For Here There Is No Place That Does Not See You

In just under two weeks now I begin my exodus from the Middle West, a fact which has risen slowly from my periphery and finally fallen center. At the end of August I leave for Seattle. There I’ll spend ten days trying to say goodbye to a girl I know and care about, and who, in all likelihood, is the only reason I even have this opportunity in the first place. It won’t be easy. In fact, I’m terrified. The question of how to honor a connection to another person and how, at the same time, to gracefully defect, is, at least by my lights, without an easy answer. Nor should it be. Assuming you were ever present and a part of the relationship enough to know and need it, assuming you were fully there, the problem is one of wanting what you also want or have to walk away from. Similarly, this summer, and in the last two months especially, I’ve been thinking a lot about Wisconsin, what it means to have to leave again the place that I was born and raised in, and why I’m troubled by it in the way I am. Yet, through no fault of the place itself, or of its people, especially its people, I am, for the most part, already absent from my locality. Somewhere in the interior, the season’s changed already. I’ve stopped investing sentiment. My mind is full of fall.

Currently, what confuses me the most is how incredibly not better it’s gotten to feel like this. I’ve come and gone from women and from friends so often now, and from so many close locations, leaving should be easy. You’d think at this point I’d have an outline or a map, a field guide, that at the last right moment, any moment now, some distant instinct would take over, some hidden course of action buried deeply in the collective memory of my departures, a truth to guide my movements and my thoughts, yet none appears. There is not an inner hand, no far off point of brightness on the horizon. If I am honest with myself, which I try to be, there is a part of me that wants to simply slip away, move quickly out the door when no one’s watching, steal off into the night, stay lonely.

Flight, of course, is not an option. Though I think my friends would understand, both Jane and my family would disown me, and I don’t want to hurt anyone, especially them. Plus, there are still things I want to do before I leave, a shamelessly nostalgic list I keep in the back of my head of things I imagine I’ll miss when I get to Thailand. There is an old wooden ski jump, for example, just out of town that I used to go with girls to when I was still in High School, a place above the countryside where two people could sit and watch the night come down across Wisconsin like veil. The last time I stood up there was, strangely, one of the last times that me and my four closest friends were all together in the same place. Mostly we drank beer, smoked cigarettes, and expressed as best we could the boyish sentiment we felt between us, a bond unique to men in their early twenties before they’ve fully gone out into the world and felt firsthand the weight of it. It kind of breaks my heart a bit to think we’ve never managed to be together since then, but these things happen. A lot of things happen. I’m not sure why, but this summer I’ve felt the need to be there, to walk the wooden steps at night and stand atop the ski jump staring at the fields.

There are the things I’d like to do before I go, and then there are the things I find that I am doing. An action that seems to help right now is going to the gym. While this lacks, I realize, the romance of a pilgrimage to a distant vantage point above the fields and forests of the place where you were young, I’ve found myself at Gold’s Gym nearly every day since first I came home and then discovered I got a Fulbright and would have to soon be leaving. I like that I get to spend time with my friend Jacy when I go there, the fact that we get to grunt and groan together in the sterile light. I also like the attractive, dark haired, incredibly ripped girl who puts up twice the weight that I do, the hot pink tightness of her shirt. I like the sauna and the hot tub and the pool, the big red rubber balls I roll around on doing sit-ups. Mostly, though, it’s the fact that I know if I work hard enough, push further on the elliptical or add an extra twenty pounds of weight onto the bar, I won’t, for a moment, be required to think of anything except the fact my body is about to break. This, ultimately, is a space of refuge, emotionally and spiritually. Left to my own devices, I’d find a way to fret awake all night, thinking of girls and homes and how to leave them. I’d grind my teeth while sleeping.

Lately, as I'm prone to do in moments of uncertainty, I’ve also returned to reading Rilke. “Letters to a Young Poet” is a book I read when I don’t know who or what else to turn to. I read it about once a year, I have at least three or four copies, and I give it to everyone I care about who hasn’t already read it. In one of the letters, Rilke advices the young poet to “…love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away…and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast. And if what is near you is far away, then your vastness is already among the stars and is very great...It is good that you will soon be entering a profession that will make you independent and will put you completely on your own…” The reason I turn to him, I think, is obvious. As it is again in this, my favorite of his poems:

            ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO

                                   

            We cannot know his legendary head
            with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
            is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
            like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

            gleams in all its power. Otherwise
            the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
            a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
            to that dark center where procreation flared.

            Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
            beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
            and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

            would not, from all the borders of itself,
            burst like a star: for here there is no place
            that does not see you. You must change your life.

Here, in the place that sees the seer, the poet, staring attentively at the mutilated statue of the sun god, imagines the absent head to be looking down upon the god’s own body, causing it to appear “suffused with brilliance from the inside,” an act of self-reflection so completely powerful it creates not only light in a place bereft of light, but also, the seeing of the self lends credence to Apollo’s name and gives it substance, even immortality. Rilke’s faith is that the self, especially a secluded self, is lit ultimately by the act of attention. I appreciate especially that he conceives of attention not only as an act of creativity and power, but as a place in and of itself, a locality that causes one to see one’s self anew and reinvent the borders of who and where one is, of what one is capable of being in a world of flux and endless possibility. For me, at this point in my life, I need to believe that I am capable of something else, some distant place, of new relationships, some person other than I am. At the end of the poem, Rilke’s imperative to change, while seemingly out of nowhere, is also at the heart of my anxieties as a human being upon the brink of a change I know is coming, but how, and in what form? What will I leave behind me? Who will I turn into? Strange as it is, it's a feeling I've had before. I'll probably always have it.

DEPARTURE (THE WAY A NAME DISSOLVES)

1.)

It’s almost three o’clock and I am sitting

on the porch steps emptying

the gravel from my boots.

Middlewestern. And the farm dog panting in the shadow

of an oak tree on the lawn.

In the middle of the afternoon I shake

the soil out into the soil

and it’s the place I come from

when there are no more paths to cut

into the garden through the dandelions

or stones to scatter

on the driveway. Dead weeds drying

darker in the heat. There are letters we should have sent

and this is one of them. Strange

how we apologize in postcards

from an island, 

or that the photographs of cities

you have lived in

lined against the wall

can look you in the eye until you close

completely. In a house where you are wintered.

That late summer on the porch steps

I understood September by its reddening.

The fields had finished. The garden

no longer capable,

straw covered. I should have called and told you that

it doesn’t matter much the weather

we are reaching in. This winter

if we can keep the sunlight on the hoarfrost.

If it is possible. The branches of the burr oak

brightened and bent down.

2.)

That one could live like this, gleaning

barley from an acre’s edge or waking up

too early, falling back

asleep. We could gather fragments

in our hands, say the garden has endured.

Let us. Promise

to be good. We’re finally feeling older.

And this too is another way

to say your face is partially shadowed

in the porch light. Where the early fern

is curling. The quiet after church bells

where it is possible

to listen. Look,

it’s the middle of the afternoon

and I have no idea at all

if we will make it. Even as it rains

when I am walking in a clearing

that doesn’t need

the water. Or if the day is going out

and the axe I use

to split the pine in half is not

the axe my father left behind him

leaning on the wall.

By the time you get here the furrows will have flooded

and I cannot remember

the feeling of having ever scattered

in the first place, in the violence we are planting.

3.)

It’s almost midnight

and the driveway hasn’t darkened yet.

The wind is dripping. I’ve had to kill the basil.

At the edges of the yard

the window glow turns black

against the fence line

and continues. Almost midnight

when the crickets finish

ticking. The kind of shadow

green you’d cover clover

to keep the weeds from breathing.

In the piece of sky between the pines

the sound a day dissolves is not a quiet

I can accept without the map

I’ve made of how the beds were ordered

to know the groundwork strong.

Soon the whitetails will be starving.

A cold October circling

the days it takes to leave a home 

when I have written down from memory

the names of streets 

I’d like to live

and a wooden walking bridge above a river

in Wisconsin. There are no more towns I want

to drive alone to. There are no more towns.

It’s getting easier to say it

before I go into my house

where the weather I cannot forget

is happening. Because we close

into our rooms

our rooms return us

to the window. We close again

and the garden grows into the forest

and I am not afraid.