…Why not take the smashed pinecone
of my life, render it in purple? Why not dream of baking
thirteen pies, six bumbleberry, seven sour cherry?
Yes, why not? As you may know, I recently dedicated myself to a new writing practice—a promise to copy a poem a day. And here I am changing the rules already. Instead of taking a single day, last week I took five days to copy Martha Silano’s poem, “Self-Elegies.” I wanted to spend a whole week with it—a stanza each day. The poem starts by asking why not, and I guess I wanted to answer that call, a call to muchness. Let’s bake, or at least dream of baking, all the pies. (You know how I love pie!) These lines bring me back to the old nursery rhyme of numbers and pie that my mother must have sung me a thousand times—“Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.” Indeed, Martha’s poem carries us back and forth through life’s stages, and I wanted to let her carry me for more than just one day. As many of you know, Martha died of ALS this month, the same month “Self-Elegies” appeared in Poetry. I assume the poem will also appear in her forthcoming collection, Terminal Surreal.
I only met Martha once in person at her AWP reading in Washington, DC, in 2017; it was a particularly moving reading. I connected with the immediacy of her poetry, with the way it was stripped down and full at the same time, with its focus on nature. We published her poem “You Can’t Trust” in Split Lip Magazine in 2018, and since then I’ve read as much of her work as I can. For me, certain people have an aura about them, and Martha was definitely one of those people. Light and authenticity poured through her and her poetry. Maybe it was her smile, the energy and warmth behind it. I loved her despite not knowing her well. I think a lot of us felt that way about Martha—close to her because she let us feel close.
Copying “Self-Elegies” was a kind of grieving, not just for Martha but for many things and people, for myself. Spending extra time with her words seemed the right way to honor her. Indeed, Martha demanded it—because to read this poem requires time. She made not one elegy but “elegies” plural. And she gave the poem not one stanza but five—each with fourteen lines. Like the first five sonnets of Shakespeare’s 154. Or the five acts of a Shakespeare play. Five like the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Five like the working days of the week.
The first thing I notice as I copy Martha’s lines is that they are also long! So long, in fact, that, with my big, awful handwriting, I can’t fit them on a single line. They require a secondary break that Martha didn’t intend. It gives the line a feeling of not wanting to end, of spilling over, of refusing to let go. The feeling matches the heart of the poem, a poem about wanting to live but instead dying, the line forced to break unwillingly. These are lines that hang on for dear life. “It’s the never-leaving part” that she likes about microbes and fungi. Indeed, time itself is a focal point of the poem: the hour, the watch, the Insight Timer, the decades, the sixty-two and a half years. Until finally, in the last stanza, the lines grow shorter. They fit on a single line on my page. The clinging to time is over. The stacked breaths and inhalations are “de-escalating.” The speaker is letting go, letting us go. And we are letting her go too.
The conversational register of the poem and the way the speaker uses direct address make this poem so beautifully intimate—“all those freaking feelings,” “kinda refreshing,” “I guess you’d say,” “didn’t we?” and “wanna have a good cry?” Its speaker says that she will die alone, and yet everything in this poem belies that statement. In this most intimate moment of life—the moment of death—this speaker brings us, like dear old friends, into the room with her to hang out. The poem is a conversation that feels like it’s still happening. It is a present moment.
The beauty of writing poems down is that it forces us to pause on the interesting words, the ones we might not know. Malathion. Vaux’s swift. Bumbleberry.
In case you, too, are wondering, malathion is an insecticide, named for malic acid. In choosing this particular chemical, Martha invokes the “mal” of malevolent, the “mal” of Latin and Spanish, meaning evil or bad. Looking up Vaux’s swifts sends me down a wonderful birding rabbit hole where I learn the thing that makes swifts so unique: they do not perch. They spend most of their time in the air—foraging, eating, drinking, and even fucking in flight! This seems the perfect bird for a speaker who also asks, “May I hover like a gull.” I imagine this gull-spirit connected still to this earth, but airy, floating above us, observing. The bumbleberry is a fictional berry. Did you know that? I did not! It refers to a mixed berry pie, one made with at least three kinds of berries. Ahhhh, Martha, thank you for teaching us this!
Copying the poem also makes me pause in moments that stand out, moments where Martha forces us to dwell by giving them extra time and word play. For instance, here:
In a Plum Village meditation, a woman says smile,
so I smile, though sometimes I don’t, though sometimes
I’m unable. Disabled is my smile, and a lot makes me cry.
