{"id":139285,"date":"2019-09-05T11:00:18","date_gmt":"2019-09-05T15:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=139285"},"modified":"2019-09-05T11:15:55","modified_gmt":"2019-09-05T15:15:55","slug":"poetry-rx-the-radiant-bodies-of-the-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/09\/05\/poetry-rx-the-radiant-bodies-of-the-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry Rx: The Radiant Bodies of the Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

In our column Poetry Rx, readers\u00a0write in<\/a> with a specific emotion, and our resident poets\u2014Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz\u2014take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This month, Claire Schwartz is on the line.<\/i><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Dear Poets,\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

I lost my father suddenly on New Year\u2019s Day. I have lived without him for over a year and a half now, and while I\u2019ve found that my heart is more resilient than I imagined, I\u2019ve started to fear the passing of time. The first of every new month feels like it\u2019s stabbing me with the reminder that time will not slow down. I\u2019m scared for this year to end, because right now I can still claim his death is recent, and it scares me that one day it will be in the distant past. I\u2019m scared that I\u2019ll start forgetting pieces of him, or that I\u2019ll stop thinking about him as much, which would feel like letting him die again. I\u2019m wondering if you can give me a poem about how to accept the passing of time and stop seeing it as the enemy.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sincerely,
\n<\/em>A Fearful Daughter<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Dear Fearful Daughter,<\/p>\n

I\u2019m so sorry for your loss. For you, Lisel Mueller\u2019s \u201cMissing the Dead<\/a>\u201d:<\/p>\n

I go home and put on a record:
\nCharlie Parker Live at the Blue Note<\/em>.
\nEach time I play it, months or years apart,
\nthe music emerges more luminous;
\nI never listened so well before.
\nI wish my parents had been musicians
\nand left me themselves transformed into sound,
\nor that I could believe in the stars
\nas the radiant bodies of the dead.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In mourning her parents, the speaker laments the fact that no clear record of their lives endures. Where can she look to find them now? But the secret of this poem is that the poem\u2019s first half\u2014ostensibly all about the speaker\u2014is not about the speaker at all. In wishing for a form left behind by her parents, the speaker turns toward the world: \u201cI have never listened so well.\u201d In not having anywhere in particular to seek them, she seeks them everywhere.<\/p>\n

\u201cI miss you more than I remember you,\u201d the protagonist in Ocean Vuong\u2019s novel On Earth We\u2019re Briefly Gorgeous <\/em>says of his friend who died. In that gap between missing and remembering is a record of living with someone who has gone. Missing is a kind of desire, and desire is a kind of collaboration. It\u2019s not that you\u2019ll start forgetting pieces of your father, so much that remembering will look less like retracing the past and more like re-membering\u2014piecing the past together differently in service of your present and your future. As time passes and the details of your father\u2019s life recede, give yourself space to grieve those transitions; then point to the fullness of your life as proof that he endures.<\/p>\n

\u2014CS<\/p>\n

\u00a0*<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Dear Poets,\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

I am on the brink of my college graduation, and I keep thinking about my old best friend. We began our friendship in sixth grade and were close throughout high school and the first year of college. We were both out of place in the suburb where we grew up, and we brought each other great joy. After the first semester of our sophomore year, she basically sent me a break-up text. It hurt, though I understood that our paths were diverging. I\u2019m upset we cannot celebrate this upcoming milestone together, and I\u2019m upset that that the version of her I\u2019ve seen on social media is a person so alien and unknown to me. I was wondering if you have a poem for the loss of a close friendship, or for the magic that is young female friendship, even if the relationship cannot last. Or, if there is a poem that expresses hope for such beautiful closeness, albeit maybe with less intensity, in our adult friendships as we age. Thank you.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Sincerely,
\n<\/em>Old Friend<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dear Old Friend,<\/p>\n

I responded to a similar note here<\/a>. I prescribed Langston Hughes\u2019s poem that describes the heartbreak of losing a friend with the kind of reverberating clarity that perfectly holds the wound and, in the shape of that understanding, offers some salve. I love, though, that you\u2019ve asked not only for a poem that deals with the pain, but one that celebrates friendship. I wanted to give you Angel Nafis\u2019s \u201cOmen to Get Your Ass Up<\/a>,\u201d which captures that life-affirming feeling of being truly seen: \u201cI am saved for a moment \/ the suspended heaven of being recognized.\u201d Or that ever-exuberant ode: Frank O\u2019Hara\u2019s \u201cHaving a Coke with You<\/a>,\u201d which reminds me how simply being with a friend can induce a wonder that requires the whole world to describe it. The poem I most want to offer you, though, is Aracelis Girmay\u2019s \u201cMoon for Aisha<\/a>,\u201d which Girmay wrote for her friend, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon. The poem opens:<\/p>\n

Dear Aisha,
\nI mean to be writing you
\na birthday letter, though it\u2019s not
\nSeptember, the winter already
\nnearing, the bareness
\nof trees, their weightlessness,
\ntheir gestures\u2014
\ngrace or grief. The windows
\nof buildings all shining early, lit with light
\n& I am only ten & riding
\nall of my horses home,
\nstill sisterless, wanting sisters.<\/p>\n

