I know how
instinctively I wait
fingernail between
bottom teeth
unwise alphabet of
teen-aged secrets
welling up just
above my
knees
there is a hole
in the crotch of my
jeans I must finger
a window I must
clean
there is a god
whose word is due
any day now
any hour
still I could
strangle every
bird that sings
I know how
to not
I have often struggled to reconcile the God of the Old Testament with the God of the New Testament.
I like logic, patterns. The comfort they provide. Even as I lack consistency myself, I search for it in others.
There was a period in my life, a dark period, in which I sat, silent, smiling, before a man who believed I was someone that my silence confirmed I was. For days after our encounters, I struggled to carry myself, to compose my body. Walking down the street, for example, was a task requiring focus; it felt like the earth itself had tilted. It had, but it was my own doing; I should not have been surprised.
My name meant nothing to me, I hardly answered to it. I was a badly trained dog in those days, sweet-seeming, but capable of biting the hand feeding it. And also capable of curling up in a ball and sleeping peacefully when caged. Like all animals, I suppose.
My mind longed for the ease of docility, for my own submission. My body refused, incongruent. It was as though some other flesh existed within my flesh, identical yet opposed.
I became afraid of what I could do. What I might do.
So what happened to Him? God, I mean.
There is an answer to that question that I remember, but I can’t recall who spoke it to me.
The answer is a question. Wouldn’t having a child change anyone?
For by fire and by his sword will the Lord plead with all flesh: and the slain of the Lord shall be many.
—Isaiah 66:16
Tom’s poem is a meditation on rage and persistence. There is a subjugation to understanding what must be done. Endless possibilities whittled to dust.
If I had to write a simile about life, I’d say life is like starving at a feast.
And I’d say this is a poem about knowing better than one’s own desires. Knowledge isn’t always power; sometimes it’s deprivation. Forgoing earthly delights in the name of some Other thing.
Sonically, this poem flows like a folk song, from between bottom teeth to teen-aged secrets, knees, jeans, clean, sings...
The ending couplet, I know how / to not, slips off the tongue with languorous Os but abruptly halts with the ending consonant T. Up to this point, the assonance and repetition threaded throughout the poem worked like a lullaby.
One of the best ways a poem can render to us our worlds, our bodies, our souls, I think, is by forcing us to accept what we least expect.
Poetry as sublimation.
For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement for the soul.
—Leviticus 17:11
Flesh without blood is dead weight, an object, lifeless, something that can only be acted upon.
Flesh is a noun, blood is a verb; it has always been so. If flesh is form, blood is the movement of the tongue speaking the poem. Together, they complete each other.
There are parts of Tom’s poem that to me feel bypassed by the rush of blood coursing from the first letter to the last. I think there are ways we can redirect, concentrate.
In general, for me, adverbs and adjectives don’t do much in a poem. “Instinctively” and “unwise” tell us something that feels as though it’s being relayed in a different time, by a different person, with less of a stake in the world of the poem: there’s no immediate risk of danger.
A poem should feel like it’s happening for the first time, to the speaker and the reader; it should always feel like there’s something to lose, not something already lost.
Similarly, “alphabet” and “secrets” are nouns too general and cerebral to be as incisive as I think they need to be; “welling up” is an action too passive to feel embodied, feel human.
But the parts of the poem that I believe work the best cause me to shudder, as if some other spirit is using my body as its own, if only for a moment.
We are made in His own image: each of us little Gods, full of power, love, rage and, of course, violence.
Like He created, we create, turning nothing into something, suns that burn and skies that storm and wild animals that fuck and fight and bite to kill.
And like we are a reflection of Him (we are Him) what we make is a reflection of us (it is us).
The poem isn’t just a body, it is our body. It should be impossible to locate where one ends and the other begins.
Some holy transformation must occur, like eating soft bread and knowing it is the body, sipping dark, sweet wine and knowing it is the blood.
Many things can be true at once. Truth is contradiction.
How do you separate the singer’s voice from his throat?
Everything emanating from him is touched by his saliva, his teeth, the flesh and blood-warmed tissue lining his lungs and tongue and trachea.
