Five Lines / Issue 8
Wiman's spice stores, Towers' medicine ferns, Garcia's stillness, and summery vibes from The National. Also, aliens in the garden.
Hello loved ones. This is the Five Lines curated poetry letter, in which I share poetic stuff I’ve discovered and why it matters to me. Five Lines is, like everything else here at Tethered Letters, AI-free.
1. “Something to get a fire going / and something to put one out.”
“I Don't Want to Be a Spice Store”
Christian Wiman, from Survival Is a Style
I don’t want to be a spice store.
I don’t want to carry handcrafted Marseille soap,
or tsampa and yak butter,
or nine thousand varieties of wine.
Half the shops here don’t open till noon
and even the bookstore’s brined in charm.
I want to be the one store that’s open all night
and has nothing but necessities.
Something to get a fire going
and something to put one out.
A place where things stay frozen
and a place where they are sweet.
I want to hold within myself the possibility
of plugging one’s ears and easing one’s eyes;
superglue for ruptures that are,
one would have thought, irreparable,
a whole bevy of non-toxic solutions
for everyday disasters. I want to wait
brightly lit and with the patience
I never had as a child
for my father to find me open
on Christmas morning in his last-ditch, lone-wolf drive
for gifts. “Light of the World” penlight,
bobblehead compass, fuzzy dice.
I want to hum just a little with my own emptiness
at 4 a.m. To have little bells above my door.
To have a door.
As you know, I've been Christian Wiman-ing a bit over the last month or so, working my way through his works. I have found his poems to be much like those of other poets I have read: sometimes I exhale slowly, finding I've held my breath during the poem. Other times, I just move along to the next one. Once in a while, I sit quiet for a few minutes just pondering what I've experienced.
I imagine that those few brave readers who have picked up one of my own books and flipped through it have probably had similar reactions of expectation, apathy, or stillness. And maybe all that any poet can hope for is more held breath than moving along.
This one of Christian's just made me smile. There's a cozy quality to it, this known experience we all share of walking into a convenience store late at night when what we really need are some batteries, a bag of Cheezits, and a Slurpee. The metaphor he deftly unravels for us speaks to an ideal of being uncomplicated, of growing into people who offer simple yet effective solutions to daily problems. That seems like hard-won wisdom to me.
But most of all it seems like hospitality: keeping yourself open to people who need something, being ready to be there for them. The light's always on, the door's always open. Aren't we always looking for hospitality?
Poets also have a responsibility - I might even say, a mission - to practice hospitality. We need to give freely of our own experiences and selves to create an effective poem, and the truly effective poem opens itself up to the reader. In getting past the surface of things (having a door, so to speak) we aspire to open doors for others.
2. "Forget that I am living my life somewhere / you can't see it,"
people I disagreed with on the internet
What does one do with someone
who still believes what he believed
as a child? That a bushel of taut tomatoes
bursting from a single seed is basically magic,
that people on the whole want to care for others,
that candy and fried dough still taste delicious,
that given a bit of luck and a fairy godmother
one can still live happily ever after, that the things
we make have value because we have value,
that aliens probably do exist somewhere
and you can walk through a doorway
into another world. That a Divine Being
made this magical world and rules it well,
and still loves the people in it after all they’ve done.
What do you do with such a backwards individual?
I’ll tell you what you should do: forget me.
Forget that I am living my life somewhere
you can’t see it, that I go out to my garden
to gather magical tomatoes and that I walk
through new doors daily, that I pray to a God
I believe in and love, that I’m caring for the people
I love and being cared for by them, that I wake up
not caring at all what the world thinks about me
and my faith in childly things. I am happier here
with this than I ever was hunting down
people I disagreed with on the internet.
When my alien friends come calling
I will hand each of them a slice of warm toast
slathered with mayonnaise and crowned with a salty
slab of Cherokee purple. We'll trade bad poetry.
I won’t call the government or tell the internet.
I suppose I would say: “I’m glad you’re here;
allow me to show you my garden," and live
well with them as long as we can, just quietly,
among all of these open doors and donuts,
so they know this world is well worth enjoying.
I was pulling poems from the archives recently for something when I came across this one from a few years ago, occupying its own file, with the curious title you see above. I read it through, and was pleasantly surprised. In fact, the shape is mostly all here still.
It's funny to me that I've forgotten whole poems I've written, for whatever reasons, that I would come to them cold like I did with this one and actually find the spark of something good in them. But I suppose it surprised me with its prescience; now that I've finally left social media, the feeling here is not dissimilar to that I've had leaving SM behind. It feels fresh-faced in a nice way. It's got some interweaving of themes and phrases, a few stand-out lines, and a satisfying conclusion. And you know what? I'm happy with that. I kind of like the youthful optimism of it. My mom always said I was a cock-eyed optimist. I guess she was right.
3. "I need to find some lower thinking, if I'm going to stick around"
"I Am Easy to Find"
The National, I Am Easy to Find
How long have we been here?
Am I ever coming down?
I need to find some lower thinking, if I'm going to stick around
I'm not going anywhere
Who do I think I'm kidding?
I'm still standing in the same place where you left me standing
I am easy to find"Towers to the skies, an academy of lies"
You never were much of a New Yorker
It wasn't in your eyes
If you ever come around this way again
You'll see me standing in the sunlight
In the middle of the street
I am easy to find
There's a million little battles that I'm never gonna win anyway
I'm still waiting for you every night with ticker tape, ticker tape
I do love The National, for many reasons. Their eighth album, I Am Easy to Find, was one of those sticky albums for me. You know the sort: you encounter it and it adheres to the inside of your skull, you have it on repeat for a month, you return to it like an old friend, etc.. It happened to come out mid-May of 2019, a year that held a lot of unanticipated changes for us, and it continues to hold this muggy summer vibe for me whenever I listen to it.
