The Same City
for James L. Hayes
The rain falling on a night
in mid-December,
I pull to my father’s engine
wondering how long I’ll remember
this. His car is dead. He connects
jumper cables to his battery,
then to mine without looking in
at me and the child. Water beads
on the windshields, the road sign,
his thin blue coat. I’d get out now,
prove I can stand with him
in the cold, but he told me to stay
with the infant. I wrap her
in the blanket, staring
for what seems like a long time
into her open, toothless mouth,
and wish she was mine. I feed her
an orange softened first in my mouth,
chewed gently until the juice runs
down my fingers as I squeeze it
into hers. What could any of this matter
to another man passing on his way
to his family, his radio deafening
the sound of water and breathing
along all the roads bound to his?
But to rescue a soul is as close
as anyone comes to God.
Think of Noah lifting a small black bird
from its nest. Think of Joseph,
raising a son that wasn’t his.
Let me begin again.
I want to be holy. In rain
I pull to my father’s car
with my girlfriend’s infant.
She was eight weeks pregnant when we met.
But we’d make love. We’d make
love below stars and shingles
while her baby kicked between us.
Perhaps a man whose young child
bears his face, whose wife waits
as he drives home through rain
& darkness, perhaps that man
would call me a fool. So what.
There is one thing I will remember
all my life. It is as small
& holy as the mouth
of an infant. It is speechless.
When his car would not stir,
my father climbed in beside us,
took the orange from my hand,
took the baby in his arms.
In 1974, this man met my mother
for the first time as I cried or slept
in the same city that holds us
tonight. If you ever tell my story,
say that’s the year I was born.
from Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002)
I realize I am beginning the first installations of this project with some powerful, notable poets, but, I just want to note that as I plan to highlight more poems, I will share the work of poets who have various ranges of audiences, or notoriety, or however you want to call it.
But this poem, whew. You can catch a clip of Terrance Hayes reading it (in conversation with Ron Charles) here at around 14:00. It’s worth the watch. Terrance Hayes was the first poet I ever heard or saw read, at an event at Fordham where he read with Patricia Smith. I wasn’t writing poems then. But then I heard Terrance read, and he was magical. Something about the clarity of his voice, and the pace of the poems he read. There was a deliberateness that allowed for the unsaid to be said for the first time. I realized what poetry opened, and how it felt to have a poem open you.
This poem utterly wrecked me the first time I read it, and now it is almost certainly one of my most-turned-to poems. It has the slipping free verse that offers easy access for the reader. The rain falling. The scene set. Each detail eliding into the next. The rain. The car. The father. The infant. The jumper cables. The orange. The tenderness that is exhibited in the contrast between the rough-hewn masculinity of fathers and the “black bird” lifted out of its nest by Noah, the “orange softened first in my mouth.”
There are many ways to access this poem and many ways to read this poem as a means to access various themes. Masculinity. Tenderness. Fatherhood. I could spend hours chewing on the deliberate grace of this poem, the way it questions itself — “What could any of this matter” — into meaning, the way the poem opens the space to “rescue a soul” by living in its own extreme present, a kind of living testament, the way it explores the tension of the speaker wanting to prove he can “stand” with his father in the cold, and yet, despite that wanting, being told to stay inside the presumed warmth of the car with an infant child.
But I want to focus on just two things, two choices Hayes makes as a poet. The first is his use of the present tense. It’s the use of the tense that renders lines like “I pull to my father’s engine / wondering how long I’ll remember / this” so potent. Just as the poem is unwinding itself, it is also aware of itself, and aware of its perpetual state of unknowing. It is aware of its craft. And it is by being aware of itself, by remembering this, that it becomes a poem. Told in the past tense, the poem would presume too much. It would no longer be an exploration, but a confession. But this poem isn’t a confession. It doesn’t presume to know enough. It is a journey through unknowing, from wondering if it will remember itself to acknowledging — in that same present moment — the “one thing I will remember / all my life.”
In this sense, the poem becomes an enactment of the holy. There is something biblical about it, not just in reference to Joseph, or Noah, but rather in the image of the infant, and the wayward couple at night. It participates in a grand, spiritual allusion. But even more specifically than that, the poem seems to understand that holiness — whatever that may mean — occurs in the instant of its arrival, not in its aftermath. It occurs in the rescue, the deliverance, the realization. I think of Paul on the road to Damascus. I think of miracles. Holiness, however it manifests itself, is that moment between doubt and realization. It is like the first space after a period, before the next sentence is formed. The moment of the holy exists between wondering if you will remember anything and knowing that you always will. You cannot name that mystery. You can only seek to live in it. And this poem does.
