The Last Romantics

by Tara Conklin

Caroline’s thoughts and ambitions extended wider, broader, further into a peopled future, the branching limbs of family expanding above and beyond, with herself at the center, the powerful, nurturing trunk.

In the space of this past hour with Caroline, a gaping hole had opened. Joe and Renee and Caroline stood on one side, me on the other, the youngest, the baby, alone.

Some days continue to exist year after year, decade after decade, as though they are happening inside you concurrent with the present. A persistent, simultaneous life. One that you consider and wish more than anything that you could change.

The dilemma was that any words I might say at a lectern or in the pages of a newspaper would never achieve the same strength as the words I wrote as a poet. Inspiration, calls to action, can take many forms. It is not so much the persuasive force of an argument that prompts engagement, but a feeling that inspires it. A sense of injustice, a longing for redemption, empathy, rage. What better to provoke any of these than a poem?

It took a madman to believe that individual involvement might change a system. It required a miracle, it required magic. Or maybe not. Maybe all it required was the alchemy of individuals who believe first that they can change themselves.

In fact, I think hope, even if premised on a falsehood, can be a thing of great power.”

What I wanted to say to this man was that the greatest works of poetry, what make each of us a poet, are the stories we tell about ourselves. We create them out of family and blood and friends and love and hate and what we’ve read and watched and witnessed. Longing and regret, illness, broken bones, broken hearts, achievements, money won and lost, palm readings and visions. We tell these stories until we believe them, we believe in ourselves, and that is the most powerful thing of all.

I wrote around him. I began to record in detail the last world that existed when Joe was still alive. The last meal I’d eaten, the last book I’d read, the last pair of shoes worn, the last earrings. Soon it became a tic, almost an obsession, to document all these final occurrences. There were so many of them. Once you begin to precisely identify every action and event, every building, every tree from a particular moment in time, they become countless, they stretch on and on. And so it was with the Lasts. At first I wrote them down not as poetry—I could make nothing beautiful then—but as simple lists. Items, colors, smells, sights, speech, weather: an echo of the lists I’d kept as a child. I fixed on paper every element of the old world so that I might remember and return to it when the present world—where my brother was gone, where things happened anew for the first time, and the second, and the hundredth—became too much. I created the old world in specific detail so that I might hide there.

Last breakfast: Mushroom and Swiss omelet black coffee brown toast, one-half foil packet of butter two sips water New York Times, Arts Section Counter, third stool from right Uniform stitched with Paige Old Adidas sneakers, blue stripes, hole in toe White socks

My brother was leading me, I believed, to Luna or to something else entirely. It was up to me to quiet down, to listen wisely and well so that I might hear him.

This would be a story she’d tell her husband, her friends and neighbors, a cautionary tale to watch out for hollow-eyed young men with fleet feet, to hope for dazed young women who do not look where they are headed, who search the skies and rooftops for signs of dead brothers, lost worlds.

“Becoming a mother is the most expansive thing you can do. But it’s an experience you can’t really explain. I won’t even try.”

Sometimes she will see it, too, in her colleagues and in the families of her patients. A care, a watchfulness, a willingness to accept the burden of another’s fear.

But after Ellis died, my idea of religion changed. I became a nonbeliever. Your grandmother was turning over in her grave, I’m sure, but the world struck me as stark and unforgiving. There was no plan. No one—no entity, no power, no God—controlled a thing. Life was a struggle. Not without its joys, of course”—here Noni smiles—“but a struggle nonetheless to feed, clothe, house, love the people for whom I was responsible. My children. You four. I was the only one who would ever love you wholly. I was the only one who would give my life for yours, and this seemed an important and terrible burden.” Noni pauses and closes her eyes, opens them again. “It froze me. It did. The Pause, you kids called it. I couldn’t face it alone, any of it, but somehow you managed. The four of you, together. You got through and you forgave me. Thank you, Renee. I’ve never quite forgiven myself, but thank you.”

Back then, poets seemed quaint, possibly irrelevant, but there is something about crisis that returns us to the fundamentals to make sense of an uncertain future and remind us of what we need to know.

In poetry’s stripped-down urgency, in its openness, the space between lines, the repetition and essentialism—poets can speak in ways that transcend culture and gender and time.

I was wrong to tell you that this is a story about the failures of love. No, it is about real love, true love. Imperfect, wretched, weak love. No fairy tales, no poetry. It is about the negotiations we undertake with ourselves in the name of love. Every day we struggle to decide what to give away and what to keep, but every day we make that calculation and we live with the results. This then is the true lesson: there is nothing romantic about love. Only the most naïve believe it will save them. Only the hardiest of us will survive it.

We believe in love because we want to believe in it. Because really what else is there, amid all our glorious follies and urges and weaknesses and stumbles? The magic, the hope, the gorgeous idea of it. Because when the lights go out and we sit waiting in the dark, what do our fingers seek? Who do we reach for?

these everyday choices we make about who and how to love are what matters. This is what, when we’re one hundred years old and looking back on life, we’ll talk about. This is what we’ll remember.