Rachel Zucker's "Hours Days Years Unmoor Their Orbits"

tonight I'm cleaning baby portobellos
for you, my young activist
wiping the dirty tops with a damp cloth
as carefully as I used to rinse raspberries
for you to adorn your fingertips
before eating each blood-red prize
these days you rarely look me in the eye
& your long shagged hair hides your smile
I don’t expect you to remember or
understand the many ways I’ve kept you
alive or the life my love for you
has made me live
first published in Academy of American Poet's Poem-a Day (June, 2017)

I went down a Rachel Zucker rabbit hole this week, which began when I read her poem “wish you were here you are,” this unpunctuated ode to the way we are situated in time and space, and how our love allows us, sometimes, if we are careful, to exist at once in multiple places and multiple times, holding the whole of us as we are and as we have been, all at once. In that poem, Zucker writes:

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...as I run through Central Park
at a speed not much faster than walking but slightly
I am shattering fields of time around me
& experiencing time differently from those I pass
last night I saw my son's adult self &
in the same moment toddler self this really
happened he was playing "Wish You Were Here"
by Pink Floyd on his electric guitar & feeling it
he's 11 & in between 2 kinds of time on the verge
of worlds I think we are too you & I who are old
young women...

One thing lead to another, and I found myself reading today’s poem.

Not long before reading it, my wife had lathered my son in baby wipes after he peed—laughing all the while—on his own face. When he was clean, I patted out a rhythm on his butt while squatting and tip-toeing and tiny-hopping my way around the room, hoping he would settle into sleep. He did eventually. It took a thousand pats.

I am trying to record some of these things: the butt pats required to put a child down, the song and dance, the dance without the song, the song without the dance. What song I sang one night. What song I sang the other. I’ve started taking notes. I want to be able to remember the specific transformation of the ordinary before its repetition—as repetition sometimes does—makes me forget. The hours are filled with so many of the same things lately, but these same things are also different. They change in the biggest of little ways. I want to hold on to every small detail of this changed life.

I want to be able to write, as Zucker does:

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I don’t expect you to remember or
understand the many ways I’ve kept you
alive or the life my love for you
has made me live

And to know that I will always remember, even though I know I will forget. Can you imagine forgetting? It feels impossible, in the moment of it all, watching your child touch a piano key for the first time and be stunned by the fact of music, as if it could come, as it seems to, to enlarge a room out of the thin invisibility of air that once was silent. It feels impossible to know that you might forget anything, anything at all. But you do eventually. You forget so much.

Both today’s poem and the one I just mentioned perform an act of holding in the midst of all of that forgetting. Even today’s title—“Hours Days Years Unmoor Their Orbits”—gives voice to life’s futility in the face of time’s certainty, the way it sometimes moves too fast, too crooked, too askant for us to even have some semblance of control. We are here now, cleaning mushrooms, and it could have been a blink or not even a single split of a second, and who we were then, washing raspberries in the sink, is also here with us now. They stand together even if they are apart. The magic of these poems is in that reminder that, even if there is great sorrow in the way that time seems to unravel without our permission, there is also the possibility that great love can transform our ability to remember, to hold on, to take the past and travel it all the way back home to where we are now.

I’m writing this post as part of a yearly tradition where I reflect on this practice of weekly writing. I cannot believe I am saying this, but today (roughly, give or take a few weeks) marks six years of publishing this newsletter—six years of writing about poems. For the nerds, this has meant 329 essays about 329 poems on 329 Sundays over the course of these past six years. It has meant somewhere near 700,000 words. It has meant sitting down on 329 different Friday nights or Saturday afternoons to think through something. It has meant that I have, almost certainly, repeated some words countless times: obsession, permission, grace, limitation, unknowing, certainty, and more, and more, and more. I know; I know. It has meant thinking through many of the same things in different ways, and many of the same things in the same ways. Perhaps you have noticed this? I certainly have. I know I repeat myself. Though repetition, I’d say, is part of practice.

I’m thinking of this poem today because of these lines: the life my love for you has made me live. I’m thinking of a life of art, of poetry, and how they have shaped me.

I’m thinking of this poem today as a way, too, to consider the fact of this life, which is the fact of this passage of time, not just because of my recent foray into fatherhood, but also because of how hard it is to fathom how much a life can change over time. Six years ago, I started this newsletter at the onset of Covid, beleaguered by the way my life felt so constantly and painfully online. I had the time to spend time with poems, and so I did. Now, those years are three apartments ago. I was barely a high school teacher then, and now I have been teaching for a decade. When I began writing these weekly missives, I was obsessed with loneliness and isolation, with our relationship to ourselves, to each other, to our work, and to the world, and with the fear that gripped the moment. Now, though such things still exist, I fear the pace of change, the loss of language; I fear a technology that hardly seemed to be known to us six years ago; I fear what is lost when we lose our intention and our attention. Some days, I fear the loss of art. Through it all, I have found myself finding poems that speak to my obsessions. This has come wildly easy. The poems are always there for me. The art is, too. There is something like solace in this fact.

