by Ross Gay
Is sorrow the true wild?
And if it is—and if we join them—your wild to mine—what’s that?
For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.
What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.
I’m saying: What if that is joy?
(Oct. 2)
15. House Party
I’m reading Adam Kirsch’s review of Ben Lerner’s book The Hatred of Poetry. It’s evidently in the tradition of the many books that attempt to reveal the true reasons behind poetry’s alleged plummet into disfavor. I was given the review, xeroxed, by a guy named Milt who ran around the halls of Cal Tech as a kid and knew Linus Pauling, and I grilled him about that. (I happened to be in the midst of a vitamin C detox, or, I mean, detoxing by way of consuming thousands of milligrams of vitamin C daily, which I hope isn’t toxic. The cold passed quick, FYI.) Milt introduced me at the retirement community where I read poems today to about forty folks, nearly all of them awake, and as lovely and engaged an audience as I’ve ever had. The place, like so many retirement communities, has gardens in the name; it shares that nomenclatural distinction with housing projects and some gardens.
Milt had a theory that the hatred of poetry had something to do with the New Yorker, which he thought was also killing it. Poetry, I mean. The New Yorker was killing poetry, he thought, but not the hatred of it, unfortunately. It was a hatred of poetry garden, Milt thought. I thought he was giving the New Yorker too much credit. But Milt’s not the only person so opinioned—about the New Yorker, or the hatred of poetry, or the garden of the hatred of poetry, adjacent to the garden of the death of poetry, just beyond the garden of the uselessness of poetry, hence Lerner’s book about poetry, or the hatred of it, selling well. But I don’t actually want to prattle on about the hatred of poetry, about, as Kirsch concludes his review, how we can “rediscover what it once was, and might be again,” as there’s already a fairly sturdy industry, commercial and anecdotal, devoted to this worry.
I live in a Midwestern college town where once a month the line into the poetry slam at a bar actually wraps around the block and inside all variety of people share their poems to an audience of a couple hundred. And a few weeks back I took a cab to Indy and my driver told me that she reads her poems at various open mics two or three times a week. And last week, also in my town, the Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera, drew an audience of about six hundred people. Not to mention, pretty much every wedding and funeral I’ve ever been to has included a poem. Requires one. So, truth be told, I give almost nary a shit about the hatred of poetry given the abundant and diverse and daily evidence to the contrary.
Yesterday I visited a class of about twenty-five students at La Verne University in California. I read a few poems and we had an engaged and thoughtful discussion. And as we were heading out to get some food at a Greek place, a young person asked me if I knew the movie House Party. It’s been a long time, I said, but yes. And if this person was white I’d have been kind of nervous for what was coming next—You remind me so much of Kid from Kid ’n Play without the high-top fade!—but they weren’t, and anyway, they weren’t talking about me, they were talking about my poems, which they said reminded them of the dancing in the movie.
Well, no fucking duh, this is the best review I will probably ever get, which, if you don’t understand (the review or my love of it, and my great and abiding love of the literary critic who offered it), it’s only because you probably never spent something like forty hours a week mastering every variation of the Kid ’n Play kick step to Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s “It Takes Two” with your boys Theo, Maurice, and Harley—all of us getting synchronized in front of the big mirror in Maurice’s apartment, his mother in the kitchen stirring gravy and yelling, “Mauri!” when we practiced hard enough that the dishes started clanking in preparation for the ninth grade talent show, which didn’t have a “winner” (I agree with the middle-school pedagogy) but did in fact have only one act, after which the stage was rushed.
(Oct. 6)
16. Hummingbird
Today as I was walking down Foothill Boulevard to do laundry (the Laundromat one of my delights—not quite the democratic space of the post office or public library, but still, delightful) a hummingbird buzzed past me and alighted in a mostly dead tree poking almost up to the power line. The bird sat on the spindly branch that bounced in the breeze, twisting its head this way and that, but pretty much just stood still, looking out over the traffic jam on the far side of the street, not moving even as I got directly beneath it. I’ve never seen one sitting still like that for so long so in the open, although Stephanie thinks the hummingbird might be my totem animal given how they seem to follow me around.
