The Futilitarians

  is possible. We are the creatures that love and slaughter.

  After we read the poem aloud, someone asked why Dobyns imagines the waiter “probably” dead by sniper fire in the future. Hadn’t he already served the poem enough? Since we’re all definitely dying, wouldn’t that suffice? Maybe that was too much of a given. The walls and beams of the old restaurant gave the weighty illusion of permanence, of a continuum, but this moment of unity, with friends, with history, is blown apart, along with some of the diners—at least in Dobyns’s imagination—and so the waiter needed to take a bullet, too. Earlier in the poem, Dobyns had mentioned the famed bronze footprints of Gavrilo Princip, near the Princip Bridge, and how the speaker and his friends “each placed our feet / into these bronze souvenirs.” I wondered about Dobyns standing in those footprints, which indicate where Princip stood when he shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and lit the fuse of the twentieth century. Had the footprints been placed there—in life, in the poem—for the vicarious thrill of the vantage point, or was their location a statement of ultimate existential contingency—all individuals are responsible for all human carnage? In other words, anyone can stand in the footprints of the assassin. Slaughter, the last word of Dobyns’s poem, reverberates, but like stone hitting stone, not like that shimmering arrow of laughter in the stellar dark, the one that makes life possible for him.

  In A Concise Dictionary of Existentialism, the only entries under W are “War,” “Women,” “Words,” and “World.” This is Kierkegaard’s entry for “World”:

  One sticks one’s finger in the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is: I stick my finger into existence—it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean? Who is it that lured me into the thing, and now leaves me there?… Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and costumes but was thrust into the ranks as though I had been bought of a kidnapper, a dealer of souls? How did I obtain an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am compelled to take part in it, where is the director?

  (See also: Being; Reality; Time; Transcendence.)

  Kierkegaard could also be describing the project of poetry, asking the questions that inhabit every line. For the season that provokes the most dread among the local citizenry, summer, Sara chose “Conversation with Myself at a Street Corner,” by New Orleans poet Everette Maddox. Maddox’s conversation with himself echoes Kierkegaard’s wry confoundedness at being alive, at this preposterous situation we all find ourselves in.

  I’m glad I caught myself

  quivering here at the corner

  trying to get across

  the summer day to the branch

  library. I wanted to ask me

  a couple of questions, viz.:

  Old Son, what interests

  you about this or any

  other moment of your or

  anybody else’s life? I mean,

  I seem to detect a sort of

  dull gleam running around

  your general haggardness

  like Scotchlite on a bike.

  Well, ahem, since I ask,

  I’d have to say

  the impingement of Fate on

  quotidian activity is

  something I have always

  kept abreast of, and I am

  BEAT. And conversely,

  the scampering of the quotidian

  across the face of Fate

  like squirrels in a yard.

  I prefer that order.

  My opinion of Heaven

  is roughly Mark Twain’s:

  I won’t even stay where I’m

  singing. Why, fuck wings!

  We got public transportation

  down here! If I had my way,

  my every thought would be

  a stained-glass window

  in a modest mansion, to which

  I’d return each twilight

  to my sweet baby—though

  she’s presently doubtless out

  with some goddam brain surgeon.

  But I’ll have to excuse me:

  the light is changing,

  and I must be run over

  by the shadow of a streetcar.

  The land Maddox sticks his finger into in this poem is ours, the alluvial soil of New Orleans, the anachronistic racket of the street-car, our subtropical flora and fauna, the heat, the destructive shadows. His poems are filled with beauty and humor, booze and longing, are set in the streets and bars where we grew up. Maddox drank himself into the grave by the age of forty-five, in 1989, a few months before Stephen Dobyns was having his moment with history in Sarajevo, launching arrows of meaning into the cosmos. After his death Maddox achieved a local cult status—his stool at the Maple Leaf Bar turning pedestal, his ashes buried in the courtyard out back among the rangy ivy and cigarette butts, beneath the epitaph HE WAS A MESS. Turns out he was drinking himself to death at the same time and at the same bars where we were drinking our way to adulthood. Did I ever stand next to him, trying to get the barmaid’s attention, as he composed love poems to her on a coaster, dissolving into his Cutty Sark? In one poem he even mentions oak-lined State Street, where our family lived in a “modest mansion” replete with stained glass windows on the landing of our front staircase that we eight kids threatened every day with our headlong running and jumping toward the beveled front doors. Dad used to shout that if any of us ever broke those windows to just “keep running and don’t come back!” Maddox’s description of thought as a stained glass window resonates with my chaotic upbringing: thought as precious, elevated, and constantly threatened by all the action.

