Miraculously, Mercilessly
I have been reading Ada Limón’s latest poetry collection, The Hurting Kind, over the past two days the way it is meant to be read: aloud, into the quiet of my room, to the cat, imagining my floorboards are a field dotted with wildflowers, unanchored to the detailed problems of my life or the needs of everyone around me (see below) for as long as those covers are open.
I’m not generally so cutesy, but reading good poetry out loud has a magical, time-bending effect that gives way to such whimsy, even when the material is tough or tugs at something suddenly emotional (I read the line “Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?” - from the title poem, “The Hurting Kind” - burst into tears, and then laughed at myself for it because it reminded me of what Patrick Swayze says at the end of Ghost. While crossing into the light and some version of heaven, he both discovers and promises Demi Moore, “It's amazing, Molly. The love inside, you take it with you.” And then I started crying again).
I have always enjoyed this (the magic) about poetry, despite never feeling fully capable of explaining why I like or dislike a poem, despite, again, years of schooling. I have a degree I will never finish paying for that makes it seem like I would have a canned answer by now, but the best I can muster is a shrug and “it’s about vibes?” You and I both know it’s about more than that, but isn’t it sometimes better to think something is good without having to tear out all of its organs for examination on a cold metal table to prove it?
I started my studies as a Theater Education major (for which I blame Glee) but quickly found myself swallowed up in a lecture, surrounded by theater majors of all stripes who simply wanted it more - people who would likely be financially okay should their dreams never burn bright on a Broadway stage. I panic-emailed a trusted professor about my doubts and the gut feeling that pursuing writing would be a more practical, correct path for me. She counseled me and offered that I could try my hand at playwriting instead, but something about the mere suggestion of that made it clear to me: I needed out of the department entirely. I slowly twisted my courseload into that of an English major and felt better about the decision with every book read and workshop held.
One of the first poems I ever wrote in college began with the line, “I’m into guys who take Ambien for fun/and Ambien for serious,” inspired by my previously self-destructive heterosexual tendencies and a Tinder message I received that went something like, “I’m so high on Ambien right now.” Romance was very much alive in 2015! I wrote that insipid little line and thought to myself, “oh my god, I’m like the next Rilke.” Just kidding, I didn’t know who that was when I was 18. I’d bet $5 on the possibility that I lied about it at some point though, as I pretended to have read, watched, listened to, and known countless things for fear of seeming uncultured, stupid, or unfavorable in friendship, love, or even both at the same time. Being 18 is criminally uncomfortable. (Now feels like a good time to tell you I’ve never seen Boogie Nights, read A Brave New World, or listened to Death Grips. With this admission, I’m suddenly weightless.)
Eventually, I started taking nonfiction courses and fell in love with the essay. I rifled through my notebooks and word documents overflowing with poetry and thought, “damn, most of these guys are just essays with weird line breaks.” I stopped taking poetry workshops and went years believing I couldn’t possibly write another poem if I tried, because I’m dramatic, and because I felt I had nothing I could say gracefully. I relied on the clunk of long paragraphs and kept it moving, but on I read, falling head over heels for poets like Ross Gay, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Jennifer L. Knox, and the aforementioned, Ada Limón.
By and by, I’ve come to realize nothing is just one thing and genre is fake, or at least it often leaks and melds and happily rebirths itself into something new and hybrid, like when vanilla and chocolate soft serve are combined and become “Twist.”
Okay… does anyone want to give me a Genius grant now? No? I’ll settle for an ice cream cone.
The day I learned my father had died was actually the day after it happened. At the time, I was working at a bakery and had many alarms set minute-to-minute to startle me awake around the ungodly hour of 4 o’clock, counting backward from 60 with my eyes closed again and again before reluctantly peeling myself out of bed just in time to catch the first train.
That morning I closed out the first alarm to find a phone screen flooded with 50+ missed call notifications from my brother and a few from my mom. I knew instantly what news was on the other side of the line, regardless of not knowing anything about my father’s health or wellbeing beyond a quick call two Thanksgivings prior and a few upsetting voicemails he’d left me over the years. I hadn’t seen him since the day I graduated high school, nearly 4 years ago by that point.
Since early 2016, I have been a subscriber to poets.org’s Poem-a-Day emails. They appear in my inbox around 6 am, wordlessly guilting me for not waking up earlier (baker days and hours long behind me) to take advantage of the slow morning light. I almost never read them, guilted again for so behind on months of unread poems, but when I do, I obtusely think, “Wait, that was really good!”
