Mary O’Malley’s “Holy”

The days lengthen, the sky quickens.
Something invisible flows in the sticks
and they blossom. We learn to let this
be enough. It isn't; it's enough to go on.
Then a lull and a clip on my phone
of a small girl playing with a tennis ball
her three-year-old face a chalice brimming
with life, and I promise when all this is over
I will remember what is holy. I will say
the word without shame, and ask if God
was his own fable to help us bear absence,
the cold space at the heart of the atom.
from The Shark Nursery (Carcanet, 2024)

My good friend John Mark recently sent me a copy of this book by the Irish poet Mary O’Malley. Thank you, John Mark. It’s a stunner: precise in the way it articulates both beauty and its loss. O’Malley’s poem, “April,” does it so well. Here’s a moment from that:

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Each tiny flower holds the light, austere.
Then it's gone for another year
after one brief wind...

That’s beautiful stuff. It really is. It captures both the magnitude of what we hold and the ease with which what we hold can slip through our fingers.

Another poem, “Late Swallow,” does this, too. Here it is, in full:

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Up from under and past the window
your loops and dives leave ripples in the air,
a winged Matisse, painting with scissors.
You have stretched Summer almost to my birthday.
Go. I need you safely in the square in Alcala.
This awful year I can't follow.

So much here, right? Painting, but not with a brush—with scissors? How what moves can sometimes be subtraction as much as addition? The very notion of Matisse as a bird? Watching beauty but asking it to go, knowing that its departure is the only way you might see it again? The twin meaning of certain moments? How this awful year I can’t follow is both a statement about not being able to move and not being able to look ahead? It is almost impossible, what we reckon with as humans. It breaks my heart each day.

That honesty, of how the world, though beautiful, can break you in two? It’s at the heart of today’s poem:

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We learn to let this
be enough. It isn't; it's enough to go on.

That it isn’t does so much work here. It shatters the predictability of the lines that come before, that now-almost-cliche reminder that something is enough. I have told myself this before. I have told myself this many times. But sometimes, something isn’t enough. What is enough is the knowledge that time will allow whatever has been lost to be found again, the light of morning after darkness. Hope is a verb as well as a noun; it moves.

Here, I’m reminded that precision in poetry is not just a matter of structure. I often think of precision in regards to form, as something syllabic or metrical, as a strict adherence to a blueprint. But precision is also a clarity of language, a resistance to cliche, a kind of correction—how O’Malley clarifies as well as corrects herself here in this poem. It isn’t, she says, just a beat after she thought it was.

I’ve also been thinking of this poem because of this middle stanza:

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Then a lull and a clip on my phone
of a small girl playing with a tennis ball
her three-year-old face a chalice brimming
with life, and I promise when all this is over
I will remember what is holy.

I went back to work at my high school this week, and when I did, I gave up a few hours a day of holding my now-six-month-old. Prior to this week, almost every day, for a few times a day, I’d help put our little one down and then hold him in his subsequent down-ness. He sleeps zipped up in too-big gown that makes him look like some wayward purple priest. It’s funny, thinking about it now, how much I miss just that simple act of holding. Early on in our kiddo’s life, which is still an early life, the napping was not so much the fun part; it often took minutes on minutes on minutes to get him down, and down sometimes meant up, and up sometimes meant never-back-down. It was a process, is what I am trying to say, and not always the most pleasant one.

But this week, I spent the better part of each day at my high school wishing I had a baby in my arms.

And it’s funny, too, thinking of all this now—the holding and the missing and the putting down. I thought, heading into all of this fatherhood-ness, that, in the midst of so much seeming-downtime spent holding, I’d be reading, trying to fiddle together some writing, something, anything. I’d find a way to turn the hours of sitting into the hours of something. This is because, perhaps like you, I sometimes have to justify every waking minute of my life as a thing of purpose and action (as if caring for another life is not justification enough). But mostly, life was “a lull and a clip on my phone.” And another. And another. For a few hours a day during these past few months, I have been a man sitting in a dark room scrolling through images on his phone, sometimes wishing I was reading a book, sometimes wishing I was writing one. In the early months, I sat there, often, trying not to fall asleep, shaming myself for not making something productive out of that time, ignoring the fact that the entire time I was holding this warm, breathing, growing mass in my arms, this snoozing lump, this big potato.