What a thing—to have a disabled smile. We don’t usually think of a smile as something that can be disabled. Until she got ALS, this speaker was busting bivalves and logging loping miles on her feet. And suddenly, surprisingly, she is disabled with a capital D, the kind that lands her in a wheelchair. I appreciate Martha stating the word disabled out loud, mentioning the wheelchair. All of us who are able-bodied now will one day be disabled in the future. The wheelchair and what the speaker could do from it, or rather see from it, reminds me of my mother who used a red walker for the last year of her life until she used it less and less until she was mostly on the couch until she was mostly in bed until she was always in bed. She never wanted the shades closed because she wanted to know the time of day, to feel the sun rise and set, to see the green leaves and their shadows move like Martha who “opened her curtains to the crows, to a scrub jay in the maple.” Martha tells us you can still find joy and humor even if you cannot smile. You can cry and not be sad. Our bodies do things we don’t control or understand.
The poem does things to me I do not fully understand. It makes me pause here:
I used to dance on my paddleboard
for hours. Ran down all sorts of winding roads,
getting closer.
Closer to what? I reread these lines after writing them. And then I realize they have brought me to the coiling wind of the Mary Oliver poem, “Where does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End?”
I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.
Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around
as though with your arms open.
And thinking: maybe something will come, some
shining coil of wind,
or a few leaves from any old tree–
they are all in this too.
And now I will tell you the truth.
Everything in the world
comes.
At least, closer.
Was Martha invoking Oliver’s poem? I like to think so. I first read it years ago after William Schwalbe mentioned it in The End of Your Life Book Club, which is about the books he read with his mother in her own final months. I now gift Mary Oliver’s collection, “Why I Wake Early,” to friends when their parents die. I mark this poem for them to read. Eventually, I will give this book to all my friends. Everything does come closer. We are all moving toward it and it is moving toward us. In a way it is death, but it is also life—I think Oliver and Silano both intended it to be life. It is the Temple, the spirit, the nature, the wind, the swift, that spot there on the horizon that we run to, the intensity of it, all that we love.
What we love. Indeed, “Self-Elegies” is at its best where the speaker considers the things that she loves. The appearance of the daughter in the second stanza especially got me, these physical details in particular: “She’s smiling, / beautiful in her black cap-sleeve top and oversized jeans.” Oh, how I love the sound of that “black cap-sleeve top”—all those plosives, words ending with an interruption of breath, with the k and the p. The spondees in the middle of the line force us to slow down and consider this child of hers. I feel the speaker admiring her daughter, the pride in seeing her and finding her beautiful. My own mother’s last words to me were, “Oh, Mo, you are so pretty.” She wasn’t speaking about my appearance, or not only about my appearance. She actually could barely see in the days before she died. She was using the little bits of speech and oxygen she still had to convey the fullness of what she felt looking upon me, of her love for me, to tell me that I was the focal point of this, her last gaze. I think Martha was saying something similar to her own daughter. Words from Genesis come to mind: “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
“Self-Elegies” offers us a guide for how to live, not how to die. Though Martha does teach us that too, how to die with grace and acceptance and love—and how to mourn her (give to trolling fish, not netting). But she is also telling us to dream of thirteen pies if we want. To ask why not with her. To read about weird stuff like microbes in the middle of the night and learn how that weird stuff connects to us. Listen to Sheryl Crow or whoever our Sheryl Crow is. Go out into the darkness. Run through the mosquito fog (my mom did that too!). Free yourself of debris. Watch the Vaux swifts and eat the Jaune Flamme. Have a favorite type of tomato for god’s sake! Dance. Overdo it.
Overdo it. I had to pause here, to look back to check: did she spell it overdue or overdo? I ponder the doubling meaning here, how we all overdo it and we are all eventually overdue. We will all return ourselves to that great library of time and spirit. “A human / life like alpine snow that seems it will never melt.” And yet it does. As I land on the poem’s final line, I think of time again, of the number thirteen at the start of the poem, of all the birds in these lines, and of the snow that also appears in the last stanza of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”:
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Stevens plays with time here, upsetting its order. It’s evening in the afternoon. It was and will snow at the same time. Similarly, Martha places her speaker in the past in her last stanza, at age nineteen, but it is a past that is looking to the future, “counting the decades forward.” This beautiful compression of time leaves us a bit dizzy. I will stop here, dizzy in the snow melt (ahhhh a poem that starts with pie and ends in snow, my two favorite things!).
Maybe you want to take a week to copy Martha’s “Self-Elegies” too. If you do, please share something with me that caught your eye or sparked a memory. Let the poem teach you how to hover like a gull.
