Sunday Pages: "So Long"

An old poem

Dear Reader,

Seventeen years ago, in the brief period after the birth of our first child but before the birth of our second, I found myself ensconced in the guest bedroom of our new house in the country. We had moved up from the city, where we’d lived for over a decade, about a year before. We didn’t have jobs that required us to go to an office, so we were home most of the time, just the three of us. We didn’t know a soul in Ulster County. We didn’t have any local friends. We didn’t even have a steady babysitter. Facebook and Twitter didn’t meaningfully exist yet. It was a strange time.

Coming up from the city, we decided that if we weren’t going to live in an urban area, we should live in the country, and not some suburb. (I was staunchly opposed to suburbs for some stupid reason.) But I soon realized that I didn’t much like country living. Our closest neighbors were single men living alone. One of them had what we joked was a blown-up meth lab on his property, an eyesore of a shed he claimed the town wouldn’t let him remove. The other, for the 2008 election, put up a “McCain-Palin” sign on the pile of junk on his lawn, probably in retaliation for our “Obama” sign. He left his up for years—literal years—after the election. Republican bachelors are the sorest of losers.

The power was always going out, and we didn’t have a generator. Once, in an ice storm, I was afraid we would all freeze to death. I’m scared of mice, and mice were forever scratching inside the walls, announcing their rodential presence on the premises. I didn’t like being so far away from civilization. I didn’t like being dependent on a car. I didn’t like not being able to walk to the store. We’d left the city because we felt isolated in Astoria and stressed out in NYC; riding the subway with a small child in a Baby Bjorn is not for the feint of heart. Now we were in this lovely but remote house, 90 miles away from everyone we knew. It was, to paraphrase Robert Plant, a lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time.

And so I did what prose writers have always done in these moments—or, rather, what they used to do, before the advent of social media. While the boy napped, I repaired to the vacant bedroom across the hall, took up pen and paper, and produced page after page of mortifyingly mediocre poetry.

For example, a poem called “Next Time” begins:

At 33, a third of my life is done
(Assuming I live to a hundred,
Which I won’t). Certainly Act One
Is over. The years have sped
By so fast, I didn’t realize the score:
I’m not young anymore.

This is, needless to say, cringingly awful—not least because, 17 years later, I now regard anyone who is 33 years old as being basically a child. I was being soooooo dramatic!

And yet I remember how I felt, writing that. I was convinced that something was ending—that part was true. I was also in an existential panic that I’d seen the last of certain friends who I deeply cared for, whose company I enjoyed, who were important to me, and how could this be? The rest of that mawkish poem calls out certain of these friends, wondering aloud if our paths would ever cross again. “I can’t quite accept that our time together has passed / Or that next time will be the last.”

I remember being particularly concerned, while writing those lines, that I would never see my high school girlfriend again. She lived on the other side of the country with her husband and children, probably wouldn’t go to any reunions, and I wasn’t ever planning on visiting Portland. I was deeply troubled about this. It’s hard to articulate, but it made me feel unsafe, somehow. And here is what happened: one of her dearest friends, quite by chance, bought a house not just in our town but on our street, a five-minute walk from where we lived. Literally within a year of writing that poem, and expressing the fear that I’d never see her again, my erstwhile girlfriend materialized in our dining room, her own infant in tow, talking to my wife about breastfeeding. That unlikely visit was the universe telling me: Dude, chill.

Mark Zuckerberg has made moot most of my old worries. I was in subsequent contact with everyone I mentioned in that poem, either on Facebook or IRL, as the kids say. But in 2006, five years into the administration of the second-worst president in the history of this country, I had no way to forecast what was coming. How was I to know that technology could, or would, make me feel less isolated?

I was thinking about that brief period of my life because similar concerns have recently cropped up. If and when Twitter breaks down, there will be people I know on there who I have no way of getting in touch with; what if I never hear from them again? And the planet certainly seems to be at an inflection point, as climate change is, as LB likes to say, in full boom.

