and where is my redemption?
James Bowden
Poets love to talk about sad things. I loved and lost her,
but she is still with me. Or I loved and lost him, but at
least I did at all. Some of the best known lines ever written:
Tonight I can write the saddest lines… I wonder if we
all just want to be sad and beautiful. Yes, Neruda, yes, me,
yes, my friend whose mother died when she was 8, yes,
my own mother too. Though, of course, there seem to be
those who are just beautiful, not sad. And the poets,
happy sometimes, when thee is looking an awful lot
like a summer day, for example. Still, sadness seeps
through. Why record what you shall not mourn? And
so on the poets trudge, many things are not redeemable,
many things can never be forgiven, prance, my children,
oh, how I love my children, weep, my body, my brain, coo,
yelp, collapse, I’m tired, I, lament and memorialize and
kiss good bye, my eyes. Picture my hands, shut, gracefully
opening as if letting go, now fingers extended for emphasis
that I am indeed surrendering. And all of us, sitting here,
listening, sucking in air involuntarily and mming at all
of the right pauses: all just waiting for the but.
Often we get one, a small but, but a but nonetheless,
a few words to hold my hand into the bleary daybreak.
But I wake up every morning, and still I am here. And
still this sadness all about me. And nobody to find it
beautiful but me, and I’m long past that. It’s been years,
darling. What does irredeemable mean? Don’t you get it?
What if there is no but? Will you forge one strong enough
for the both of us?
It was much easier to love my sadness when it was new, when
lovers flocked to my cheeks and drank of my teardrops, begged
me to let them. When I thought I knew it would end.
Forgive me my conceit. Forgive me my facetiousness.
Forgive me my poetry. I no longer wish to read and write of
the sun’s warmth: I want it here, gentle on my breast, now.
There is so much I want to write that I do not have the words or organizational strength to write. Currently, this is reminding me of one of Ross Gay’s poem recordings, the ending here and the choppy concrete sentences he issues. There’s a Dermot Kennedy song called “Redemption”, that goes redemption will come for you, so, … and perhaps this is in response to this common functional form, covariance that we continually shape narratives with even if it’s not necessarily true?