(While I’m writing this, sitting on the curb outside the Laundromat, a young woman walked by wearing a winter cat hat with pointy ears, walking a mini Doberman pinscher wearing matching pink booties, skittering across the asphalt. I swear to you.)
Once I saw a hummingbird perusing the red impatiens outside my building at school, and I walked slowly over to the planting, plucked one, and held it in my outstretched hand perfectly still, long enough that at least one student walking my way crossed the street so as not to get too close to me, until the blur of light did in fact dip its face into the meager sweet in my hand. And another time I was visiting with a woman I’d met at a reading in Berkeley who wanted to show me her garden (that’s not a euphemism—her actual garden). After we walked through the actual garden, admiring the fruit trees and herbs and busy beehives, we sat down on the deck overlooking it all, and she got around to telling me about a friend of hers whose husband was ill and encouraged her to take other lovers if she wanted, which she did—want and take. How’s it going for her, I asked, and before my host could respond, a hummingbird buzzed by, almost ruffling her long gray hair, and dipped its beak neck-deep into the honeysuckle just behind my new friend’s head, its wings almost moaning, the sound of slurping nearly audible as the bird eased its head in and out of the flower, at which she said, nodding, “I think it’s going alright.”
(Oct. 6)
17. Just a Dream
Among the many things I have learned from Montaigne (I’m a little surprised I just wrote that) is that the word essay, which I already knew means attempt or try, also means trial. I gleaned this from one of the essays (trials) in the Penguin Classics edition I scooped from a used bookstore, I’m not sure where. It’s in the one called “On Books,” which is on books (titling, for Montaigne, I’m guessing, was not a trial). It’s a nice and sometimes brutally honest assessment of what I imagine was the canon of his day, some of which remains in the canon of ours. Plato, Cicero, Virgil. He might mention Homer. Seneca. He finds both Cicero and Plato to be dull and long-winded, spending too much plodding time getting to their points. Virgil he adores, and thinks his Georgics the finest poem ever written. I love the Georgics too, so it pleases me to know I’m in good company that way. But I don’t think Montaigne would like this essay, as it has been only warm-up. Maybe everything is always only warm-up.
One of the great delights of my life, when I get to do it, is staring into the ceiling or closet from my bed, or looking at the slats of light coming into the room, or the down of dust hovering on the blinds, recalling my dreams. Sometimes they are prominent and clear, like last night when I was to be Hillary Clinton’s vice president. I was still me and was writing something on the board in a classroom where I was teaching a class, thinking to myself, She’s got the wrong guy. I’m not cut out for this. I was thinking of my tendency toward panic and paranoia, and how that might not be suitable for someone who’s second in command. Though I gave her a big hug for being the first female nominee, the first female president, congratulating her and silently thinking, How can I get out of this.
Which is maybe one of the themes—not the primary one by any stretch of the imagination!—of my dream life: how can I get out of this. Which explains all the airplanes falling from the sky, the tornadoes brewing in the distan
ce, the plays in which I have the lead but haven’t studied the lines, and the last football games I’m supposed to get to but can’t, stuck in traffic in my uniform.
A few years ago I had a dream in which I had been fucking my mother for about two years. Thankfully I didn’t actually live through (dream through) the fucking part but instead just woke up (in the dream) to the fact that for the past two years (is two a significant number?) I had been fucking my mother. Just as you would if you just realized you had been fucking your mother for the past two years, I lost my goddamned shit. I was pacing around, hyperventilating, thinking, How could I have been fucking my mother for the past two years?! Mind you, this wasn’t an Oedipal faux pas, which, as far as I’m concerned, is completely forgivable and understandable; he was fucked from the start, and the blind man said so.
As I recall, in the dream, maybe my mother and I were to meet up later, or she was on her way over (a date?), when it occurred to me that something (fucking my mother for the past two years) was not okay. What have I done, what have I done, I thought. In writing this I will commend myself for not, in the dream, blaming my poor mother, my dear mother, who was also a party to the depravity.
