Charlie Smith's "The Rose"

I'm looking everywhere for new ways,
poking, selecting, looking everywhere,
turning the trees over, rummaging among skirts
and stars. I'm so lonely and intense, so
tense and energetic, I'm getting up early
to touch the slick habit of ice on the windowsill,
to touch dust and the dried blue berries of juniper.
I'm shaking and scared of life
and of the absence of life, childless, love
buried out in the prairie far from here
under the shifty grass; I'm watching the white birds
drift up from the south, reading the last lights
in the tall buildings like lines of white type
spelling the future, I'm into everything
haphazardly and wholly, revenant and pilgrim,
I'm looking as I go and I go formally and
rapidly, moving through gales of solitude,
through crowds and the cries of young children;
I'm tasting, I'm smelling everything, I'm
stooping in Chinatown to kiss the boots of
the Buddhists, I'm pressing my bare skin
to the ancient stone designs of artisans lost
to the world; I'm looking everywhere, I'm alert,
I'm open like a child's blue coat as he runs,
I'm ready for bronze and happiness, I'm gamely
adjusting the water level, I'm forgiving it all,
telling it all, hearing it all, I'm ready
for fake silk patches spilling from envelopes,
I'm ready for a "vague splintering of rain,"
ready—I'm looking everywhere—for a delicate
means of transition, I'm stumbling against
beauty and not apologizing, I'm almost naked here,
skinnier than I used to be, almost helpless
or maybe I'm completely helpless as the religious
say is the way to heaven—all right I'm helpless—
I'm swaying on the platform, I'm tenderly
toasting the bread, I'm placing the saucer,
the spoon on the tray, I'm arranging the rose,
I'm pulling the curtain, I'm letting light flood the room.
from I Am Your Lifeguard: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2026)

I first encountered Charlie Smith’s name as one of the epigraphs for Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America, which I have been reading while my child naps in my arms. It is the perfect book, I should say, for such an extended moment; I can read an entire story (or sometimes two) over the course of a single nap. I can spend some time thinking about a story, too, in the aftermath of having read it, which I did for a long time with Moore’s “Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People,” which contains this paragraph, added almost immediately to my folder of perfect paragraphs1, moving as it does from the strikingly noticed world to a stunningly realized truth about such a world:

The next day, they made their way along the Antrim coast, through towns bannered with Union Jacks and Scottish hymns, down to Derry with its barbed wire and IRA scrawlings on the city walls—“John Major is a Zionist Jew” (“Hello,” said a British officer when they stopped to stare)—and then escaping across bandit country, and once more down across the border into the south, down the Donegal coast, its fishing villages like some old, never-was Cape Cod. Staring out through the windshield, off into the horizon, Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could produce—winds, seas—a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world—no flower or stone—as a single hello from a human being.

How good is that? How perfect? How it sets you so solidly in the world with its specific violences and specific cruelties and specific beauties and then, as if placing a hand on your arm to point off into the exact right spot in the distance, how it offers you, from that vantage point where you have been so specifically placed, a way of understanding the world that gives language, perhaps, to something felt inside you for a long time.

One of the epigraphs from Moore’s book is from Smith’s “The Meaning of Birds,” a poem I had not read before and then, upon reading it, loved, and then, upon looking into it more, realized is probably Smith’s best known poem. In that poem, he writes:

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And if occasionally a tern washes up
greased and stiff, and sometimes a cardinal
or a mockingbird slams against the windshield
and your soul goes oh God and shivers
at the quick and unexpected end
to beauty, it is not news that we live in a world
where beauty is unexplainable
and suddenly ruined
and has its own routines. We are often far
from home in a dark town, and our griefs
are difficult to translate into a language
understood by others.

As I have grown older, there have been few things more touching than the way that birds have become, for people I love, these kinds of visitations. A cardinal a reminder of a grandparent. A blue jay the reminder of a mother. The other day, standing with my mother-in-law, I watched a hummingbird appear out of seeming nothing. It floated, as if dangled by an invisible string, in front of a flower. It moved its wings so quickly it seemed iridescent, like a child’s spinning toy shining in the light. We said quick, come see to anyone who could hear, but it was gone before anyone could get there. Beauty unexplainable and suddenly ruined.

I thought about writing about such a poem today, but then, smitten by that poem, I purchased Smith’s New and Selected,2 and I read through it in between reading Lorrie Moore’s stories, and I encountered today’s poem.

