From AN ARS POETICA

JULIANA SPAHR

^
Earlier in this day of cool breezes and beer,
a friend had dropped by on his way to the doctor
to get an all day ketamin push.
Years ago he had been bitten by a tick,
a tick that may or may not have been weaponized
but whether the virus he had in his blood was created by a state
or just by the things we are doing to the environment in this moment,
and maybe those are the same thing,
he was now in pain all the time.
The ketamine was to reset his pain receptors.
They had already had to detox him from opiates in the past
and didn’t want to have to do it again.
A nurse was going to push the dose incrementally
and take him into a hole for an hour.
Before he left, I asked him when he was in
to figure out why there was poetry.
He texted me hours later.
It said:
Orange and yellow. The breeze off the bay.
He meant that same breeze I had been enjoying with beers.
He added:
The clouds.
Mount Diablo in the distance.
The warm sun.
Then a few days later he texted:
There needs to be some pleasure in the world.
And, a few minutes later,
Poetry is the what is left of life.
More singing.
I texted back Brecht:
In the dark times. Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.


^
That night I thought if I just read all of Brecht,
I would maybe find the singing.
So I began to read Brecht that night,
in bed with my son while he too read before he went to sleep.
There was a new edition.
It was hard to hold because it was so big.
I rested it on a pillow and I rested my head on a pillow
and I turned the pages looking for the singing.
I couldn’t find the singing.


^
What I found instead was a series of questions.
I was reluctant, imageless, lost a little too,
not in the middle of the words but in the middle
of all that defines this world, this moment,
a busy street corner might be the only way to think of it.
Poetry should be a place for the questions, not for the answers,
some say. But when I read poetry, it felt as if poetry thought poetry could hold answers.
And maybe it needed to do so in this minute for some.
But I needed otherwise.
When I said, I am lost,
they said come down to the plaza.
I said ok and I suited up, by which I mean I put on my jeans and
my running shoes and my many layers of flannel
and struck a water bottle in my bag.
I met them there in the afternoon light.
We milled around, listening to others declaim.
Nodded our heads at those we recognized.
Dark came early and suddenly the moms were getting teargassed.
Elsewhere, some sort of feds,
we didn’t even know who they were,
were disappearing people.
The next day we learned the term “show of force”
was also a helicopter maneuver.
There were avatars on twitter
who would sometime lecture-tweet:
those of you who don’t notice how fascism arrives,
I can assure you it isn’t on cat’s feet.
As if we had not read our history.
As if we had never felt the sharpness of a cat’s claws.
It wasn’t that we didn’t notice.
We did and it didn’t help.
Some of us gathered their children close
and decided to wait it out.
Others showed up.
Still others just left the consciousness of earth.
Some of these others momentarily.
Too many of them permanently.
I asked one who came back from death
what it was like over there
and he said nothing; it is nothing.
I picked up Brecht again.
I wanted to learn how to write all the peace and the war,
the order and the chaos,
the joy and despair at the same time.
What is a poem, I told myself, if not that magical thing
that inventories everything so that the harms and hurts
of all our lives are understood in some way.
Brecht did not answer.
Turned to Rukyeser.
Also did not answer.
I thought briefly of that shield made for Achilles,
The one where the moon and the sun shine at the same time.
The one with the two cities.
With the sowing and the reaping.
The one that ends with the ocean
And then went back to twitter and watched
the video of the federal militia
arrest an old man who brought a leaf blower
to a protest so as to blow back the endless teargas.


^
There are moments where we know what to do 
which is show the fuck up. 
And there are moments when we know to show the fuck up
but can’t or don’t or are too tired.
And then there is the rest of life. 
I go to little league games as often as I talk about revolution.
More often than I talk about poetry.
Like the song of summer the foul ball always comes out of nowhere. 
And all the kids run for it. 
This happens multiple times each game.
I’ve got it. I’ve got it. 
They all yell this. 
I’ve got it.
Rarely does anyone have it.
In the hours before dusk the light is luminous. 
And I recognize it as the boyfriend of the breeze.
After the game, I watch my son and his friends
jump over a fountain.
Daring each other. 
They know any of them could slip,
miss the ledge on the other side
fall into the water
and split their head open.
This mild danger is their life. 


^
Sometimes I wear my Sappho hat 
And sometimes I wear the one that says HOWL to these games.
I have refused the one that says Spicer, but that’s another story.
The song that summer was the one about Old Town Road.
I hated it at first and then I loved it
And when I saw the kids screaming it as they walked away
from the baseball field one night, I knew
this was about the rest of life. 


^
In the rest of life there will be singing for sure.
And yes, there will be singing in the end times. 
But is it the end times? 
I hope if anyone reads this in the near future
everything in this poem looks foolish and wrong. 
I hope we say we were dumb to exhaust ourselves, 
to risk the punches and the kicks.
Dumb to make everything have two factor log-ins.
Dumb to call my mom and freak her out for no reason. 
Dumb to worry everything. 
For yet the world and the leaves continue to exist 
Dumb to not spend time with the yellow veins. 
With flowers.
With large, compound leaves. 
Arranged. Alternately on the stem.
11-33 leaflets. Occasionally up to 41.
One to three teeth on each side. Close to the base. 
Everything. Panicles up to 30 cm long.
Everything.

JULIANA SPAHR is a poet, critic and teacher. Her most recent book is Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment from Harvard University Press, and her most recent poetry collection is That Winter the Wolf Came from Commune Editions. With David Buuck she wrote the novel Army of Lovers. She has edited, with Stephanie Young, A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism (Chain Links, 2011), with Joan Retallack, Poetry & Pedagogy: the Challenge of the Contemporary (Palgrave, 2006), and with Claudia Rankine, American Women Poets in the 21st Century (Wesleyan U P, 2002). Previously, she edited the book series Chain Links with Jena Osman, the collectively funded Subpress with nineteen other people, and Commune Editions with Joshua Clover and Jasper Bernes. 

Originally published March 2021 in poiesis 2.1 by w the trees.