I think I was in sixth grade that day
that I punched the kid three years younger
than me on a dare from some girls.
No provocation at all. My back was to him,
then I just wheeled around and landed
a few quick ones on his face and chest.
He looked more confused than angry.
The girls congratulated me for my obedience.
So that was a day in elementary school,
which is surely, along with junior high
and high school, one of the worst places
or states of being possible in the seventy years
or so that most of us get, don’t you think?
That kid had some problems in his family,
though I can’t recall what they were.
That state of being, elementary school,
was probably worse for him than for me.
I don’t remember the last time I saw him.
Years later my father told me he’d heard
that this same kid, then in his late teens
or early twenties, when he was arrested
for public intoxication or drug possession
or just hating the whole damn world,
did his best to urinate through the bars
of his holding cell and onto the feet
of the arresting cops. Sometimes,
without trying to, I picture him
trying to get them, but imagine
his weak stream falling short as his curses
dwindle to soft grunts and whispers.
And if I’m not careful, I then see him
dropping to his knees and passing out,
his face hitting the floor, sliding
through his own slick piss straight
into a momentary halo of oblivion.
The imagination is dangerous.
And something of a god-like power,
at least according to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
He called it esemplastic, an obscure
and idiosyncratic term that basically means
having the ability to fuck with damn near everything.
And maybe to set things right. Truth, too,
is dangerous. The knowing of it, that is.
A little learning is a dangerous thing
is a line you know, whether or not you know
Alexander Pope is its author. Its truth
seems self-apparent because just a little knowledge
can make you feel an unearned confidence,
as if you know all you need to know
and now need to know no more, but can take
what you know to build yourself up
and to grind down anyone else you’d like to.
Thus the relationship of most college professors
to their students. But a little knowledge is also dangerous
because it can be a lure to deeper knowledge,
can swallow you as if into a vortex or down,
as the kids say, a rabbit hole, and then you’re lost
trying to get to the “bottom of things”
(i.e., all there is to know), and nobody
ever returns from that little adventure.
Because no amount of knowledge ever amounts
to truth. Do you want to know a truth?
John Keats is the greatest poet of this language.
And he said that truth is beauty. And, in fact,
that the inverse is true. So all you really need
are the eyes in your head, if you believe Keats.
Don’t hold the fact that he died at 25 against him.
That kid knew what he was talking about. True,
he was riffing on some very old paired ideas there.
Delight and instruction, sweetness and light,
beauty and truth. But it’s the simplicity of his equation:
beauty is truth. That is all ye need to know.
I love the archaic, almost biblical sound of that ye.
It makes the pronouncement sound absolute,
brooks no argument. This truth is true, damn it.
Of course, there’s truth, and then there’s truth.
That’s what got under Plato’s skin, why he wanted
to pitch the poets out of his Republic. He knew well
that poetry is an art that’s equal parts revelation
and deception. It’s true. Just ask Homer. Or Aristotle.
Or anyone who’s ever really looked into it.
Poets have to be exquisite liars. And Plato
is not the only one who has a hard time with that.
Some readers, too many, demand a purity of truth.
But some things are more important than truth.
And a lot of things are a lot worse than a lie.
Some other schoolkid is getting hit for nothing
as you read this. And some other children
are being raped by their fathers and uncles and brothers,
some others feeling hunger every second of every day.
There’s a song on Sun Kil Moon’s Benji
called “I Watched the Film The Song Remains the Same.”
(The album’s pure genius, by the way,
though some of Mark’s longtime fans
think it’s betrayal-level garbage. To hell with them.)
In that song, Mark Kozelek remembers
having once been baited into clocking
some undeserving boy, as he puts it,
out on the elementary school playground.
And in the song, Mark apologizes to that boy
across the years and untold miles
as if such a thing could ever really be done.
You know it can’t. I know it can’t.
But in the ten-plus minutes of that song,
amidst the ethereally beautiful finger picking
of Mark’s old guitar, it seems not only
like it’s possible, but that it’s happened.
And you have been its only witness.
Sometimes I tell my students that poetry is
the persistent, futile effort to earn self-forgiveness.
Some roll their eyes. And inside, I’m rolling my eyes
at myself too most of the time, including now,
knowing my penchant for grand pronouncement
gets the best of me more often than not.
But I believe what I tell them. And I’m a god
of futility. Just look at me now, still
writing these lines as you grow suspicious
of the investment you’ve made in the poem.
Around stanza 33 you started to doubt
the veracity of its opening anecdote
after you’d already begun to grow tired
of its self-indulgent, meandering, prosaic style.
But it really happened, reader, though there’s nothing
I can do to assure you I’m not abusing your trust.
Still, this prostrate god lays down this next line,
and whether or not you believe it’s true I say
the rabbit stretches in the grass, the cockroach
scurries in the walls, the dew resolves
into a gas, the yellow-throated warbler calls,
the sunlight shifts across the leaves, the asp
and mongoose share a dance, the wasps
build nests under the eaves, the stiffened robin
feeds the ants, the moon obliviates its phase,
the water-walking spiders float, and days
and days and days and days are swallowed
nightly in my throat. Could any of that
be something to you? Or set anything right?
