Michael Bazzett's "The Man Kept Reaching"

over the gunwale of the canoe
and dragging his tin cup across
the water then pouring it back
into the stream and when we
asked what exactly he was doing
he said I'm trying to peel the moon-
light off the water the skin of it
seems so thin and silvery but no
matter how many times I scrape
it stays luminous as the sky itself
from Cloudwatcher (American Poetry Review, 2025)
A note: A few months ago, this poem was also featured in Benjamin Niespodziany's Sunday Poem and Prompt Substack, which is worth checking out along with Niespodziany's Piżama Press.

So, this is art, isn’t it? Sisyphean and beautiful? Not a punishment, no, but an attempt to hold light in your hands? And how it succeeds and fails, both at once? And how it’s the trying that matters? Not just once, or twice? Right? But, rather, a whole life? The poem says kept reaching, not just reached, doesn’t it? Do you think he’s still reaching, even now, even still, trying to cup the moonlight perfectly, despite all evidence that it’s impossible? Despite the moon on the water and no longer in his hands? What matters more, perfection or its pursuit? What matters more, light held or light beheld? Do you think he’s trying still? Do you? Do you think he’s writing, too? Do you think he’s making art?

I’m a huge fan of Michael Bazzett’s work. I want to say more about it. But first, I also want to say that the book this poem is from, Cloudwatcher, was the first winner of the American Poetry Review’s Stern Prize, which awards publication to a manuscript written by someone over 50. I want to say that I love this. I believe Lynn Melnick won this year’s edition, which is awesome, because Lynn Melnick rules. I interviewed her nearly a decade ago. The time. It passes.

I love a prize that centers voices speaking from the other side of a half century. We live in this moment of 30 under 30 lists and all sorts of things that put pressure on young people to refine and present themselves in such a way that allows them to reach some semblance of fame or prestige or notoriety before it seems like it is too late. This is a shame. It is a shame because it creates and reifies an unnecessary anxiety around art making, placing it in direct tension with figuring out how to live. It’s a shame, too, because it often deprioritizes and delegitimizes the experience and perspective of older people. It is also a shame because it is not too late to write, to try, to create, to make art, even if someone tells you it is. Whoever tells you that is a shitty teacher. Norman Maclean published A River Runs Through It, his first and only novel, when he was 72. He then waited 18 more years to publish Young Men and Fire—his account of wildfire firefighters that is, in my opinion, worth every second of your time. He was 90 when that came out. May Sarton wrote like ten million books, but some of her most transcendent work came from the journals she wrote—Journal of a Solitude, for example, or At Seventy—when she was sixty years old and onward. I could go on. There are countless stories like this. It’s not to say that young people should not write and publish (I teach a journalism class at my high school that is built entirely around publication). It’s just to say that I wish more outlets privileged older voices. I’m grateful that Cloudwatcher is the result of such a thing.

Anyways, I have been a fan of Bazzett’s for a while now. Victoria Chang, in her blurb for Cloudwatcher, mentions Charles Simic and James Tate. She says that they “would be proud.” This is certainly true. Bazzett has a surrealist bent. I think, too, that there is pulsing undercurrent of real tenderness sitting at the heart of his work. His poems do not live solely out there, in a realm separate from the world where we live, as some might think of a poet whose work can at once be about myths and rivers that disappear and people who fill out applications to become literal tycoons. No, I think Bazzett’s poems live so deeply within the self that they remind me of how many out theres we contain—how many seemingly un-understandable sorrows, inarticulable desires, how many dreams and nightmares.

The end of his poem, “Yes, And” gives language to this:

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Don't leave me hanging like a forgotten
raincoat. Like something you once lost.
Let me know you know. Let me into
the light where the body holds a song.