  Dad was so proud of that modest mansion on State Street, the white columns and high coved ceilings, but it fairly sagged under the weight of all of the mortgages he took out trying to provide for us the things we needed (food, clothes, education, psychiatric care) and the things we didn’t (dinners at Delmonico’s, Brooks Brothers, study-abroad programs). Like Maddox’s modest mansion, our house on State Street was a projection of Dad’s desires, one that we all lived in precariously, and that we all vacated when it was time for him to pay the bills. Once a month he would ceremoniously set up a paper grocery bag next to his recliner and spend a couple of hours opening envelopes and his checkbook, yelling and cursing, signing and paying. He’d pay and pay for his big house and his big family for a long time. Even after her death, Rebecca’s psychiatric bills kept arriving, monthly reminders of that expensive failure, costly in every way. Mom figured there must’ve been a time when he became too angry and stopped paying them and they got sent to a collection agency, which just inflated the financial damage over time. He paid those bills until his own death. How did he feel every time he wrote out one of those checks? Signed his name in that dramatic, craggy signature. Certifying his sadness or anger. Some months in penance, others in resignation.

  And then summer turns to fall, night into day. The time of day in a poem can figure as deeply in it as the time of year. The evening opens up the firmament and mystery, sex and danger, while the dawn opens up possibility and revelation, new opportunities to get things right and to mess things up. Matins are traditional prayers usually performed at dawn by certain monastic orders in Catholicism, ending a night of vigils, starting the day with supplication. The word comes from Matuta, the Latin name for the Greek goddess of the morning, Leucothea. Matins are also known for imparting various “lessons,” about scripture and the lives of saints and martyrs, but Louise Glück bookends her poem “Matins” with questions, mimicking life. She begins:

  You want to know how I spend my time?

  I walk the front lawn, pretending

  to be weeding.

  But of course, she’s not weeding, she’s searching. Her search takes on the insistence and regularity and pose of prayer. Glück’s questioning starts as personal, almost accusatory, and then softens a little as the nature of the search—for courage, for evidence—is revealed. Time
passes, trees change color, “a few dark birds perform / their curfew of music,” and eventually the voice seems more open and plaintive.

  But it was a phrase from the middle of the poem—“summer is ending, already”—that I hung on. The “sick trees” and the “dark birds.” Dad in his recliner with his vitamin drink and oxygen tank, telling me, “It all just went too fast.” Dad at table 5 weeks before he died, telling me no one really knew him. All of us standing tomb-side with the small well-dressed crowd, empty-handed. I wish he would’ve opened up more, would’ve asked the right questions, freeing us to ask them, too. But what am I really asking for? The father’s function isn’t the same as the poet’s function. The father (my father) is ensconced at the table, in the recliner, at work, in all his wounded, burdened authority. The poet is ensconced between wide margins, quivering at the corner and scrabbling on the ground, making pronouncements and beauty. At the end of the poem she asks:

  You want to see my hands?

  As empty now as at the first note.

  Or was the point always

  to continue without a sign?

  There was some consensus among us that night at the ECRG that the answer to the final question was, most likely, yes.

  In another poem, “How to Like It,” it was fall, and Stephen Dobyns was still, again, questioning what makes life “possible.” This other Dobyns poem seemed to be about midlife, a frequent topic at the ECRG, as that age bracket dominates the room with its throbbing ambivalence and urgent doubt, occupying the highest and most lavish tower in the unwalled city. You can still make the stairs, the brocades are still bright, the tapestries a little worn in the right places. Surrounded by the tapering beauty of all the seasons, you can enjoy the panorama and the action in the streets and squares, even with the encroaching knowledge you’ll have to leave the city altogether one day. It was a time Dobyns’s speaker was well acquainted with:

  These are the first days of fall. The wind

  at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,

  while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns

  is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,

  the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.

  A man and a dog descend their front steps.

  Sara realized that the last three poems all featured lawns or yards, like they were some kind of spiritual buffers between the domestic world and the universe. Along with the squirrels frolicking on that yard of fate, the dog was definitely an evening favorite. Everyone loved the dog. As the poem’s speaker, like so many of us, stands dreamily suspended between youth and age, past and present, between thought and action, the dog bounds around with crazy ideas:

  The dog says, Let’s pick up some girls and just

  rip off their clothes. Let’s dig holes everywhere.

  So, we wondered, is the dog in the poem animal desire? Is the dog our dynamic inner companion, promising action but out of sync with our thinking self—the man—which is paralyzed by fear and indecision, gazing at “wisps of cloud / crossing the face of the moon” and fantasizing of escape? Is the dog the man, or is the dog the dog? That dog wants to go out! His suggestions are at first energetic, reckless, sexual (to get “crazy drunk” and “tip over all the trash cans we can find,” head to the diner to “sniff / people’s legs” and “stuff ourselves on burgers”), and then become more manageable and domestic (to recline “by the fire and put our tails over our noses”). Instead of driving down the road all night to some new city or sniffing a stranger’s legs at a diner, they go back up the walk to the front door as the man wonders, “How is it possible to want so many things / and still want nothing?”

  Once again, it seemed to us, we are left with the inherent impossibility of desire. By the end, the man feels conflicted, but he still has an appetite and the dog proposes they make the biggest sandwich ever. Finally, the man’s wife finds him in front of the refrigerator, gazing into it

  as if into the place where the answers are kept—

  the ones telling why you get up in the morning

  and how it is possible to sleep at night,

  answers to what comes next and how to like it.