I think this is because, as Eula Biss writes, artists are rolling around “inside the pit of a peach.” In that essay, she writes:

I think it’s inherently scary, I say, being inside the pit of a peach, rolling along, not knowing where you’re going, getting carried across the ocean by birds. It’s a life marked by uncertainty and absurdity, the life of an artist. Maybe the value of art, to artists and everyone else, is that it upends other value systems. Art unmakes the world made by work.

Writing about poems for these past six years has not made me a more certain person. In some ways, it has made me more uncertain, more willing to doubt. But the great grace is that I have found company in such doubting. 329 poems of company, to be exact. And countless readers. Thank you, truly, for such company. I cannot believe it.

This life of intentional uncertainty often portends a kind of generosity. In one of my favorite moments from her book, Having and Being Had, the aforementioned Eula Biss writes, of poets:

The poets I knew made their money like everyone else, as teachers or bartenders, but what they did for poetry, and for each other, was most often given away.

I think again of these lines in today’s poem: the life my love for you has made me live. They remind me of what Biss talks about—this life of giving that is also a life of art. It is love, I know, that returns me again and again to poetry. It is no small work to offer attention in this way, but it is also no small joy. I think this must be true of so much else, of all the lives that love makes us live for one another.

Perhaps it is one great shame of poetry that it is often first taught to us as a kind of riddle to figure out—each poem a meaning-morsel to unwrap in some certain way. You can get a poem wrong, can’t you, in the midst of such a pedagogy. You can fail at understanding. Isn’t that a shame? This is not to say that there are not poems that expand all the more for the work you put into offering attention to them. You can spend a lifetime with Gwendolyn Brooks’ short, three-to-four-word lined “We Real Cool” and find yourself parsing rhythms, drawing diagrams, looking at old photos, and more. But that is not the same as thinking of a poem that eventually closes the door on you once you have figured it out completely. Looking, I think, is not the same as knowing. Paying attention is not the same as understanding. You can do the former, in both cases, and leave a poem with a mind and heart far bigger than if you always try to do the latter.

I’ve learned that these last six years.

I have become, in some ways, like a kid again.

And now, with this child in front of me, three apartments after the one I lived in when I started this newsletter, and six years later, it is that uncertainty that I realize has been such a constant in a life of reading and a life of writing and a life of, well, living. I don’t mean uncertainty in some awful way; I mean it simply in the sense that I do not know for certain the direction of my life, the surprise of the next sentence, whatever great joy or sorrow is to come. In these past six years, as I have been sitting down each week, I have experienced surgeries and hospitalizations and health scares. I once fainted at a funeral. I have experienced love and marriage and a little child. I have watched hundreds of kids graduate. I have experienced countless ordinary failings, the subway train’s doors closing on me as I have bounded down the stairs to catch it. I think about it now and I cannot believe how much fits into a life.

I don’t know what to make of this other than to say I don’t know. Kurt Vonnegut wrote that his son once told him that “we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” That whatever holds so much weight. What hasn’t changed in these past six years is the fact that there are people, often with a great deal of power, who will tell you what it is. Thankfully, there are countless poems to tell you all the ways that it is not.

Right now, the it that is being sold to us is an it of radical optimization, unlimitedness, and growth. It’s a hard it to push against. It comes at us from every angle, infinitesimally calculated to appeal to you, and you, and you—all the while flattening you, and you, and you.

And so I think again about Zucker’s lines:

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the life my love for you
has made me live

At the heart of these lines is love. It is love that guides the choices of a life. And it is love, necessarily, that involves someone else: my love for you. Love involves limitation. It embraces it, I think. It exists within the constraints of a day, and within the thousands of days that make up a life before a life inevitably ends. Love is radical because it is neither optimized nor unlimited. It is a choice to say yes to fragility and uncertainty and mortality, rather than to some promise of infinity. It is radical because it understands the finitude of a life and says, within this short time, I will reach out to you. To allow your life to be changed because of others—what greater grace is there than this? And to be changed by others—what greater joy? I’ll finish these last words after a thousand more butt pats on yet another ordinary night. I am tired, but in love. Thank you for being here with me, inside the pit of a peach for all these years.

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