I have had other terrible dreams. The one where I murdered someone and then invited people over (Super Bowl?), the severed head sitting behind the chair as we chatted over root beer. And other terrible fucking dreams, of course. But you might imagine that none was as terrible as the one where I had been fucking my mother for two years, and very few things have been as delightful as when I woke from that dream, let out a groan, shook off the grossness, and shouted Thank you! Thank you! to no one but me.
(Oct. 10)
18. “That’s Some Bambi Shit” . . .
. . . quoth my buddy Pat, when I told him about the guy who told me and Stephanie, as we were walking the dog around the cemetery, our cat Daisy following behind (Disney shit, yes, but not yet the Bambi shit), as he was pushing his lawnmower, a hefty belly hanging over his belt wrapped tight in a three-quarter-sleeve AC/DC T-shirt, camo-hat with the gas station razor-style shades perched atop the brim, when somehow the family of deer in the neighborhood came up, that not only had he seen them, he’d become friends with them, such that sometimes he’d be working in his shed, getting his mower tuned up, grabbing a tool, and the little fawn would come right in and rub up against him like a big old dog, really, until I’d have to shove him out, git now, git, and one time I was working back there and started getting light-headed, and I didn’t know I had the sugar but I started feeling real bad, real dizzy, and started walking out of the shed and toward the house, and the next thing you know I woke up with both of those deer, the momma and her baby, licking my face, all over my cheeks and eyes, til I realized I’d passed out and said okay okay that’s enough now, and got up and got me some pop.
(Oct. 16)
19. The Irrepressible: The Gratitudes
No, not everything irrepressible. (Delight: a T-shirt I saw that read, “Make it scary to be a racist again.” Though, truly, difficult as this is, I want light shone on the racist, too, and the hateful in me, too. Which is the frightened. Little more.) I’m actually talking about this amaranth plant I see growing in the thumb-thick cracks in the asphalt beneath a chain-link fence with three strands of barbed wire strung atop that. Just in case, I guess. It looks like it’s escaped from a planting of the stuff in a barrel planter behind the chain link and barbed wire. The plants are lush with green foliage—the part sometimes called callaloo—and pinkish, conical flowers. Some are perfectly erect; some bow their heads, like they’re listening, or like they’re looking back for someone, waiting on them. “Come on,” they seem to whisper when the breeze blows through them. They’re bodies against a fence. They’re candles.
They’re also visited, we can see, since we’re very close now, by honeybees, recently added to the endangered species list. So close are we that we can see that each flower, as is so often the case, is actually many flowers. A few bumblebees—is the name because they bumble? If so, it’s a misnomer, given these things crawl elegantly on the flower clusters, reminding me of Philippe Petit of Man on Wire fame, or, more sweetly, more to the point, a baby’s hand wrapping around my finger, which—right now, in my life, there is a child named Auri, whose hand wraps my finger when I put it in her little palm and she totters across the room, which is one of the delights.
My dad was an irrepressible know-it-all, which sometimes could be a delight, sometimes not, and one of his delightful facts was that a bumblebee (misnomer—ballerina bee) was an impossibility. Too much mass. Too teeny of wings. Once he said it as one buzzed right by us. That’s impossible, he said, smiling.
If you get closer to the amaranth, you’ll notice in the lighter-colored flowers—the reddish, fiery pink sort of fading to a lavender—that the flowers are giving way to the seeds, of which, on every flower—the bees know this, the honey and ballerinas and the many I can’t see—by my estimation, there are a zillion. A zillion seeds on every flower, I’m saying. Maybe one hundred flowers. Meaning, check my math here, one hundred zillion seeds. Meaning, keep your calculators out, one hundred zillion future plants, on every one of which how many flowers, how many seeds (some of which are now in a paper bag in my pocket, thank you very much). This is what I think exponential growth actually means. This is why I study gratitude. Or what I mean when I say it. From a crack in the street.