Let me know you know is such a profound way to talk about the surreal. Sometimes the most accurate way to describe a shared experience or feeling is in a way that contextualizes it out of the bounds and limitations of this earth. Art-making becomes the experience of skimming moonlight off of river water. Heartbreak means you no longer feel human, but feel instead like a coat left in a closet. In Bazzett’s poem, “I Would Like To Describe,” Bazzet describes the “silence that lives inside me” as a “canyon” that is “old and only / deepens.” He writes:

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Perhaps yours is made of light
and when our silences join, we'll
catch a glimpse of silver water.
Perhaps we'll need to invent
a new vowel to share our joy.

It’s a surrealism, Bazzett’s is, that brings us closer, that understands the various limitations of bodies and languages and more, and, in such understanding, asks us to imagine: new vowels, new sounds, a light that lives inside us of us that we can never see. This is a light—hopeful, tender, wanting—that has a history in poetry. Think of Zbigniew Herbert (whose Collected Poems: 1956-1988 sits in a special place on my bookshelf), who wrote the same-titled poem that no doubt inspired Bazzett’s “I Would Like To Describe.” In that poem, Herbert writes:

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I would like to describe a light
which is being born in me
but I know it does not resemble
any star
for it is not so bright
not so pure
and is uncertain

It is impossible to describe, this light. Herbert only knows it by what it is not.

It is a wild thing to say, but I think this is most true of ourselves. We live in our bodies and our minds, and sometimes art gives shape and voice to who we are, but god, I sometimes think trying to describe what goes on inside of ourselves is like trying to build a tower to heaven and hell at the same time. You go up; you go down; you never quite get there. A surreal poetry gives voice and image to this light within us that is impossible to describe—it is, in some ways, the light of the moon on the river, which is to say, the light of the soul. What we cannot say and yet still try to say—this brings us closer, I think, than we could possibly imagine. It is one point of art. We are at once utterly describable and indescribable. Art lives in between these poles.

Bazzett’s poetry does, certainly. Today’s poem splits so much in two. There is the moonlight and then there is the moonlight reflected off of the water. Even the word, “moonlight,” is divided in two by one of Bazzett’s delightful line breaks. And then there are all these boundaries, how this man simply wants the light but not the water; he wants to “peel” it, like “skin.” These are all describable things, described so vividly. But they get at the indescribable—how impossible any of it is, how you cannot have light, how you must accept that you live in the midst of light, how light makes possible who and what we are, how it allows you to see what you hold, but how it cannot be what you hold.

In one of his poems, “Nine Possible Observations to Consider,” Bazzett pokes, with delight, at some of the other impossibilities at the heart of our lives:

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1. The sound a bluejay makes, if it were a color, would not be blue.  It would be the color of something torn open.

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3. Two men enter a room.  One asserts time is an invention, the other claims it as a discovery.  They stare into one another’s eyes.  The exact length of this pause has yet to be determined.

Or consider his poem, “On Average,” and how it takes the seeming bigness of the felt experience of our lives and condenses it into eight lines which read, in full:

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It takes a little over eight minutes
for sunlight to travel to Earth,
and a little under eighty years
for people to travel six feet more
down into the root-haired dirt,
freshly dug. The last stretch
is so perilous, we tuck folks
into boxes to keep them safe.

At first read, this feels surreal—a kind of make-believe of sorts, a way of defamiliarizing us with the very familiarities of our own lives. In what world, I want to say. But then I read it again, and it is simply true. In this world, I say. Somehow, to look at things as they are, you have to look at them strangely.

I think that such a surreal, askant glance at the world is what drew me to poetry in the first place, what made it feel like a place of great permission and remarkable image-making. One of the first poems I ever deeply loved, Steve Scafidi’s “The Sublime” (and doesn’t the sublime, after all, have a tint of the surreal?) holds these lines at its heart:

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You do it every day.
Walking too early, driving to work, working and returning.
Reading poems of great beauty and crying at the movies.
Touching the hair of your niece who laughs at water. Flying
over cornfields so close and so openly that when you wake
there is silk in your beard. Your arms are tired and hang
at your sides like the wings of a migratory bird who is about
to die. 

