We are, as a lot, poor students of astonishment.
‘We,’ a generalization both messy and apt: a boy’s bedroom floor, a prayer lit with grief, desire and consent, foraged mushrooms, medical files of the uninsured.
If everything I’ve learned, one way or another, one word or another, was first modeled for me.
If learning, leaning, postures, poses, poetries.
If sentences begin with possibility. Perhaps why we lean into the line
break. Lean into a pause, a possibility, a space we might but don’t yet
know.
If my father was two parts funny, two parts deep-feeler, six parts fury: I grew up knowing the worst thing in the world was to make a man mad, even one who’s often silly, often sweet.
Graduate, as in, She wants to teach when she graduates.
Is this too simple, to say a pause is a space my spirit steps into itself.
Poetry teaches me to move toward the unknowable, the unsayable, the I-Am-ness that is unnamable.
What if I say “moves me toward.” Or: writing poetry teaches me to move toward.
Messy and apt.
If astonishment moves in too many directions, like a sentence with a gerund, a verb, and an appositive.
So many of my poems end with questions.
Once, years ago, as a teenager, I was told I would make a good pastor’s wife.
Once, more recently, I lay on the cool tile of a hotel bathroom and imagined turning my back on God. In my vision, I could not see God, but I could see the slight shine of my shoulder blades, the knuckles of spine up my own back, lit as if with moonlight.
Graduate, as in, She wants to graduate to serious drama.
When I decided to put on my arm the two names we’d chosen for a first-trimester loss and another deep into the second, I only sought out women tattoo artists. I waited months to get into Honest to Goodness, an all-woman tattoo parlor, and when the time came, my husband drove me, read me poetry, held my hand as the needle buzzed. It wasn’t complicated: I didn’t want a(nother) man to touch me, to mark me. I didn’t even want a(nother) man to see me cry. Not from pain. Compared to labor and childbirth, it didn’t hurt at all, honest to goodness.
If astonishment is more feckless than sorrow. If it leaves each door an inch from closed there inside the house of sufferers. If it means, at some point, we might be amazed by our grief.
Or, gobsmacked: shocked by a blow to the mouth or clapping a hand over the mouth in astonishment. If the way of poetry is also a gobsmacking. If we gobsmack.
Can I use a word this tawdry, this simple. Are we chauffeurs of higher consequence, or the tedium, the guttural, the shape of so many unspoken things.
If I did not want to be a pastor’s wife. If I was wounded by the “compliment.” If I was deviant in all my ways. If I was woman. If I wanted, instead, to pastor.
If astonishment is more juvenile than inquiry.
But who do you say I am? Jesus asks. This is the tattoo I want on the back of my neck, just below my hairline, where no one can see it, not even me: to ask of Jesus his own tender question of me.
Let us never be graduated. (Even the request is a linguistic bramble: is it passive, do we move away from receiving on purpose?) Is there an ‘us,’ a ‘we’? Why not ‘me.’
If astonishment has less agency than anger.
I am astonished by forgiveness. [Passive] Forgiveness astonishes me. [Active] All of my poetry, every last poem, has as its subject matter forgiveness—the wrestling with or the receiving of or the giving forth—or all of these at once.
If astonishment is more provincial than (pursuit of) comprehension.
What parts of God are not my father? What parts of my father are not God? What parts are?
When I went again to get more dead babies’ names tattooed on my arm, two first-trimester miscarriages, I wasn’t as worried. I’d been through it, knew what to expect, didn’t want to pay a sitter for my husband to come along too. If he’s a good artist, a man who doesn’t scare me when I walk in the door. If I set up a consultation, wear no makeup, loose clothing, offer clear, precise instructions in my online signup. I’m not scared at all when I walk in the door, or when he moves close to measure the existing tattoo on my arm, so when he says, Let’s go ahead and do it right now, I say, Okay. I say, Sure, why not. I unzip my hoodie and I sit in his chair.
Poetry opens up a place to curate
–> Middle English: from medieval Latin curatus –> from Latin cura, ‘care’.
It was my father who told me I’d be a good pastor’s wife. He held my face in his hands, he kissed me on the forehead. His cheekbones shone as if lit by the moon. My father, the pastor.
Wonder is a hirsute lover, scruffy in all the wrong places.
Writing poetry is an act of sustained wonder, a baptism into the Family of humility and awe—you are mine, I have redeemed you.
reverencerespect x (fear + wonder) = awe
Graduate, as in, a thermometer graduated to Fahrenheit.
Say I am less an alum than a metric of wonder + fear.
Say reverence is a professor. Of the scoundrel-kind. One who professes (and also, perhaps, misses class without alerting students, rarely answers email, refuses to serve on committees, talks incessantly about his/her/their own work and nothing else), a doctor of the love of a branch of—
Say awe.
