
Image by Roxana Kenjeeva
Image by Roxana Kenjeeva
For D.P.
Staring out over a field of bees and grasses,
wildflowers and ticks, knowing it was no place
to lie down, that we couldn’t
lie down in it, something happened to me
related to difficulty.
Let me start from the beginning.
We were difficult people
arising from our mothers’
difficulties in a shrinking because
globalizing economy that made us
think we could be kings, if only
we invested correctly, pharaohs
if we could just finish our novel.
One evening, after a few rounds
of karaoke, we sprawled about discussing
democracy, and while it was the consensus
that the system, unchecked, imbalanced,
floundered, we could not agree
on whether our age was darker
or any more a failure than any other.
We were the people we went to
about anything, such that we’d narrate
experience to ourselves the way we’d
tell it to each other, but that night,
exhausted, polarized, we retreated
to bed as to corners.
According to our partners, anyone,
really, who watched from outside,
we had a way of making
a problem of everything.
That problem was not the problem.
The problem was that evident and manifest
in the world around us, we saw beckoning,
golden and sweet, cold when it was hot,
forgiving when we were sorry, morphing
to embody any moment’s reprieve,
every available possibility.
Miraculously, we still made decisions.
Yet we couldn’t live with them, even
the choice to live with our choices.
All the while, we maintained authority,
agency, attuning and translating
this skill, the seeing of everything,
to poetry, painting, psychoanalysis, filmmaking,
teaching, whatever we found ourselves doing
the day we woke up and asked if we shouldn’t
find something more lucrative to do.
For what had been a way of feeling
above money now seemed silly,
idealistic, antisocial and self-abnegating,
and we had mouths to feed: our own.
Who hid this regret best showed it
silently, small protests like refusing
to help with the dishes, finding it
impossible, in a city full of gorgeous,
intelligent, funny, successful women
to fall in love with any of them.
As for me, I had inexplicable
panic in my body, spurred by anything
that might give me joy:
A popsicle a date a book a shower
A basket a letter a garden a room an idea a picture a poem
But this was over now that I’d been granted
a residency in the bee-loud field of Arrowhead,
Herman Melville’s Berkshire estate.
There was a marathon reading of Moby Dick on
and that I walked into the barn to pee just before
Paul Giamatti was slated to read confirmed for me
that I was in a new phase of manifesting
wrought by the session with the energy
healer who had, unexpectedly and beyond
all rational belief, actually healed me.
Indeed, I had been speaking with my niece.
She was going through her first real heartbreak,
the kind that leaves you grieving
not just a person but a version
of your life’s events in which
things make any kind of sense.
I could decide to feel fine, she said,
but I reject that premise. I wasn’t happy
for her misery, but I did find it
vindicating. It had turned me
from “the family idiot”
to an oracle only those willing
to look at their pain could visit.
It seemed to come down to whether you believed
knowledge to be a filling up or an emptying.
It felt good to be here, to bask
in Melville’s achievement, to imagine
being a writer people cared about.
The field literally glittered, insects
everywhere making white noise,
Greylock in the distance.
Melville looked out, the tour guide
said, and imagined these hills
the back of a whale. Hmm,
I thought. Really? Or did we
want so badly to explain his genius
we came up with a shape the nearest
cloud could be, not the shape of a cloud,
but a face or a puppy.
This was like Hind Sight, the immersive
James Turrell exhibit I’d just seen.
Alone, I followed a railing along a wall
through pitch darkness to my seat.
I sat down and immediately
saw a white circle in front of me
emanating low humming light.
As my eyes strained to see it,
the circle dissolved entirely, everything
taking on its qualities, low humming
light now all around. I looked away.
There it was again, the circle, intact
in my peripheral vision.
Let the mountain be the mountain.
The whale is in you, Melville, we don’t
have to see it, except in the way you
want us to, in a book, a story.
The rain was heavy. I closed my studio door
and still water pooled beneath.
When it let up, I opened the door
onto Eden, a secret garden, everything
wet and new, me too, starting over
from a feeling of wellbeing.
Staring out, I saw that I was seeing
what Melville had seen. Clouds
over the mountain clearing
made the field and trees beyond it
one surface, waving, the sky still roiling
from the storm. I had been wrong.
It really could be the sky
over a vast and uncompromising sea,
waves parting to reveal the back of a whale
on which the rain continued lightly,
my studio a coffin caulked
to be a life buoy, one
that could save me, another sailor
drowning in regret.
Jessica Laser’s most recent collection of poetry is The Goner School.