You do not know me yet.
\nIn fact, we are years away
\nfrom that life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s not, on the occasion of writing, Aisha\u2019s birthday. And yet, this letter, celebrating Aisha\u2019s being, takes in the whole year and the whole of the women\u2019s lives. Which is to say: Aisha opens a world of possibility\u2014a portal into their wide-flung lives and deep histories and buoyant desires. This is an adult friendship enriched by all that came before they met. As the poem continues, the speaker imagines Aisha before she knew her:<\/p>\n

& then, you, all nearly grown,
\nall long-legged laughter,
\nalready knowing all the songs
\n& all the dances,
\nnot my <\/em>friend, yet,
\nbut, somehow\u2014Out There.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Friendship, like other forms of relation, is neither fixed nor linear. For the friends you\u2019ve lost, there are also the not-yets who, someday, will be calling your name\u2014your losses, your dreams\u2014with their whole lives. The next great friendship that will hold you is out there, and, this time, when you meet that person, you will bring more of yourself along.<\/p>\n

\u2014CS<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Dear Poets,<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>Two years ago, I was overcome with the irresistible need to write a certain novel. This book would not leave me until I wrote it, and I labored over it for months. Before this, I had a \u201cgood job\u201d and decent career ahead of me, and I had always been frightened of giving into my literary urges. But the novel is a fabulist retelling of my father\u2019s death, and I could not walk away from it.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

I wrote this novel, and it is now in the hands of editors, and will come into the world someday soon. My pain is as follows: my boyfriend and my mother, those who love me most, have not read my book. I have begged both of them, and they have promised me\u2014sometimes my hope gets rekindled because they will read a page or two, and then abandon it for months. I am destroyed that those who urged me to chase my dreams now cannot be bothered to witness them. I want more than anything to share this enormous part of my heart with them. If my beloved asked me to read their work, I cannot imagine not rising to the occasion. Furthermore, both of them are readers in the genre that I\u2019ve written.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Do you have a poem for me that can ease the loneliness of being a writer? Of creating a world that those you love will not step into? I am so scared that my irritation and lonesomeness will turn into wicked resentment, and that it will eat both my art and my relationships alive if untended, but I cannot beg them yet again to read my book.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Thank you,
\n<\/em>Bereft Bibliophile\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dear Bereft Bibliophile,<\/p>\n

First of all, congratulations on completing your novel. That\u2019s a gorgeous accomplishment! I\u2019m sorry that your boyfriend and your mother have caused you pain by not reading it. The poem I want to offer you exists in a world different from the one you\u2019ve described. I want to share it with you because I return to it often when I think about the complex ecosystem of love and writing. Monica Sok\u2019s \u201cABC for Refugees<\/a>\u201d opens with a father teaching his child how to read:<\/p>\n

Cherub-bee-dee how does a man
\nwho doesn\u2019t read English well know that cherub-bee-dum
\nthose aren\u2019t really words-bee-dee.
\nBut birds.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

Cherub-bee-dee, cherub-bee-dum, like how my father says
\nFine then! Leave!<\/em>\u00a0My mother shouts,\u00a0Stupid! Dumb!<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The mother is frustrated, but the expression of her frustration\u2014\u201cDumb!<\/em>\u201d echoes the space of reading that the father creates: \u201ccherub-bee-dum.\u201d There is kinship there, a convergence even in opposition. The father, \u201cwho doesn\u2019t read English well,\u201d opens a world for the child and sets her on a path of flight:<\/p>\n

Birds? What are birds?
\nThanks to my father, reading with me, I have more feathers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With what she now knows, the child then calls back to her mother:<\/p>\n

Mother, mother. Repeat after me.
\nCherub-bee-dee, cherub-bee-dum!
\nWe read together before bedtime.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don\u2019t know why your mother and your boyfriend haven\u2019t read your book, but I wonder whether you might\u2014alongside that question\u2014turn to another question: in what other ways have your mother and boyfriend made your writing possible? To prepare someone to move into a place where you can no longer accompany them is a great act of love. Your loves helped you to build the life that you needed in order to make that novel\u2019s world, even if they won\u2019t visit; in turn, your writing, I hope, transforms you so that you can love better.<\/p>\n

I do think there is some loneliness inherent in being a writer. Creating\u2014putting into the world that which did not before exist\u2014means, for a little while at least, that you are dwelling alone. There is also deep comfort in being a writer because you will find readers, people who, for now, are still strangers to you but who, I have no doubt, will find something they need in your words. They will meet you there. To be a writer is to believe that you don\u2019t yet know all of your kin. It is an act of faith that you might find them. Your family, in loving you, has made your making possible, and there will be more, new family waiting for you on the other side.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014CS<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Want more? Read earlier\u00a0installments of\u00a0Poetry Rx<\/a>.\u00a0Need your own poem?\u00a0Write to us<\/a>!<\/i><\/p>\n

Claire Schwartz is the author of\u00a0<\/em>bound\u00a0(Button Poetry, 2018)<\/em>. Her poetry has appeared in\u00a0<\/em>Apogee,<\/em>\u00a0Bennington Review,<\/em>\u00a0The\u00a0Massachusetts Review, and\u00a0<\/em>Prairie Schooner, and her essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in\u00a0<\/em>The\u00a0Iowa Review,<\/em>\u00a0Los Angeles Review of Books,<\/em>\u00a0Virginia Quarterly Review,<\/em>\u00a0and elsewhere.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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