As in, They gazed in awe at the small mountain of diamonds | the sight filled me with awe | his staff members are in awe of him.
Don’t be facile.
Wherever I turn my back, there’s God. Behind me, before me. The bones of my body lit with God.
O inescapable God, I wrote, years before I tested out turning in my mind’s eye.
Send me reeling, I wrote.
Which is another way of saying, Don’t let me be graduated from you. Don’t let me understand enough to be certain. I asked for it. Me, specifically. (Didn’t I?)
Understand, I love you, even as I turn from you like this
to run down a dim and disappearing street . . .
—Marie Howe, “Apology”
Back is also a way.
Write me a letter of rec, you scoundrel.
Humbly, I ask you. Humility is how many parts reverence?
Why do I ask so many questions. If ‘if’ offers supposition, not inquisition.
If I ask again.
If inquisition is not becoming of a woman. If supposition is more comely, fitting.
If my faith is in part a metric of fear, how much of that fear is not awe but avoidance of shame? If avoidance of shame is in part desire to please, who is it I have been trying to satisfy (at my own expense), and for how long?
When the man who tattoos my dead babies’ names on my arm, who does not stare at my body or touch me when he does not need to, who laughs at my jokes and reverently mentions his ex-wife, who is not big or burly or brusque, asks if the carbon mockup looks okay, I cannot say No but I try in my body language, the scrunching of my nose, to convey No. When he repositions the mockup on my arm once, twice, then washes the blue ink off and tries again a third time, he is satisfied, says quietly, his face near my elbow, I’m a fucking badass. I’m a goddamn genius. I stare at the shop’s name on the wall: Sailor’s Luck. It still doesn’t look right to me but I cannot make myself say Stop, say, Wait, say, No.
Should I beg my daily bread or sun and shield? Is what I write in one poem.
I did not become a pastor, though intermittently I have been a pastor’s wife (and not, I’m afraid, a good one).
If so many of our poems are prayers.
Which is another way of saying questions. Which is another way of saying not knowing. Unknowing ourselves towards wonder.
Let us never be graduated from you, Lord. Even as / if we turn (away).
When my sons pray for a baby brother or sister, I don’t know what to say.
When they pray for justice—a quelling of police brutality, families reunited at the border, gun laws and green factories, marriage for all (each of which would enrage my father should he overhear them)—I want to flick the question into the air: what does prayer even do? I want to say to their small faces: prayer is not enough.
Even as this thought flits through me, I sense I’m wrong, like I’m wrong about a lot of things. Or, if not wrong, not yet right. I won’t know it for a while, that perhaps prayer’s work is not about getting, but shaping.
Maybe like the work of lament or protest: not making any one thing happen, necessarily, but creating space for the shape of longing, the shape of suffering. For being shorn to the roots. For waiting. For wonder?
Once, I wrote, small as a fawn I slept in the curl of my father’s arm,
held in that holding pattern we know as love . . .
Who is the ‘we.’ Is it, now, fright or shock or longing that keeps me from saying ‘me’?
My student writes a poem about her roommate who was sexually assaulted in the basement of a frat house. My student writes an essay exploring how, after the dance, in the hotel room, she didn’t say No when he touched her even though she wanted him to stop, how he stopped, at last, after he took off her underwear, how he kept her underwear. My student writes a short story where the main character says No but then when her boyfriend berates her, she lets him bring her to climax with his hand. Since he did not expect her to do the same for him, he’s confused days later (“Dude, what the hell?”) by their break up.
With each student—and these are camouflaged mash-ups from the dozens of writings I’ve received—I mark their pages and ask if they’d like to talk. Every last one of them does, but in all these years, essay after poem after story after essay after poem, only one has filed a report. They don’t know, or grasp, the word coercion. Me Too hasn’t hit yet. After it does, my students write about that, too, but mainly how they feel/field the backlash.
Keep asking questions, I tell them, after we hug, before we hug, mascara running down their cheeks, running out of tissues in my office. Keep telling your story. Let words do some work, too.
. . . you will find me, God,
like a dumb pigeon’s beak I am
pecking
every way at astonishment
—Ilya Kaminsky, “A Cigarette”
Don’t stop writing poems, my husband begs me. Please keep trying.
I have written about this before, but I am compelled to again, to lay it out like some terrible picnic: several years ago, without warning or reason, my son Jericho died deep into the second trimester of my pregnancy with him. I delivered him and held him in my arms and tried to say goodbye and though I did not know it then, the loss of my son would sear me in a way I had never before known: my first experience with catastrophic loss. Jericho, and multiple miscarriages after him.
I was a walking, writ-large lamentation.
Lamentation also is a kind of prayer, holy in its way. Wholly in the way, if it becomes unwieldy. If fear runs over wonder—not a cup running over but the tires of a flatbed truck. If it becomes psychosis.
