how do we keep moving?

on trying to string together a sentence, thinking about love, and a bunch of poems by lots of poets

H. once told me that she believed the opposite of depression has to be expression – that the only way to move past the feeling of being stuck is to begin to let it pass through by expelling it from the trap of our bodies. And for a minute, I thought this meant that the only way to make feeling like the world is ending go away is to talk about it to someone who thinks it isn’t and let their sureness comfort me. Except I’ve noticed that when I’m in the thick of being sure that the world is ending, there’s not a person I could talk to whose sureness would comfort me. It offends me, actually, when someone tells me that everything will be okay and that this too shall pass and that my sadness is as fleeting as my joy. It bothers me to have to feel that the massiveness of my fear should be soothed by some trite truth. To remind me that everything will be okay is to assume that I don’t already know that, but I do. I do know it will be okay.

So, spare me the banality.

Instead, let me express a few things:

1.     That no one loves like women love – the gentle touch on the shoulder; a kitten placed in your lap while you cry but don’t want to be seen; a private text asking, “are you ok?” when you are both sitting in a group of friends and she notices you have been typing on your phone with a speed that is never assuring; offering you a coffee without a word; listening to you work through the eighteenth crisis you’ve had this week without pointing out how much of it, in fact, is not a problem at all; stocking her fridge before you visit; acknowledging the burn out before you have to explain it so that you never feel like you have to acknowledge it yourself; saying the scary thing for you; reminding you to apologize; reminding you to breathe; reminding you that this life is worth living by handing you a perfectly ripe avocado

2.     That I am thinking of my teenage obsession with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and now in my slightly more grown self, I am wondering what it was about the lines, Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”/Let us go and make our visit that preoccupied me so completely; how I wonder what it was about hearing, There will be time, there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;/There will be time to murder and create/And time for all the works and days of hands/That lift and drop a question on your plate;/Time for you and time for me/And time yet for a hundred indecisions/And for a hundred visions and revisions/Before the taking of a toast and tea, that still makes a pause swell up in my throat; how I wonder if there really will be time to wonder if I dare, to turn back and descend the stair; how I still wonder if I dare disturb the universe; that more and more, I have measured out my life in coffee spoons; and that with the more I have to say, the more I am learning it is quite impossible to say just what I mean

3.     That I’m still not sure how much of love is an offering yourself like a present to the people you love and how much of it is giving yourself like a duty – I don’t know at what point or which relationships it’s okay to say are too much work; I don’t know how much of me is supposed to be a gift and how much of me is bound by duty; I don’t believe that you are something precious and that you owe no one anything, but I also don’t believe that you are meant to give yourself away without thought; I don’t know how to politely say that only parts of me love you and that there are parts of me that only love to be loved

4.     That twice this week, I have woken up with the lines from Katie Farris’ “Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World” in my head, Why write love poetry in a burning world?/To train myself, in the midst of a burning world/to offer poems of love to a burning world; that I am learning that I will lose faith in love before I lose faith in love poetry; that even if I can’t write it, I believe in it, I believe in it so deeply, the power it has to save us all from the way we doom ourselves to lovelessness; that the only reason I am holding on in this burning world is knowing that there will be so many hurting people who will need someone to read the poetry they write, how all I have to offer now is how badly I want to read it all

5.     That I am, once again, preoccupied by nooks – we drove past open fields yesterday and seeing a tree made my heart ache for how badly I wanted to climb the trunk and lie across a branch; I have been looking at every comma and apostrophe I type and thinking of the curve, how gentle it would be to slope inside of one, to let it hold me and the banal truths I don’t want to acknowledge; how I see my heart again as a small bedroom, the upper-left drawer of a chest of drawers, a birds nest; how sometimes, lately, when at work, I think briefly of climbing under my desk and working from there and I resist the urge only because I don’t know how to tell people I am shrinking and want the world to shrink with me and my world feels about as big as the space under my desk

6.     That I can’t stop thinking about Aracelis Girmay’s poem, “You Are Who I Love” for how it made me weep the first time I read it, how she says, You are who I love/summoning the courage, making the cobbler/getting the blood dawn, sharing the difficult news, you always planting the marigolds, learning to walk where you are, learning to read wherever you are, you baking the bread,  you come to me in my dreams, you kissing the faces of your dead where you are, speaking to your children in your mother’s languages, tootsing the birds/You are who I love, behind the library desk, leaving who might kill you, crying with the love songs, polishing your shoes, lighting the candles, getting through the first despite the whisperers sniping fail fail fail…”; for how much courage it takes, for how I love, for how I have been loved, for how the whisperers snipe fail fail fail; how I have kissed the faces of my dead, how they come to me in my dreams to remind me they love me still

7.     That sometimes I worry that my hopelessness is a sign of my lack of faith; how I wonder if my insides are weak and my conviction is lackadaisical; how my most fervent prayers are to hold tightly to that which seems to slip through my fingers; how I am hoping that my intentions to be good will make up for all the ways that I fall short; that even in my sleep, I am trying, that I am looking for the thing to hitch my heart and my hope to and to hold on, hold on, hold on

8.     That I believe Ron Padgett’s “How to be Perfect” will be the “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” of my 20’s, because I am newly preoccupied with how he says, Hope for everything. Expect nothing. Take care of things close to home first. Straighten up your room before you save the world. Then save the world. Know that the desire to be perfect is probably the veiled expression of another desire—to be loved, perhaps, or not to die; how there are desires stacked inside of me like a child’s first game of Jenga, with a belief only the young can have that structure will prevent collapse; how my heart is a small catastrophe

9.     That I think Anna Świrszczyńska was on to something when she wrote “There is a Light in Me” and said, Whether in daytime or in nighttime/I always carry inside/a light./In the middle of noise and turmoil/I carry silence./Always/I carry light and silence; I know that Jane Hirschfield was right when she said I know that hope is the hardest love we carry; I know Langston Hughes felt what I feel when he wrote “Island”, Wave if sorrow, Do not drown me now; I see the island, still ahead somehow. I see the island and its sands are fair: Wave of sorrow, take me there.

10.  That all I have is a small sprig of hope that lives inside of me despite it all; how I know that faith is like watching flowers grow in concrete, there may be an explanation but the only way it can be a poem is when, even then, you allow yourself to recognize it for a miracle; how I am young, still, despite the aging of my heart, and how like Wendy Xu who writes, in “Things Other People Are Good At” the only thing I ever made which is worth anything at all is a promise to my friends to keep moving

I will keep reading poems and I will keep moving. I hope you will too.

with love,

mariam