling until Lou was no longer making any sound.

When I walked in, Lou’s skin had already yellowed. I realized I’d seen three dead bodies now. My dad, my granddad, and Lou. They all looked the same, laid out on a hospital bed. It was five minutes to midnight. An hour later a nurse came. Another hour, and a man and a woman arrived from the mortuary. At the door, their long, gray, thinning hair obscuring half their faces, they told me they were here for the body. Never have I seen more ghoulish-looking people. They wore baggy suits with sleeves that came down over their hands, and round, shiny shoes that also seemed a few sizes too big. They moved slowly. “Was he in the military?” they asked. “No,” we said. “He was not in the military.”

“Okay, thank you.” They put a sheet over Lou’s body and wheeled him through the house, out the front door. Julie followed him out, holding Birdie. She wanted to show the dog that Dad was leaving. Dad was being wheeled onto the van.

“See, it’s okay, Birdie. There he goes. They’re wheeling him in now. He’s going …”

Gabe didn’t want to watch his dad go into the back of a van. I found him in the backyard with a tall glass of vodka, smoking a cigarette. He joked that he’d been praying to his dad as he was dying. “Come on, five more minutes. If you make it five more minutes I won’t have to marry her.” Then he said that he was plotting to steal morphine to kill the dog.

All the lights were on. It was three in the morning. Gabe pulled out a crate of home videos and Julie and I told him to put them away. I made us some tea. We had some more vodka. Julie went to bed and I put Gabe in the shower. I washed his hair and cried, but he was like a stone. I could tell he was still obsessing about killing Birdie. After the shower, I put him in a clean T-shirt and underwear, tucked him in to bed, and held him tight until he fell asleep.

I woke up in the morning to Gabe sleeping soundly next to me. He looked so at peace I didn’t want to wake him up. It made me cry. His eyes opened. “Dad?” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was joking. Soon after, we heard Julie howling. Long, slow howls. One of the saddest, strangest noises I’ve ever heard. “My life!” she called out between the howls. “My life!” It was almost like singing.

After that first day Julie said she needed to mourn alone. We needed to leave so she could scream and cry and talk to God. We went to Joni’s for a night but then Joni said she was too sad and stressed to have us there, with the baby coming soon. A little desperate, we decided to go camping. For the next week we drove between beaches along the central coast, walked, wrote, drank beer. Gabe wrote a list of plans for the future, plans that involved him getting paid to travel, recording his album, singing at a body of water every day, building the 24-7 radio live-stream, moving every three months. He was going to give this list to his family, to prove to them that he had a plan. “You two need to move on with your own life now,” Julie had told me before we left. I couldn’t understand how his family could abandon him at a time like this. I’d had to remind her that Gabe had come home to look after Lou, that we’d been living and working in Chicago. At the same time, I got what she was saying and why they didn’t want him hanging around. Gabe was a liability, and now he was my liability.

***

Lou didn’t have a funeral. They were going to take his ashes out to the ocean in the spring. After the week of camping, Julie got lonely and wanted Gabe back again. I decided to leave, to stay with a friend in Brooklyn for a while. I found a flight from San Francisco and booked a train from San Luis Obispo up the coast. Before I left, I found Gabe a job doing yard work for a neighbor. He would save some money and leave in January. We said we might travel around. I tried to believe it could happen but I knew that it would not.

As we left for the train station, a commode arrived for Lou, more than a month late. Julie couldn’t bear to look at it, so we said we’d give it to Goodwill on the way to the station. She gave us a trash bag of old blankets to donate, too. I said a tearful goodbye to Julie and she gave me an envelope with a hundred-dollar bill in it. She thanked me for all the help and told me to get something nice for myself.

“Gabriel doesn’t want you to go,” she said.

I hugged her again and got in the car. “I never say goodbye,” she said. “I only say see you later.”

We drove up to the back of Goodwill and waved down a man who seemed to be accepting donations. “Is that a commode?” he asked.

“Yep. My dad just died. He never used it.”

He shook his head and tutted. “Nah. We can’t take that. That’s nasty.”

“How about these blankets?” Gabe said, pointing to the trash bag.

“This bag? Those blankets?” The man took a quick sideways look. “Nah, we can’t take that either. That’s nasty, too.”

We were in a silly mood, driving to San Luis Obispo with the commode rattling in the back. It was a fresh December day. You could feel a change in the air. We stopped off at Ben Franklin’s Deli and I ordered three Californian sandwiches from the cashier, one for me, one for Gabe, and one for him to bring home to his mom.

“My dad just passed away and my girlfriend is leaving for New York!” Gabe announced out of nowhere.