(Oct. 21)
20. Tap Tap
I take it as no small gesture of solidarity and, more to the point, love, or, even more to the point, tenderness, when the brother working as a flight attendant—maybe about fifty, the beginning of gray in his fade, his American Airlines vest snug on his sturdily built torso—walking backward in front of the cart, after putting my seltzer on my tray table, said, “There you go, man,” and tapped my arm twice, tap tap. Oh let me never cease extolling the virtues, and my adoration of, the warranted familiarity—you see family in that word, don’t you, family?—expressed by a look or tone of voice, or, today on this airplane between Indianapolis and Charlotte (those are real places, lest we forget), a tap—two, tap tap—on the triceps. By which, it’s really a kind of miracle, was expressed a social and bodily intimacy—on this airplane, at this moment in history, our particular bodies, making the social contract of mostly not touching each other irrelevant, or, rather, writing a brief addendum that acknowledges the official American policy, which is a kind of de facto and terrible touching of some of us, or trying to, always figuring out ways to keep touching us—and this flight attendant, tap tap, reminding me, like that, simply, remember, tap tap, how else we might be touched, and are, there you go, man.
(Nov. 4)
21. Coffee without the Saucer
It might be what one calls a fetish, though don’t get excited, for there are no feet or other body parts involved. Rather, I want to extoll the virtues of the small coffee drink—espresso, short Americano, cortado—served without the saucer. (Another delight—the song on the radio: “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” that weirdest of songs, creepy even, that my brother and I would play again and again on the Fisher Price record player in our room, one of a handful of Beatles-ish 45s we inherited from our uncle, not deceased.)
I’m thinking of this delight as I wobble across this Greenwich Village café called Stumptown, my short Americano wobbling precariously on the little saucer until I can rescue it and place it squarely on the table. Phew. And the spoon clanging the whole time. For Pete’s sake.
The most recent delightful experience of a saucerless administration of a small coffee drink happened at an espresso place I love not only for the very fine small coffee drinks they make but also for the curiosity of one barista in particular, who studies my face as I indulge. No saucer, right, she observed after one visit. I love her.
But it’s her compatriot I’m today lauding, a French-looking college kid. French-looking—indulge my stupidity here—by the high-waisted pants and sort of orderly disordered look. A scarf. No ber
et. When she opened her mouth, though, it was obvious that if she was from Bayonne, it was the one in Jersey.
Anyway, she pulled the double espresso and without even reaching—without even glancing—beneath the counter where the useless and actually truly dangerous saucers are stacked (think of the natural resources wasted in their production, little discuses of evil!); she just placed the demitasse, holding it not by the handle but sort of clutching it from above, like the magical mechanical claw in those rest-stop games, in front of me, all French-like, pretending she wasn’t my sister, which she was.
(Nov. 5)
22. Lily on the Pants
Or was it an iris gladdening the blue denim on the upper thigh of the young woman exiting the Salvation Army with a few kids and two plastic bags stuffed to the gills in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, where I stopped to procure a cheap pair of sweatpants after a solid two hours of pick-up at the Y next door, which turned out to be half-off, Black Friday and all: $2.50. I always mix them up. I know, I should know, given that a lily was the first flower I planted in my garden, and I pray to it daily in the four to six weeks that it offers up its pinkish speckling by getting on my knees and pushing my face in, which, yes, is also a kind of kissing, as I tend to pucker my lips and close my eyes, and if you get close enough you’d probably hear some minute slurping between us, and for some reason I wish to deploy the verb drowning, which, in addition to being a cliché, implies a particular kind of death, and I will follow the current of that verb to suggest that the flower kissing, the moving so close to another living and breathing thing’s breath, which in this case is that of the lily I planted six years ago, will in fact kill you with delight, will annihilate you with delight, will end the life you had previously led before kneeling here and breathing the breathing thing’s breath, and the lily will resurrect you, too, your lips and nose lit with gold dust, your face and fingers smelling faintly all day of where they’ve been, amen.