I think what drew me to this album was the relational push and pull of it. I've written about it in terms of prodigality, and it's not hard not to hear lyrics like "Don't you know someday somebody will come and find you? / If you don't know who you are anymore, they will remind you," ("So Far So Fast") or "Oh, the glory of it all was lost on me / 'Til I saw how hard it'd be to reach you" ("Light Years") in terms of that leaving and returning. I think my 2019 freshly-transplanted soul was feeling it hard.
I've read that people think about The National as only ever about stasis, the inability to change. I get that. The melancholy of inertia, the difficulty of wanting to be someone you know you cannot be, the sometimes paralyzing second-guessing... it's all in there. But that's where change starts: in realizing you cannot do it by yourself.
Anyhow, I recommend a return to this one, if you're up for some late summer melancholic beauty. I picked this song because it's representative of The National lyrics, almost stream-of-consciousness, evasive dialogues that speak of unexplored backstories, earnest questions and expressions of love. The overall effect, when combined with Dessner's shifting soundscapes, is endlessly compelling to me.
4. “All the world is in these clutches.”
“A Green Thought”
Katharine Towers, from The Remedies
Say instead it was an evening in head-high
bracken with its smell of dark and medicine.
Thinking green of the infecting fern
where you may crouch and not be known,
lodging your feet for good amid the stalks.
A bower is a dwelling place or once it was
a cage for pent-up singing birds.
Look down to see the warp and weft of root.
All the world is in these clutches.
Look up to clock the fern’s drab underneath
blotched with spores you mustn’t breathe.
Breathe in deep. There’s nowhere else to live.
I forget where I found this gem, but I really love what Katharine does here. Summers, as seasons go, are so full of contrasts: dusty dry days, stifling muggy days, summer storms with all their fury and the cool breeze that follows. I remember many a day exploring tree lines and corn rows like a jungle explorer, my shirt sticking to my back.
But there's also something alien and overwhelming here, a wildness. We enter into this poem in the middle of a thought, "Say instead..." Here's another way to look at the thing we were talking about. Opening lines like this always make the poem immediate, as if it just emerged from the ether a second ago.
She makes use of very specific words: bracken, lodging, pent-up, clutches, blotched, etc. Imagine it with "grass" instead of bracken, or "putting" instead of lodging, or "hands" instead of clutches. There is a violence to these sounds as well; take for instance the repeated "tch" in crouch, clutches, blotched. The poem leans toward fleshy, anatomic sounds, as if you are inside the stomach of some beast, hearing the squish and rumble of it as you were digested. Couple this with vivid sensory imagery; you know what "dark and medicine" smells like, if you've ever crushed your way through any summer vegetation.
And all of this — wildness, physicality, ominous undertones — culminates in a transgressive command: breathe in what you are told not to breathe. The entangling, dangerous jungle we live in is all we have. Better to inhale it in the short time left to us than to go through life holding our breath and never smell that dark medicine.
I just love the complexity of it. In only twelve lines, one central image, one season, she really gets into the guts of things.
5. “What is happening in the silence / of this house?
“August Morning”
Albert Garcia, from Skunk Talk
It’s ripe, the melon
by our sink. Yellow,
bee-bitten, soft, it perfumes
the house too sweetly.
At five I wake, the air
mournful in its quiet.
My wife’s eyes swim calmly
under their lids, her mouth and jaw
relaxed, different.
What is happening in the silence
of this house? Curtains
hang heavily from their rods.
Ficus leaves tremble
at my footsteps. Yet
the colors outside are perfect--
orange geranium, blue lobelia.
I wander from room to room
like a man in a museum:
wife, children, books, flowers,
melon. Such still air. Soon
the mid-morning breeze will float in
like tepid water, then hot.
How do I start this day,
I who am unsure
of how my life has happened
or how to proceed
amid this warm and steady sweetness?
Albert creates a perfect mood in this one. I am never up at five, because I'm still convinced the world itself doesn't exist until at least seven. And then schloop, there's the world!
But I know this feeling of being awake when everyone else is sleeping, whether during naptime, or on the exceedingly rare days the kids and I let Linnea sleep in. It carries contentedness in it, and also expectation. Albert wants to know what is happening in the house, how to proceed, he is unsure even if how he got to this place.
I sometimes wonder about the decisions that have led us to our present life. They all seem so small at the moment and so big in the retelling. The grace of providence, I suppose, is that we don't have any clear notion of how our decisions will really impact our life. And so sometimes, when stillness invades us, we realize how little we actually know, and how held we are in the warmth and sweetness of something beyond our ken.
I think Albert answers his final question, though. How do I start this day? Why, by writing a poem, of course!
That’s all for today, friends. Thoughts? Any lines you’ve loved lately? Send them my way. — Chris
What a lovely collection Chris. I sat down on this late August afternoon, certainly hot and muggy outside, and took my time reading. You're right about Wiman, I hold my breath too while reading him. And your poem, "people I disagreed with..." really struck me. It was like a playful yet compassionate reminder to myself. You put words to something I sometimes feel shame over...still believing something I did as a child. And then I wanted to share it on the internet. Ha!
Now to revisit some National...