There was still some time before the train. At the station we ran up over the footbridge to get a good view of the tracks and the hills. I took a few pictures of Gabe. He took a few of me. The train came, we said goodbye, and I found a spot with a table at the back of the second-floor observation car, the same booth we’d sat in after that first trip. My bags stowed away, I looked down and saw Gabe on the platform below, dancing to get my attention. He was trying to say something, but I couldn’t understand him. He mimed and danced around a bit more. Got on his knees. Drew a picture of a house with his finger in the air.

A man sitting a few seats ahead of me watched the scene in awe. All of a sudden he began narrating it to the rest of the car.

“Marry me,” the man said. “We’ll have a house by the sea.”

Gabe mimed writing in a notebook, then swimming, then playing guitar.

“You can write poetry. I’ll swim. Play music,” said the man.

By this time everyone in the observation car was watching. The narrator turned to me.

“Does he have a phone number? I want to tell him something.”

“He doesn’t have a phone,” I said. “But you can leave a message on his mother’s answering machine.”

So the man dialed Julie’s number, and Gabe, feeding off the audience, mimed a phone in response. I thought of Julie at home alone, rattled by the phone ringing. The man spoke to Gabe through the glass and Gabe nodded along, though he definitely couldn’t hear. Neither of them broke eye contact. The man said he was a preacher. He’d married about ahundred couples by now. Each time it had been uniquely special. “Why wait?” he told the future Gabe, who would be listening to his mother’s answering machine if he ever got around to it. The preacher ended his message with his number, saying to call him if we wanted to get married.

The train started moving and Gabe ran along the platform. I waved until I could no longer see him. Soon I was coasting inland. A rush of green-gold on either side. Pesticide farmland, trees, bushes thick with leaves, sunlight gracing the tip of everything. I stared out the window the whole journey. No sign of December anywhere, no sign of time passing. So much talk of marriage in God’s country. No doubt He had it all planned out for me.

 

Helen Longstreth is a writer currently living in Brooklyn, New York, after growing up in Bath, England. Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, Touchstone Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. She is working on a collection of stories and essays.

Announcing Our Summer Issue

Not long ago, during a spring clean, I came across one of the dozen or so notebooks in which I’d been keeping a diary back in 2020, and found myself sitting on the floor to read. I was expecting the writing to be disappointing (it was) and that I’d feel a mixture of embarrassment and exasperation at my repetitive thought patterns (I did). I was more surprised to realize that, having faithfully kept a near-daily record of my life during one of the most eventful periods in recent American history, what I’d written was almost exclusively about cars, and my monthslong efforts to buy one. “B. offered to drive me to see the Yaris,” a typical passage begins. “I brought water, pears, chocolate, cigs. Talked about cars all the way. He seemed subdued.” Another entry, in an apparently unconscious tribute to Daphne du Maurier, opens: “Last night I got into Volvo C30s again.” There are accounts of test drives: “Driving the automatic: never quite being able to tell if it is off or just v. quiet.” And moments of reflection: “S. sent me a picture of his pickup and many planks of wood. Jealous of male agency.” And then, in the middle of one September entry: “Mum asked if I had spoken to shrink about the car issue.”

We at the Review take an especial pleasure, as readers, in the diary form: that peculiar mixture of performance and unwitting self-revelation, of shapelessness and obsessive (occasionally deranged) selectivity; that sense of a narrative unfolding in real time, almost without the author’s permission. And while the Review doesn’t do themes, as we were putting together our new Summer issue, no. 244, it was hard not to notice our partiality peeking through.

In the issue, Lydia Davis shares selections from her 1996 journal, and they often read like warm-up scales for her exquisitely off-kilter stories. (“For lunch—a huge potato and a glass of milk.”) You’ll also find masterful uses of the diary as a fictional device. The Brazilian writer Juliana Leite’s “My Good Friend,” translated by Zoë Perry, is an elderly widow’s apparently unremarkable Sunday-evening entry—“About the roof repair, I have nothing new to report”—that turns into a story of mostly unspoken decadeslong love. And James Lasdun’s “Helen” features excerpts from the journal of a woman who lives in what the narrator describes as a “state of incandescent, almost spiritual horror,” and whose crippling self-consciousness doesn’t protect her from humiliations the reader can see coming.

Also in issue no. 244, John Keene, in an Art of Fiction interview with Aaron Robertson, describes how blogging heralded his recovery as a writer after losing drafts of several of the stories that eventually became Counternarratives. And Sharon Olds, in an Art of Poetry interview, tells Jessica Laser about the need to keep one’s art and biography separate, especially when they are clearly not. Keeping a diary might be therapeutic, Olds explains, but “writing a poem to understand yourself better would be like making a cup with no clay, or maybe like having the clay but not making the cup.” She concludes, “If I had to choose between a poem being therapeutic and it being a better poem, I’d want it to be a better poem.”