So for today’s “Sunday Pages,” I thought I’d share the least bad of the poems I wrote 17 years ago. It’s about how we shouldn’t fear the end of the world. You know, real sunshiny stuff! I will add the caveat that this is an extremely pretentious poem, and I have resisted the urge to tinker with it. You’ve been warned.

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So Long

“...the warming predicted for the next century is on the same scale as the temperature difference between the last glaciation and today.” —Elizabeth Kolbert

Troy is sacked, razed, set on fire.
All is death: men women children cut down.
Bounded by high stone walls, the pyre
Glints on the sea, where men drown.

But Agamemnon’s armies cannot destroy
Aeneas, who flees ruin to a hero become.
Aeneas is all that preserves of old Troy,
But he is enough to found Rome.

We know this from Virgil, who set it to verse.
New are the names, but ageless the plot:
Godless city falls, Chosen One escapes the curse—
What happened in Sodom to Lot.

Jesus, Osiris, Prometheus’s liver,
Phoenix rising from ashes to fly away,
Cyclical tides, spring floods on the river:
Myths of rebirth. Time may

Not be linear, to souls who know infinity,
But earthtime is. Sooner or later, the tides will stop,
Man-made (thus mortal) gods perish, rivers run dry,
Phoenixes fall with a plop.

Our life force, what the French call élan
Vital, is a collective grand delusion, a lie
We must all of us believe in order to carry on,
A genetical joke. Why

Thirst for glory? Why hunger for fame?
Why lust for Virgils our honors to call?
Even if it’s Caesar or Christ, our name
Will recede beyond recall.

No matter the victories in battle we rack
Up, Nature will win the war. One day the casualty
Will be us. One day we’ll stop fighting back.
It’s the price of mortality.

The benighted will weep, contemplating such loss.
“Think! The accumulated knowledge of humankind
Gone up in smoke: planetary Nineveh.” What dross!
In sacred Sanskrit, we find

That nirvana means extinction. Siddhartha’s realization
That It Ends (and, moreover, that Not To Be
Is a devoutly-to-be-wished-for consummation),
Isn’t lost on me.

I say, let the ruined cities die—
Rebuilding is quixotical and vain.
I say, let the fallen towers lie—
They’ll only fall again.

I’m neither defeatist nor Doomsday prophet;
I love this moribund world that we’ve made.
I won’t feel rapture when our end’s been met;
I just won’t be afraid

To learn, as One, what dreams will come. I’ll take
Solace, furthermore, in communion, when
Eight billion raindrops enter the lake—
Who needs Virgil then?

If fall it must, then when the ball drops,
Let my voice join the chorus of man’s swan song,
And my soul know infinity when the music stops—
It can only last so long.

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Seventeen years ago, I was afraid I’d never see my friends again; I saw them. I was afraid the world would end; it didn’t. I was convinced my own career was on the wane; it wasn’t. Whatever modest writerly success I’ve achieved in this vale of tears happened after I wrote that poem. In fact, it was in that same room, around the same time, that I came up with the word “fathermucker” for stay-at-home dad, and wrote the first paragraphs of what became my second, and most personal, novel. We sold that house and bought a new one in the village proper, where the power rarely goes out, and there are streetlights, and I can walk to the drugstore, the deli, the pizza place, the bank, the college, the bar—even to a place that sells crystals and astrology books and tarot cards. Six weeks after the closing, the old house burned down.

Human beings have inhabited this planet for something like five million years. We’ll be here for five million more. We survived the last summer heatwave 125,000 years ago. We’ll survive this one. Surviving is what we do.

If something is ending—this is what eluded me 17 years ago—something is also beginning. The next thing might be worse, sure. Certainly it looks that way now. But this is what I learned from looking back on these old poems: the next thing might also be better. Bush begets Obama. Trump begets Biden. The first season of White Lotus begets the second season of White Lotus. And so on.

Wonders never cease, and wonder never dies.

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ICYMI

The great Ethan Bearman was our guest on The Five 8:

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Photo credit: Pixabay. Raindrops enter the lake.