A Fresh Poem: "Staying"

And a few words on it, for those who would like them.

“Study of Clouds with a Sunset near Rome,” Simon Alexandre Clément Denis, c.1786.\

Dear friends,

I am sorry that I have not been able to hold to my usually-punctual posting schedule over the past few weeks. This has been for two reasons. The first is simply that my work life, for mostly wonderful reasons, has been very full. (One large announcement on this front will go public this week, for those interested.) I have simply had fewer evening hours to write, and less energy with which to write well. I forecast a shift in that in the coming weeks. Here’s hoping!

The second is a bit more of a big picture dilemma. In beginning these dispatches, I committed myself to trying to be more raw and direct than I am used to being in my writing. I can be, frankly, a picky and obsessive writer. I like to work with dense ideas, and to multiply images. I like to fiddle with things. I keep finding myself gravitating toward longer pieces, toward ideas that take TIME to let them develop and percolate. I was afraid early on that I would feel the pressure to release half-baked things. I was right. I do feel that, though I am trying to resist it. I find myself constitutionally struggling to release something that I do not feel is DONE, yet am torn.

My beloved encourages me to write shorter pieces, saying that not everything needs to be an essay. I see the logic, but then I hesitate to keep a good piece short, as I write and rewrite it as if it is going off to The New Yorker or something, which of course it very much is not. But hey, I like a little development. I do not want to be more noise. If you are reading my words, I want them, even if imperfect and bearing the occasional lame thought or glaring typo, to be worth it for you. I have already worked for four hours on a piece that I was hoping to share … last Friday? And now it is all just terrible! I can never publish it! O Fortuna! My valve!

With that in mind, if you are a regular reader, would you take this poll? I am genuinely interested in your feedback, which you can also send by message if you have anything to say on the matter.

And now, on to today’s poem. This is one that I wrote a few months ago, which will appear in The Locust Years (my forthcoming collection) and which I first shared via video to X/Twitter. I share it here for the week of the Feasts of All Saints/All Souls, in which we remember the faithful departed, and especially those people who are dear to us.

A few words of explanation follow below for my (very kind) paid subscribers.

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Staying 

That clock whose long hand is the setting sun,
whose short hand is the moon, whose face the sky,
whose gears are wound each year by God’s bright key, 
which chimes each spring with birds sprung out the tree,
that clock whose pendulum inscribes the sea,
has stopped for you, dear one. But not for me.

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It was not until beginning to write a few notes on this poem that I realized it may have been influenced by a story my Grandmother Irene told me as a boy of ten, when I was staying in Bend, Oregon with her and my grandfather.

There was a very old mantle clock in the room in which I slept, a clear-voiced, chiming clock which she told me had been a wedding gift to some beloved pair of our ancestors, and always kept perfect time, at least until the death of the husband, at which point it stopped completely, and defied all attempts to repair it. It was kept for sentimental reasons, but sat for years, until (you have already guessed it), the death of the wife. At this point, it began to run again, and never missed a minute since. (Yes, I am aware of the similarity of the first part of this tale with a certain folk song, and am just slightly suspicious about the whole thing, but well, Grandma told it as family fact, and a family fact it shall be.)

It was a good tale to tell a kid who has to sleep for a week in the room with the skeletal ticking of the loud ghost-clock! (Thanks, Grandma!) But whether you believe in such things or not, it seems to me there is a truth in that old story. Time stops working right when those who love one another are separated. Something basic changes and goes out of the world. Something breaks.

Yes, something breaks, and yet the world goes on. That second bit is the heart of the poem. The physical world keeps time. The sun rises like a strong man to run his course. The celestial bodies make their steps, and perfectly on time. The cuckoo pipes the arrival of the Spring, ducking in and out of trees. And you and I, the living, watch the intricate clock of the world and marvel that it has not stopped when the world of one that we loved so dearly stopped. Perhaps you aso know this feeling. Perhaps you know it very well.

My grandmother, with all of my grandparents, is long gone into the next life. She, like so many others that I have loved, are held in this little poem. Dear friends and close family. Ones whose voices I can still seem to hear, the smell of whose clothing I can still, almost, remember. They are gone. We are not. We stay. At least we are staying for now.

To inhabit time is to share a home with death. For there to be a present, there must be a past and future. For there to be a past and a future, there must be a was and a will be. This is all so basic as to be obvious. But the obvious may still be profound. In death, is becomes was. Now becomes then. We becomes me.

Later this week, Christians around the world will celebrate the Feasts of All Saints and All Souls. We remember this (with much corn syrup and macabre lawn decorations) mostly as Halloween, but the point held in all of it is to help us remember those who have moved beyond time. We mark a day on the calendar in order to anchor that ever-lengthening list of names that each of us hold in remembrance. We mark this with a day because such a thing needs to to be done in time, on beat with the clock of the earth and the sky. Why? Because though they are departed from us, we are told, and told by sources we choose to deem reliable, that they are alive to God. And so we anchor them, just a little, to time. We note that the clock keeps going, and remember them on the turns of it. It is good to do this.

That is enough to say, for we who are staying. It is just good.

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The poem is written in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is odd, but I hope that you are simply carried along by it. Don’t think about it too much, but if you do think about it, let’s observe that this is what it looks like:

A
B
C
C
C
C

This really is a little strange. It begins as blank verse (unrhymed regular metrical lines, usually iambic pentameter), but then the final four lines are clear end rhymes, and one a very basic sound in English: “ee.” The repetition of this sound comes as a subconcious surprise, and “holds” you a little. It keeps time.

I will let you explore the poem to find a few more little things that may be worth noticing. (One might be some very nice sounds used, another is that the poem definitively ends with “me,” perhaps much like my life will.)

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I have often thought of a concept from some short writing of Jorge Borges—that God is perhaps able to grasp the shape that a man’s path makes through the world as immediately and completely as you or I can comprehend the simplicity of a square or a triangle.

When a death comes, the shape of a life in time and in space, is completed. The shape is final, the story, from our perspective at least, concludes. A life moves from the dynamic to the static, or at least it appears to do so from the vantage point of the living. (The dead may have a different experience—I am genuinely curious to find out, though not eager to satisfy that curiosity particularly soon.)

But whatever that shape, and whatever thoughts we may think about it, we feel this separation and subsequent crack in time with a little pang of surprise. They are gone, and yet no one bothered to inform the world. This is at first experienced with a little sense of offense. But later, one realizes that it is precisely as it ought to be. This is an indescribable comfort, and a gift.

Things go on. We try to keep our calendar, and the beautiful clock of the world keeps time.

For us, at least. For now.