  As in the Glück poem, there are no answers to the questions, unless the poems themselves are the responses, as if to say all we can do in the face of life’s mysteries is desire, give shape to that desiring, and through that shaping try to connect with others and lessen our collective isolation.

  Finally, we arrived at the inevitable, winter and death. “Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we are going to die,” said poet Marie Howe. “The most mysterious aspect of being alive might be that—and poetry knows that.” Sara chose Howe’s poem “What the Living Do” for winter. It’s addressed to Howe’s younger brother, Johnny, who died when he was twenty-eight. The loss of a sibling brings death up tight and close. That starkness leaves its mark. As an adult, when you’re with your siblings, part of you is always a child, attached to childhood patterns of behavior and associations. All the jokes and gestures, affections and resentments. But losing a young sibling works similarly. You internalize their nagging unfulfillment forever.

  Howe’s brother died in 1989. Maddox died in 1989. Dobyns dined in 1989. I don’t know what to make of the alignment of that year within these poems that Sara chose, all connected to this specific moment near the end of the twentieth century. In my mind they stitch an arrow pointing at my 1989, when I was living in an actual walled city, Siena, so young, lounging on the piazza, dating Italian paratroopers stationed nearby, and experiencing the exquisite crush of centuries of culture. I loved the stories of the warring medieval towns in central Italy, catapulting diseased donkeys over each other’s walls, toppling their phallic towers as a sign of dominance, raiding the reliquaries of the town’s patron saint. And the Berlin wall came down in 1989, contrasting historical imperatives regarding walls: which we want to preserve and which we need to destroy.

  Also: in interrogating the year 1989, I remembered something I’d forgotten, or buried. It was the year Rachel first tried to commit suicide, albeit mildly, with Tylenol, news my mother shared when she visited me in Tuscany, on a loggia overlooking Florence’s Piazza Santo Spirito. I was far from home, on another continent, living in a perfume commercial, all cobblestone and elegant arches, where even the paratroopers wore ascots on the weekends. Suddenly, all these years later, the accepted narrative of the twins seemed more complicated to me. Was Rachel the one who opened the door, and Rebecca the one who first walked through it? At the time, I dismissed Rachel’s attempt as an adolescent bid for attention and it got lost in Rebecca’s more dramatic descent. But eleven years later that ripple would crash to shore.

  Howe’s “What the Living Do” added personal loss to our discussion of people as seasonal beings, and the way we implicate seasons in our internal drama. She laments to Johnny about the clogged kitchen sink and the broken heater in her apartment, runs errands around chilly Cambridge, spills coffee and drops groceries. Buys a hairbrush. All these things that “the living do” are sharpened by Johnny’s absence, by his inability to do them anymore, and the speaker feels the pressure of the Tragic Plane on the Trivial. Parking her car, she recalls what he had referred to as “that yearning”: “We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want / whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.”

  Howe’s poem describes the remarkable and unremarkable ways we experience our lives. Its long lines and its couplets seem to reflect the winding track of the mind, the inevitable track of our day. Caught between the frustrating breakdown of the material world (the clogging and dropping and falling and spilling) and the endless ratcheting of desire (“that yearning”), we can still be surprised by moments of acceptance of our imperfect selves, of our survival after deep loss.

  But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,

  say, the window of the corner video s
tore, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

  for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:

  I am living. I remember you.

  The attempt to know and be known seemed to be the dual purpose of each of the poems Sara had chosen for us. The restaurant, the intersection, the garden, the window of the video store—that night the ECRG talked about all the places we can meet ourselves, all of these unexpected encounters that help move us forward through our days. All of the poems look up—to stars, stained glass windows, birds, the moon, or, in “What the Living Do,” the “headstrong blue” sky—while busily negotiating the ground, digging their fingers into existence, searching for something, memory or recognition, something. Maybe that movement is connected to the conversational tone of the poems, this need to both explain and engage, whether with a “you” or yourself. All these conversations, like the seasons, have the potential to keep us tethered to our tenuous place in the world, even as they acknowledge the bigness underneath everything. They do it by keeping us talking to our living and our dead.

  At our weekly breakfast following the November ECRG, I told Mom about the poems Sara had selected, how helpful the seasons were in navigating them. It’s not difficult to induce total delight in her, to make her forget the steaming huevos rancheros before her, as she brightens and talks about how much she loves the seasons, the thought of the year going round and round, the waiting and the expectation, the buildup to celebrations. And also, she added, how much she loves the beauty and order of the liturgical year. Advent and Ordinary Time and Lent.

  Frenetic breakfast service buzzed around us: coffee refills, extra hot sauce produced out of aprons, checks laid down and money scooped up. I asked her if that structure of observance was how she reined in the chaos of the family all those years, since Dad was often gone working, how she provided us order and meaning, through Sunday Mass, lighting Advent candles, celebrating three Christmases—the Feast of Saint Nicholas, the twenty-fifth, and then the Feast of the Epiphany, which also kicked off carnival, which brought us to Lent and interminable Holy Week and glorious Easter. If it was one of the things that made it possible to bring up eight kids, largely on her own.