As Hayes says in that interview with Ron Charles (transcript here): “If you live every day, there's probably five days of the course of your life where you say, oh that was a poem, like that whole day. Like somebody just sent me. And I do think you know a lot of being a poet is listening for those moments.”
The second authorial choice in this poem that I want to highlight is the stanza break that separates the two chunks of the poem. And it is the first line of that second stanza: “Let me begin again.” It seems simple, I know. But it is this line that makes the poem a poem of reimagination. This line echoes Larry Levis’ admission in “Winter Stars,” where he writes: “I got it all wrong.” Think of the radical nature of that. A poem that admits that it got it wrong. A poem that allows itself to begin again. Indeed, Hayes once said that “Levis knows that Memory is a form of the imagination.” And I think, too, that Hayes, in his work, offers his imagination the same permission to explore what little of the past that memory leaves us.
In the aforementioned interview, Hayes talks about how his mother doesn’t think of his work as confessional, that “she thinks that I'm just making stuff up.” He goes on to say that “transparency…is really what I'm trying to achieve, a certain kind of clarity, both in the language and in feeling. So, my sense is that if you can get it right, if you can get the rhythm, and the language, and the sensibility right, you can say whatever you want to say. Anything can be said if you can say it right and sometimes that means beautifully, sometimes that means rawly. Sometimes that means metaphorically.”
This poem holds a special place in my heart because of that radical act of reimagination, how the poem gives itself permission to try again. I use both this poem and “Winter Stars” in a free-writing poetry workshop I often do, where students read both poems, and then give them space to think of a moment, however mundane or ordinary or extraordinary, that they would like to write about. When they write, there’s only one rule: they have to write for 10 minutes and then, after whatever they’ve written, they have to at some point write either “Let me begin again” or “I got it all wrong,” and then continue. The act of borrowing these lines of admission or permission — sometimes these acts are one and the same — opens the possibility of reimagining the narrative they were writing.
To be honest, I stole this prompt from a therapy session. Once, after I finished talking about a particularly traumatic moment involving me sitting in the front seat as my dad drove my alcohol-poisoned mother to the hospital, my therapist asked me to reimagine the scenario. What do you wish you had done, he said. I had been sitting in the front seat. I remember my mother’s feet hanging out the window, how I watched them in the rear-view. I wish I had been in the backseat with her, I said. So be there, he said. And so he gave me space to close my eyes and reimagine that moment. I was in the backseat with my mother. I was holding her in my lap. I was saying it would be alright.
Rightness. Realness. Truth. A poem has to be these things, some might say. And maybe it does. But what these things mean, and how they are shaped by intentionality in the present, or in the act of writing — well, that can be radically different from poem to poem, or person to person. Hayes understands this. That’s why the choice of the present tense is so radical. It forces the poem to be right. And the offering toward the reader, the permissive “Let me begin again” — this allows the poem to be right. It is right in the first stanza, which is different from the second stanza, and it is right in the second stanza, which is different from the first. I find Hayes’ choice to continue, to begin again, to be such a gentle act of courage. It is a kind of revision of the mind laid bare on the page.
There is a tension writers often have of wanting to say exactly the right thing. I feel this tremendously when I write. We are often taught to revise for precision of language, so we can render a past moment, and the surrounding or resulting discovery, with as much exactitude as possible. And this makes sense — bearing witness to ourselves is an act of tremendous pressure, and fear. And yet, Hayes’ “Same City” teaches us that a poem can be a work of clarity just as much as it is a work of freedom, and exploration. What beautiful grace, to step out of rigidity in such a way. When I read it, I think: how many of my own poems have I stopped before letting them begin again? How many poems of mine, in the vein of Levis, have ever admitted that I got it all wrong?
A poem does not always need to be a kind of machine of exact replication. Notice some of the repeated words in this poem: think, perhaps, love. Taken as prescriptions, these three words offer their own advice for crafting a poem, a poem that considers, a poem that dwells, a poem that cares. Though I often hate rules, I’m going to try following these ones.
Such a beautiful exposition of how the poems brings out the confessional aspect of the Poet through it's tense and how powerful it us. I loved the way you have explained the dichotomy in the two stanzas Terrance used in this poem through a simple line break and how you have used the same device in your workshop.Yes, we all need to realize the moment which birthd poetry and accept it. Such realizations speaks to the truth and the hunger inside us which needs acceptance. I read this once and I'm going to read it again.Brilliant.