A Blog Post by James Diaz
There will be two worlds, poor child, always, between you and your heart’s desiring eye. Your passport – a pen, dollar store, faded, unsteady ink, some letters will not do their job, like you – they are half formed.
I want to hold you, little version of way-back-then, wild and broken, the dirt that became a second skin, edges of your journals smudged with prayers of brown and grass. You were not loved well, oh child, I know you hurt in ways that were impossible to crawl out of. Why did you think you could do it, poem your pain/ palm your dirt?
Jorie pushes her little one somewhere – is this a place you know, this earth where things are connected to their thingness and the will to say them, place, person, world, light, happening? This is her poem, not yours, and yet yours, she keeps you from dying hence you are here because she willed you through – what miracle, did you repay her, thank her improperly, bowed head, blushed, stammering, oh, tell me how the poem works, mother, tell me, how do you open it so easily and I – so, impossibly trailing behind, always behind?
She will run her fingers through your book, her book, one that you have carried for a decade, you even put that razor blade on top of it once, but her poem said; sleep it off again this time – and you did. Will you tell her this – no, this is too much, even for a poet, to bear. You run your fingers through my/your/our book looking for the misprint in the original design, oh, how more than metaphor opens up between us here (our flawed disintegrating world) there it is, the word runs off the page, see, you say, holding yourself out to me, it is you on that page, is it not/ You that saved me?
Your molecules press into parchment, my passport between two worlds, I carry you home now, skin, dna, enmeshed with flaw, the unspoken thank you for this second life, this one that is already quickly ending, you’ll chart it in Place, Sea Change, I see change but it’s not pretty, has no proper voice, no gentle hand, oh world, here, you give – like broken bread, like light, to the child.
In “Lapse” you are pushing love from a womb into wind, the world – broken, opens that way, of necessity- you must see for her, for us? Oh seer, what is beneath the braille? My fingers are dumb/blind. Can’t you show me how without making it obvious, that it comes from… you? This poem. My poem. Every —— one’s….
how you could see over the tops of the houses
up and over to where your own house is down there—
and the housing development, and the millions of leaves, and the slower
children lagging behind
I am stopped short, is there more? Isn’t it all right here: your own house – housing development, slower children – lagging – looking in on your scene of love/contemplation? Am I the other child, the one you do not mention, do not add the word public to? Am I fully or only half Hispanic, disadvantaged, otherworldly. I won’t know the love of your hands to the small of my back, the push off into the unknown, won’t have this poem to remember the world by, my house is on fire, I cannot be put out, I will burn, so many things here will burn.
A great poem, surely, it exists. You are the sturdier voice, the note hit just right. You know the landscape better than I and I love you for that, I am here because of that. Footprint in parchment, I was parched, drank from your ink, how could I not admit it, you are the greatest poet, I will not hesitate to say it…
Only, I think of the lagging, slower children, the (public) housing not our own, the fires raging, the poverty of… spirit/words. I think of our poems, such lesser species, how could they not be, I am asking, how could they not be lesser things? It seems you should want the answer as much as me, do you- want it? The world already is shrinking, will not have enough room for all of us/ species. How many poems will the aftermath want? How many lagging, slower voices/ will be fit into tomorrow? I am asking, how many?
Is there a poem for each of us, on that swing/ eternally – impossibly pushed/described with such perfect desperation? The slow, lagging speaker haunts me, it’s why I do not really say thank you for this second life, it’s why I never again open the book you left your skin cells on. It’s why I love you all the more for all that I can never write the way that you can, as if it is all there, as if we are all there, though we are not.
As if I had a house of my own. Oh slow children, what type of house should we build, public or private. I am asking, how many of us will fit into tomorrow?
Author’s Note: Quite a few years ago I attended a reading at a small upstate New York Library where Jorie Graham read from her latest collection. This essay, in part, describes the encounter between us as she leafed through my copy of a book that sustained me for a decade and a half, The End of Beauty, searching for the flaw in her book’s design, the place where the words ran off the page.
Another time, while reading Jorie’s poem “Lapse” — available online at the American Poetry Review — I was struck by the image of her and her child in a park, overlooking their house. It reminded me of parks in the rich part of town my father would take me to sometimes, on the weekend, when he had a day off from the factory. I was split inside. In some ways I’ve felt mothered by Jorie throughout my life. Her poems have walked me back from suicide countless times, and her love for her child in “Lapse” is so palpable. Yet this feeling of being on the other part of town arose in me. What to do with it? That’s one of the things I’m grappling with in this essay.
Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published on James Diaz’s personal website.
James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018). He is also founding editor of the literary arts & music journal Anti-Heroin Chic, which will be celebrating its third anniversary as a publication in January with a book launch of AHC’s very first print anthology: What Keeps us Here: Songs from The Other Side of Trauma. His work has appeared most recently in Drunk Monkeys and Peculiars Magazine. He lives in upstate New York. Visit him at https://jamesjdiaz.weebly.com/.