Or is it all just dissipating breath?
One of the things I love about Benji
is how it strikes an almost perfect balance—
not a calm equilibrium, but a measured dance
of extremes—between profundity and absurdity,
between pathos and bathos, between self-praise
and self-effacement, between sheer solipsism
and an almost pure empathy, as in the line
wherever you are, that poor kid, I’m so sorry.
If you can listen to the way Mark delivers that line
and think he doesn’t really care, that this is all
cynical artifice, that he wouldn’t give
damn near everything to be able to go back
and make it right, well then, dear reader,
I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in your skin.
But redemption is always possible, so read on.
Another selling point for Benji is that,
like all great works of art, it’s obsessed with death.
From Mark’s cousin Carissa to his truck-driver uncle
to his grandma to his friend Brett to the thirteen victims
of Richard Ramirez to the wife of Jim Wise
to John Bonham to Peter Grant to James Gandolfini
to two people in a Portland mall to twelve people
in a Colorado theater to twenty-one people
in a San Diego McDonald’s to fifty kids under the age
of nineteen on an island in Norway to twenty-six
children and adults at an elementary school
once attended by Adam Peter Lanza,
it’s as relentless and inescapable as the fact itself.
Who wouldn’t want to spend one hour,
one minute, and fifty seconds on it right now?
Louis-Ferdinand Céline said, No art is possible
without a dance with death. Wallace Stevens said,
Death is the mother of beauty. And I say
that a tried and true prescription for living
what might be called a meaningful life is to say
I’m going to die to the mirror each morning.
I’ll admit that the desire to quite forget
what the nightingale has never known is about
as human as it gets, but as Flannery O’Connor says,
The truth does not change according to our ability
to stomach it emotionally. And the truth is that wishing
won’t make it so. The weariness, the fever, and the fret
are here to stay. Even if we aren’t. Hell, even as a species.
If you scale what we know of time down to a calendar year,
everything we call A.D. takes up about four seconds
(see Carl Sagan). From a cosmic perspective,
a human life is as ephemeral as a mayfly’s
and just as important. My friend Jake knew
something about ephemerality. He dedicated his life
to a project he called Inscriptions for Air. A white boy
from northern Alabama, he set out to write elegies
for every martyr of the Civil Rights Movement
after seeing the forty-one names that are etched
into water-washed stone in Montgomery.
When a forgotten murder or lynching was unearthed
in research, he simply expanded the project.
He called it the work of a life. Through four books
he wasn’t halfway done with the first forty-one.
But his brain was grand enough to hold it all,
as strong as his heart. Then one December night
he dressed in his characteristically dapper style,
went to a holiday party with his wife, and while there
felt something wrong in his head and left.
He was forty years old. You don’t just write some
of the greatest poems of your generation, give
everything of yourself in the interest of everyone else,
put on a tie, button your coat, then go to a party
and die. That just doesn’t happen. Until it does.
You don’t just go until you do, like breath on wind.
You don’t just go to the convenience store for Skittles
in your comfortable hoodie and die until you do.
You don’t just reach toward your glove compartment
with a child strapped in the back seat and die
until you do. You don’t just go for a run
on a country road or on a late-night run for burgers
and die until you do. You don’t just turn out the light
in your own bedroom, go to sleep, and die until you do.
The stiffened robin feeds the ants. And the dew
resolves itself into a gas. Days and days and days and days,
you swallow the thought that the terrible, inevitable
impossibilities could be resurrected and reversed.
And each morning you wake wanting a more exquisite lie.
I want Jake to be alive now and writing his poems,
want him to finish Inscriptions for Air,
want to see him again, to thank him for what
he’s given. And I want to go adopt that rescue dog
that my dying friend Nina had to return,
by herself, when it didn’t get along with the dog
her family already had. I’ll take him, Nina,
I want to say. And while I’m there, I want
to take the cancer from her breast and spine.
And I want to go back to twelve years old
and not let my Chihuahua outside off the leash
so he won’t be torn apart in front of me
by my great uncle’s collie. And I want to go
to the Oran of Camus’s La Peste with a gun
and shoot Cottard before he can shoot the street dog.
I know I’m supposed to empathize with that man
in a strange way, to forgive him out of some grand
existential human solidarity, but damn it, Camus—
an innocent dog? Fuck that guy. And since I’ve got a gun
in this exquisite lie now, I want to go to a white enclave
in Florida and shoot a man in the back of the head
before he can approach a seventeen-year-old
with Skittles in the pocket of his hoodie.
And I want to find that kid from elementary school
and apologize for those undeserved punches
from forty years ago. So when I listen to the song,
“I Watched the Film The Song Remains the Same,”
if I’m not careful I begin to think that making things right
is possible as I feel the slow, ephemeral breath
drift in and out of my lungs like Mark’s fingers
floating across the strings of that old guitar.
A rabbit stretches in the grass. A warbler calls.
Halfway through the labyrinthine drafting
of this poem, I remembered the kid’s name.
The imagination is dangerous. So is the internet.
There’s a photograph in the online obituary I found,
and I recognized his face at once. (Is it one detail too far
if I tell you he was 49?) It gives no cause of death.
Sometimes loved ones would just rather not say.