Notice how the litany here begins in the ordinary: walking, driving, reading, touching. And then there is that image that both can and cannot be real: a man flying over cornfields, gathering silk in his beard. It is a kind of magic. It becomes the only way one can say a feeling. There is not—at least not to my knowledge—a better way to describe the thrill and risk and joy and delight of desire and enchantment than that image. I have never flown over cornfields. I have never flown at all. I struggle, at all times, to grow a proper beard. But I know what it is like. To fly so close. To wake to the feeling of silk stuck to my skin. To fly at all.

I think, too, of one of my first favorite books of poetry, M.A. Vizsolyi’s The Lamp With Wings, full of love poems that do justice to the utter absurdity and indescribability of love. They are unpunctuated sonnets, all of the poems are, which makes them seem like the poetic enactment of trying to keep the lid atop a full pot of boiling water. In one of his poems, Vizsolyi writes:

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you broke both my kneecaps & set
my hair on fire you ate a small salade with
low-fat dressing & poured whiskey on me to
keep the fire going you washed your bowl &
put it away & climbed into the freezer tucking
your legs in & closing the door behind you i
heard you laughing & we laughed for
300 years me on the floor & the bowl
put away i said think how ridiculous we’ll
look by then with our love the way it is

We do not live for 300 years, but in some ways we do, and in some ways we live longer than that. Our love certainly feels like it could scratch the surface of forever, even if we know, with every ounce of our being, that we will not. What do we do with such a tension living within us? This unsolvable mystery we cannot put down?

Bazzett’s poems permit us a way of holding what we cannot hold. He writes, in “The Extra, The Ordinary”:

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Hearing the liquid note of a cardinal sounding
out during a light spring rain,
                                                      I'm reminded
that I am not the first creature to believe I can
somehow live inside the boundaries of a song.

Belief and music. Isn’t that, in part, what all of this is about? I can somehow live, this poem says. That somehow is doing such work there. But it is true. We are somehow living each day.

Sometimes I wonder if the surrealist poet is given short shrift, made out to seem too playful to be honest, a kind of version of James Tate’s Goodtime Jesus grinning at the world. But then I look at my son, who is now almost six months old, and who seems to have just discovered the light fixture hanging from our bedroom ceiling. He stares at it and its green, pearly orbs and the shadows it throws up and out, and he does not look away. He does this if you stick your tongue at him. Blow a breeze in his face and he will blink ten thousand times and smile like a dog with his head thrown out the window of a moving car, eating wind on a highway. I don’t know what my son feels. I could not know such a thing at all. But he is taking the world I thought I knew and making it seem like the magic it often is. I lay on the bed with him and look up at the ceiling. I’ve never looked in such a way before. If you caught me doing this, if you walked in on me watching the shadows move across the room the way clouds move across the sky, I would say a child made me do it. I would not be telling a lie.

All of this brings me back to the central image of today’s poem: the man trying to skim moonlight off of the river. I think, often, about what something like a poem can offer us in today’s world. Or, more specifically: something like a metaphor, a symbol. Something like the surreal or the fantastical. This is not just because I write this newsletter; it is also because, most days, I have to try to justify reading to my students, especially in a world like ours, where ten billion pixels are not blinking through a page to make us have to look.

The truth is, this image of this man failing to bottle up the moon is an image that does more justice to the experience of life than an image based solely in what we, as humans, have made. We have made money and we have made machines. We have made a language of ones and zeros that has evolved into a language, however artificial, that gives the illusion of thought. We have not made the moon, nor its light. We have not made the water that such light sits upon. The moon reminds us that there are some things we cannot do. Money does not. It is possible to become so rich that you do not have to think. It is not possible to bottle up the moon. We sometimes need an image, however surreal—a man trying to skim light off of water—to remind us that we are as small as we are. And it is in such a reminder of our smallness that I remember how wild it is, how nearly impossible, that, being so small, we somehow contain so much light.

1. 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.

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.