I encountered these lines:

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I'm into everything
haphazardly and wholly, revenant and pilgrim,

And this line:

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I'm open like a child's blue coat as he runs

And these lines:

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I'm ready for a "vague splintering of rain,"
ready—I'm looking everywhere—for a delicate
means of transition

And I encountered this correction, which I adored:

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I'm almost naked here,
skinnier than I used to be, almost helpless
or maybe I'm completely helpless as the religious
say is the way to heaven—all right I'm helpless—

All right I’m helpless. I love that correction, how it takes the twice-repeated almost, the once-mentioned maybe, and says, no, no, it’s not almost, it’s entirely. It’s not maybe, it’s surely. I love that correction in the midst of such a maximal poem—and it is maximal, this poem is, this present-tensed thing of hope and searching and wonder—because it insists, even in the midst of such maximality, on honesty. No, the poem says, I am not rambling on without control. I am actually telling the truth. I am correcting myself. I am helpless.

I find such joy in a poem of this nature because of how much space it takes up on the page. It does not shirk from being so full. It begins with two complete sentences; did you notice that? The first ends on line four. The second ends on line eight. And then it just gives up on all hope of ending a sentence, and the rest of the poem is all commas and semi-colons, this single-sentenced litany of what it means to look and wonder and sway and move and let the light in. It does not bother to stop. The world bleeds into the world. Those words—all right I’m helpless—take on an even more distinct meaning when you consider the grammar of the poem itself, the way that it abandons one sense of structure—the sentence—as it goes on and on. Helpless to life itself, the poem also becomes helpless to the rules we create to make more sense of life.

An aside: you can, as a poet, control something that presents as uncontrollable. You can enact the wild ongoing endlessness of longing with precision, even if the longing reads, on the page, as a wayward, crashing thing—barely a space between your words.

I have found that this poem’s enactment of a ceaseless, searching wonder feels quite true for me, especially now, in these early months of fatherhood. I have been struck, each day, by the way any previous conception of time seems to have abandoned me. The minutes roll by like seconds. The day ends in a blink, and the blink has contained a dozen diapers and a thousand buckled knees bouncing underneath a rocking body. And each day has seemed to be lived entirely in the present tense, which is not, I realize, how I conceived of my days before this journey—days spent looking back and looking forward, days spent with time as a thing stretched out before and beyond me, days spent paused in the midst of something, not held in each second of the endlessly ongoing present tense. Now, the day is the single cry I am trying to shush, the momentary silence I want to live in forever, the belly laugh I want to crawl inside before I know it will leave me.

It feels sometimes like watching the world from the window of a train car, which is how this poem feels, too, and why I love the detail of a line like this:

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I'm open like a child's blue coat as he runs

It’s there, and then it is gone. And all you remember is the blue of it, open to the wind. We are helpless to the demands of the present tense. To time itself. And so we catalog every detail we can. The world becomes a thing seen through glass—precious thing it is—and my hand keeps trying to reach outward, and my knuckles keep bruising from all the times they’ve knocked against what separates the present from the past. Call it whatever. Call it glass.

Wrapped up in the present tense—noticing, searching, wondering, feeling—the world becomes a world of striking, colorful detail. Everything is precious because you know you cannot pause the world to hold onto what you’ve noticed for a second longer. You are open to it all, completely helpless, knowing you cannot close your fingers around it. And so, for each second, the world becomes the following: the ridgelines of my child’s ear as he naps, the orange fingernail sliver of the moon in the sky, a dime-sized birthmark on the back of a nearly bald head, the bright green skin of an asparagus glittered and shimmering with oil and salt, a bush of hydrangeas surrounded by more bees than I have ever seen in my life, the sound of tears from behind the closed door of a room, and then, once more, his wide and toothless smile.

1. Those who know me also know that I am an avid cycling fan, which means that I am in the midst of every cycling fan’s multi-week fever dream: the Tour De France. I had the pleasure of writing about the Tour for Escape Collective last week, where I was able to wax poetic about breakaway riders and hopeless attempts at victory and the beauty of watching someone lose. Read it here.

2. My novel, Pilgrims, is out in the world, and I am deeply grateful. Thank you for reading it and sharing it and all sorts of things. If you are interested, you can buy it here. Consider writing a review on Goodreads if you’d like. Consider asking for it from your local library. I appreciate it. Thank you a million times over.

3. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.