I tried to turn away from poetry. I tried to turn away from God.
Later, I was diagnosed with Prolonged Bereavement Disorder, which also, somehow, re-ignited my Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, my very first dis-ordering, from childhood.
But for years I had no diagnosis, no language for it—only the cavernous gulch between the me I had been before my midwife uttered the words I’m sorry, the baby’s dead and the me after; between me and everyone and everything else, even my spouse and closest friends. My faith. I believed Jericho’s death to be, somehow, a result of God’s displeasure. Fear ate at wonder like a parasite.
Had God not, after all, been so sure about me. Forgotten to shoo me into fenced pasture? Let us prey . . .
Pastor –> Anglo-Norman French, pastour –> from Latin pastor, ‘shepherd’: from past-, fed, grazed –> from the verb pascere, to feed on, to graze
My mourning self both stretched away from and conflated with every other arena of my life.
Over the waters
Poetry, a space that had offered meaning-making, seemed to take a direct hit, as though located over a fault line. After Jericho’s death, I could neither read nor write it, another dizzying rupture. It took a long time for me to understand that the lines themselves felt so chaotic and disruptive, the imagistic leaping so willful and frenzied, the sensory details brash and manifest: every word enacted a magnification of my grief, the distance between what I’d understood as profound and necessary and the blistering loss(es) I was living.
Astonish: early 16th century, from obsolete astone ‘stun, stupefy’ –> from Old French estoner –> from Latin ex- ‘out’ + tonare ‘to thunder’.
The questions or spirit of questioning that had shored up and helped me settle into a sense of radical, pregnant mystery now battered me about as cavalier, piercing, too concentrated and far too certain—yes, doubt itself was a conviction. It was alive, and my son was dead.
And so, stupefied, except for the most keening of psalms, I put poetry aside altogether.
The voice of the LORD is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the LORD thunders over the mighty waters . . .
This hangs in the unsayable balance: not fear or wonder but fear and wonder.
Like my own students, I wrote (poems) before I knew or grasped the word coercion: I rendered in detail my dress, the car we sat in, how he pulled at my panties:
all you could think to say was
wait to which he said sorry sorry sorry
what you meant was no
what he meant was let me try again in five four three
And now, because I have spoken of God, and pastoring, and babies lost, I must also say how much I relied on choice, on being allowed, personally, medically, legally, to choose. In the years of patching together these stutterings this choice was maligned, then threatened, and now, taken almost entirely away. I have not yet said I almost died during one miscarriage, and now, might again. The No in me wells up in ways I do not know, yet, how to unleash, articulate, enact. A grave palimpsest of new grief and old. And always, an echo within an echo, the knowing this would enrage my father most of all if I had the courage to speak of it (I don’t have to tell you I don’t, do I).
The cord had knotted around Jericho’s neck.
It often does, they said. They said, It could have been hypercoiling. In his autopsy, they did not test the cord for hypercoiling. The autopsy offered [me] no explanation.
Silence, too, can thunder.
Was the line break
a reminder
When I leave the second tattooist’s parlor, having paid almost three times as much as the first time, it’s raining. I do not cry. I do not put up my umbrella but whack it against my thigh with each wet step back to the car. The disgust I feel is directed at myself: I was not an object, pleasing, but still I had let a man’s ego permanently etch itself, botched, on my skin. I had not wanted to displease him.
I didn’t quit language after all, even if it quit me. I did not turn from story. What I needed in the immense fracturing of self, when my grief and reckoning with trauma loomed like titans: a longer line, a semblance of narrative, a quieter chasing after and lassoing of physical and metaphysical experience, a line all the way from margin to margin.
(If empty spaces stun.)
Let us consider the prefixes: Be-wildered. Dis-mayed.
What was I before, then? Before my wildering meant being, my maying, dissed. Already I had lacked order, horribly. My extremes, legion.
Recalling the man in the car with me, months and months later, I end the poem as I spy a tree frog crawling along the porch swing where I sit:
carefully you reach to touch the frog so small
so composed and unaware you mean not to hurt it just
reassure yourself of living you too have been that still
a thin line of sweat on the crest of your lip
I can see it now, from a distance: some prose is another version of poetry, cousins resembling each other even if distinct. The lines run to the edge, but the fracturing and questioning: still there. If God is still there. If God is not shocked (by me). John Updike said as much, and also this: only truth, however harsh, is holy.
What /am/ I /am/ now: Mayed. Wildered. Hyper-disordered. But maybe not so knotted I will die.
It takes practice to say No, the actual word coming out of my mouth. I don’t know what the worst thing in the world is, but it might not be making a man mad.
I graze under the sky, waiting for thunder (a question, a prayer, a space, the unsayable, fear + wonder = not graduating nor being graduated; knowing this could—at any moment and for any reason or none at all—turn (back)
(is a way)).