Holding. Holiness. Wholeness. Wendell Berry writes of the “wholeness that is holiness.” In her novel Home, Marilynne Robinson writes:

Her father had always said, God does not need our worship. We worship to enlarge our sense of the holy…

Whether or not you ascribe to any sort of faith, there’s still something here about attention, about the noticing of the holy as an act of witness. Substitute the word earth for God above; maybe substitute the word world. And substitute the word witness for worship. And now: the world does not need our witness. This is true. The world goes on whether we notice it or not. And yet, we notice the world to enlarge our sense of the holy.

I will remember what is holy.

I will say the word without shame.

What a profound statement in today’s poem—to say the word, “holy,” without shame. I think of how often, in this contemporary moment, I have read think pieces and takes and all sorts of things that defend people’s willingness to be cringe, or people’s willingness to like a thing. This is why, as an aside, I think things like the hyper-critical, negative review—the takedown—are more in vogue than people think these days. We love to like the act of disliking, to rally behind a collective dismissal. On the other hand, it feels like, so often, we try to couch the fact of liking something with a million tiny steps away from our emotion. We like something, but we don’t, no, not really. We like something, but it’s a guilty pleasure. We like something, but here are all the reasons why such an act of liking is a detour from the truth of our character, rather than a part of it. We say the word holy, but we say it with so much shame.

Now, writing this, I realize that I struggled, months ago, to even get to the place of letting something be enough. It was hard to say that I just liked the time of holding because it was what it was. There was a part of me that wanted it to be more than that—time spent doing, producing of a certain kind. I thought of time as an empty space unless it was filled with what I wanted to fill it with. But the thing about holiness is that you cannot choose it; it is a light you notice emanating, not a fire you start burning. It is more about witness than it is about action. Now, I remember what is holy. It was always the holding.

It’s like Matthew Nienow writes, in his poem “End Grain”:

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the most
vulnerable door
of  what makes
the holiest of
things.

Something, then, about the breathing, the giving-oneself-over, the trust. To watch it, then, to hold it. To keep the peace of that sleep. To hold open the most vulnerable door to the holiest of things.

Before I go, can I tell you something? About the long minutes before the stillness? About that sometimes loud hallway to that vulnerable door? About how to get a baby down? And what it takes?

You think it takes quiet, and darkness, and the slow rocking of a chair, but sometimes it doesn’t. And then sometimes it really doesn’t. And it takes a repositioning, a baby on your shoulder instead of your lap. But sometimes that does not work, actually often, and you feel the baby’s legs pushing against your own, and now the baby is trying to stand instead of trying to sleep, and so you stand, to introduce gravity, and this works, it actually does, it is like the ultimate weighted blanket, this constant force pressing down against the baby, and the baby is quiet, and you think potentially asleep, but then you catch your reflection in the one mirror you strangely have, and the baby is not asleep, no, the baby is awake, very awake, the baby’s eyes are so open they are their own worlds with seas and countries and trees, and so you do it, you start patting, first just a basic count, a kind of pat-pat-pat-pat, which is nice, but not great, and the baby moans and grunts and begins to whine, and you know you have to vary it, and so you do a bit of a rhythmic five count, almost jazzy, throwing a hush on the fourth beat, and maybe you feel a bit like a drummer though you’ve never been able to keep a beat with multiple limbs at once, but here, in this moment, right now, it seems to be working, though the problem is that every time you stop for even the briefest lull, you hear it, there it is, that whimpering whine, that I’m-awake-dad, and you have to go back to it, counting the beats, realizing you’ve never counted to five hundred before, or seven hundred, or certainly a thousand, and realizing, then, that it’s been minutes now, more than minutes, and finally, your knees shattered from the countless bouncing, your hand numb against the smallest body, you sense it before you hear it: a stillness that is as calm as it is quiet. Your baby is asleep. And it is holy. It is a holy thing.

1. I have to make a correction to a previous post from 2024: in writing about Mahmoud Darwish’s “Mural,” I left out the name of one of the translators, Rema Hammami. The post is now corrected to reflect that. Absolutely my fault, and I apologize for the mistake.

2. I am thankful to the good people over at Frozen Sea for publishing a poem of mine, “Prayer,” in their most recent issue. It is the first poem I’ve written in a long time. You can read it at the link here, along with a recording of me reading it aloud. Be sure to check out the rest of the issue, as well.

3. 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.

4. 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.