Knowing that the sound and the body are two different entities does not stop them from also being one, like a thread endlessly pulling apart and coming back together.
How we come into the world - pulled from the flesh and bones of another, fresh off the lips of some God - must be how our poems do, too.
My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.
—Psalms 73:26
Psalms are poems, but are all poems psalms?
I think they could be; I think they should be. What is the difference between a psalm, a song, a prayer and a poem?
The poets behind the Psalms speak in a voice all-knowing: they don’t lack the awareness that their bodies will perish, but nevertheless are confident in life everlasting. They speak in an omniscient voice that does not waver.
A poet, above all, must believe. Not only believe, but do so at the cost of anything (everything) else.
I see this kind of certainty in the final couplet of Tom’s poem: “I know how / to not.”
A poem unsure of the world it is in, the body it is inhabiting, goes nowhere, dies like the flame of a candle, slowly then in an instant.
Like a psalm, a poem needs to declare itself.
My flesh, my heart, my portion...
Everything comes down to the sound.
A noise that, when repeated, proves its strength all over again.
All flesh shall perish together, and man shall turn again unto dust. If now thou hast understanding, hear this: hearken to the voice of my words.
—Job 34:15-16
Maybe God is a way for us to immortalize our frail human form; maybe God is a conduit.
Maybe we blame our worst impulses on Him; maybe we created God’s rage so we would be able to confess to each other our own rage, what we’re capable of.
Maybe we use God to triangulate. When we are unable to speak, we let our words pass through Him.
Maybe God is what stands between us and what we fear the most. Who we fear the most.
In God I have put my trust; I will not fear what flesh can do unto me.
—Psalms 56:4
What Tom’s poem is missing, I think, is that third point between the speaker and God, the Other.
Anne Carson wrote of Sappho’s use of triangulation in Eros the Bittersweet, explaining how the erotic tension of Sappho’s Fragment 31 is created by the lover, the beloved and, crucially, the distance between them.
There is some shadowed force behind the “secrets” alluded to in Tom’s poem, and I believe the speaker can use his relationship with God to, in some way, face what he doesn’t want to face, name what he doesn’t want to name.
For God to exist, temptation must as well: a little Devil in all of us, a serpentine collective.
I know how
instinctively I wait
[where? place the body]
fingernail between
bottom teeth
[transition to next image,
possibly with new stanza]unwise alphabet of
teen-aged secrets
[describe the secrets with imagery instead, what they look, taste, sound, feel like; channel them through their Other; who or what else is implicated here?]welling up [different, forceful verb] just
above my
knees
there is a hole
in the crotch of my
jeans I must finger
a window [to what? let the reader see] I must
clean [what is dirtying it? let it dirty the reader as well]
there is a god
whose word is due
any day now
any hour
[an opportunity potentially exists here to juxtapose God and the Other before returning to the speaker]
still I could
strangle every
bird that sings
I know how
to not
This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.
—Genesis 2:23
When introducing a third subject into the poem, wedged between self and God, two opposing forces will take effect at once:
A third, Other presence will complicate the poem.
This third presence will serve as the missing link in a trilogy, unifying the poem into a singular body.
When I shared my thoughts on Tom’s poem with him, this was his response:
Perhaps the third entity at play is the knowledge that "god" created me, my fingernails, the hands that put my jeans on, the person that installed the window, the birds, my knees. The knowledge that "god" knows my secrets, too. In hindsight, all of my poems are about what "god" has done and what "god" knows.
Or perhaps the shadow that exists in my work is the embodiment of what I know no one else can know. And "god" is the entity that exists solely to make the nature of a secret less lonesome.
I have always felt sadness and regret over the distance that my secrets create between myself and others, landing me on an Earth I no longer recognize.
I find myself deeply comforted by the idea of a God who serves to keep me company in that Other place, and then take me home.
Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, the further you are, the closer you get.
To be considered for a future Body Composition newsletter, please email 2-5 poems and a biographical statement to fmkrit@gmail.com.
"I find myself deeply comforted by the idea of a God who serves to keep me company in that Other place, and then take me home." oooooooooof!