The day after my father died, the day I learned it had happened, after calling my brother back, calling my mother, and calling the bakery to let them know I wouldn’t be coming in, I was left with nothing to do but sit in the dark and wait for the sun to rise from my shoebox, East Boston room.
I opened my email and found the poem “Florence, Kentucky” by Adam Scheffler waiting for me.
I invite you to take the time to read it now and encourage you to give it a spin out loud, even if it makes you feel a bit awkward or dumb.
In a short blurb about the poem, Scheffler says of the feeling behind it, “there is beauty in how people go on despite the many degradations visited upon us.” Little did he know that it would be e-blasted to me on such a confusing and gloomy morning, during the hours I spent crying while trying to not wake up my roommates (which did not work), working up the courage to give my grandmother a call. If I were a stand-up comedian, I’d craft a few minutes of material about this morning because it’s actually funny, in a sick way. For example, my best friend and roommate at the time was struck down with food poisoning from a Sweetgreen salad and thought I was crying because I was disgusted by the sound of vomiting. Comedy gold, no? (I just read that back and it’s probably not as funny as I feel it is, but I’m not editing it out. Throw your tomatoes.)
The degradation visited upon me that Scheffler described was not my father’s death, or my vomiting roommate, exactly, but the fact that it all happened to be immediately chased by the Patriots' Superbowl victory parade in the city of Boston. I sat on our uncomfortable Wayfair couch, for the first time a girl with a dead father, and watched thousands of people pour into downtown on the local news, all drunk before noon.
I’d experienced the debaucherous joy/chaos a few years earlier after a prior Patriots Superbowl win, the parade always looping around my college’s campus. I remember elbowing my way through the beer-soaked crowd, watching punches be thrown in every direction, attempting to travel from a class back to my dorm, when a glob of yellow spit landed just below my neck and began sliding down the front of my winter jacket. An ugly man shouted something at me about my lack of respect for the team in reference to my plain, non-Patriots clothing. I kept walking. It was what I believe future historians will call a “Boston baptism” and also what I call “a poem.”
Because I was already more than aware of the degradation awaiting should I attempt to flee the uncomfortable quicksand of grief - I skulked down the street with a friend to look at the water, to look at the skyline afforded to us from across the river, trapped a tunnel away from the comfort of my favorite tree. This in retrospect is not so important, but as it unfolded, hurt me in a deep, untouchable place. My favorite tree. Time, after learning of a death, feels endless but also moves rather quickly. I’d be boarding a bus to Long Island, thoughts of trees behind me, well before the paradegoers’ hangovers would dare start to fade.
But back to that poem - isn’t it great for so many reasons? Don’t worry, this is not a pop quiz. It moved me that morning in February for its images: a subject’s unhappiness being likened to the radiance of a cleat and the sharpness of an ice skate. It’s the final stanza that arrested me most, though - wrapped up in my bedsheets, back against the scratchy, wall-sized tapestry, swallowing waves of sadness, relief, disappointment, and pain. It gives me pause still:
and I think of the ice I waded out
on as a kid, of how often the world
seems like it’s going to shatter,
but then, miraculously,
mercilessly, does not.
Miraculously, mercilessly. Do those adverbs not sum it all up? In Ada Limón’s poem, “The Hurting Kind,” she writes, “You can’t sum it up. A life.” But everything is a miracle. And everything is cruel. And on it spins.
Adam Scheffler wrote everything I’ve ever wanted or tried to say in two simple, underutilized words. They both brought me great comfort in the face of such a profound moment: my father’s passing was unsurprisingly complicated, and it was hard to accept or process the wild onslaught of feelings that surged through me that first day, and the weeks and months to come of that year. How often the world seems like it’s going to shatter, but then, miraculously, mercilessly, does not. On and on we spin until we don’t.
This has been an elaborate warning to you that any given day someone in your life dies, you will still receive things from all the email lists you are on. When you are stuck in the shock of the moment, and turn towards the everyday routine of checking your various apps and communication tools, you will be greeted by the familiars, and perhaps you will stop to read a poem, a recap of the news, or an Old Navy sale announcement. Miraculously, mercilessly, there may not be anything special waiting, no sign or divine message such as the one I stumbled into, but emails? They will continue appearing, and piling, and sweating it out.
Whatever awaits you in your inbox on those dreadful, difficult days, I hope to god or whatever that it’s never this one.
Read poems out loud. Delete emails? Find the funny. Cry, probably. Leave the rest.
Big miraculous, merciless love,
kaylasomething