Hi friends,
Last week, shared a wonderful craft essay called “All We Do Not Say: The Art of Leaving Out.” The title speaks for itself, and if you’d like some brilliant advice about using constraint in your writing and letting the negative spaces do the hard work of speaking into the ineffable, I couldn’t recommend it more.
In the essay, she shared a poem by Carolyn Forché called “The Colonel.” It’s haunting and rich and gorgeous. I’ll let you pop over there and read it if you’re inclined to follow rabbit holes from one writer to another. Either way, there’s this line that she pulled out that punched me in the gut as well, where the narrator says, “There is no other way to say this.” right before turning a corner and delivering a scene that knocks you right to your knees.
That line has been knocking around in my ribcage ever since. I decided to use it as a prompt, and it ended up becoming a doorway into writing about something that I have not yet been able to put any words to.
That’s the thing about art, isn’t it? It cannot help but to midwife in new life, new art, new pathways. Creativity begets creativity, on and on in an endless, generative loop.
I had the rare privilege of helping out a new friend last week with a presentation at a local art gallery. (Friends, I wore a dress, and wedges, and mascara, all at once! I got a babysitter! I stood behind a microphone in front of people I did not know! A community of artists! So many artists!) This friend had written a handful of gorgeous essays inspired by art that had made him “Wonderstruck”. (Check his essay collections out here if you’re interested in serendipity and everyday magic.) He shared paintings and photographs and fused glass and woodwork and poems by other artists and song lyrics and scenes from movies. My job was to read all the words in his essays that were not his, all the inspiration that had stirred up his own wonderings and conjurings. It played out like a wonderful spoken word performance, and it got me thinking about how many people here on Substack inspire my own prose and poetry.
This is an awfully long on-ramp to this morning’s poem. (I know, I know. So much for constraint.) Alas, I wanted to take a moment to say thank you to all the artists who help midwife in pieces like this one, which felt like real labor to me- a painful and necessary release. You cannot see the tears that made the ink run in the notebook I frantically filled up the night I wrote this in bed, my hair sticking up, the very same mascara I’d proudly donned for the performance painting black trails down my cheeks, but perhaps you will hear the echo of their impact on the page.
So much love,
Kendall
What Happened
What you don’t know is that you won’t want
them touching her body. You will
want it to be one of you. Her people, your people
pulling her out of the river.
But that is not what happened.
The people calling her name
in the narrow valley— the ones
with mouths that had tasted her
beef bourguignon, her potato latkes, her
tiny liquid droplets of laughter
that shattered the light between you
in a misty cloud of surprised delight
under the propane porch lamp at dawn—
those frantically hopeful friends did not
reach her before the nameless people did.
…
You will wonder if the strangers
flying the helicopter
that spotted her red raincoat
on the sandbar that morning
were rough with her,
or if they cradled her head
and bowed theirs low
before lifting her up to the sky
under a dark halo of spinning wings.
…
You will never stop wishing that
it had been you that had
found her, your arms full of autumn’s finest
fireweed and forget-me-nots, kneeling
to press your mouth to the cold apple
of her cheek, the river
washing your tears from her hair,
your hands holding her
hands that had just been cupping
a mug of creamy french roast
beside you on the stilted cache, your bare feet
dangling above Nugget Pond,
your mouths sipping and smiling and saying words
having to do with plans,
and dreams.
…
What you don’t know is that you will close your eyes
and see yourself throwing your
head back beside her, wailing
so loudly that the lamentations of the swollen river
cease for a breathless moment, listening—
the water halting mid-cantor,
offering a silent supplication, begging
forgiveness for flooding
her beautiful lungs.
But, my love,
that is not what happened.
There is no other way to say this.
Water does not know remorse, and
you will never know what happened.
WOW. I know "wow" is not the right word but it's all I can think of right now. This stopped me cold, I just had to sit and think about it for a while after I finished reading, and then I had to read it again. I'm glad for the long intro, I like how you told the circumstances of writing the poem. (I thought Marya's talk was great too) This poem hit me hard.
Kendall, uff!
you write grief as memory, imagination, and absence all at once.
You speak what happened through memory, through imagination, through absence, and every turn keeps opening more than one truth at once. I sense the love in the meals, the laughter, the porch light, and I sense the ache in the strangers who reached her before you. You hold them both, tenderness and ache, and the way you leave the space between them speaks as loudly as the words themselves.
The river you name as cantor, as supplicant, as force that carries on — I stay with this tension. Water carries life, and water receives life. Your lines allow both, and I feel the refusal of easy meaning. That refusal is also love, because you give her back to herself through remembering.
You call this painful labor. I see it as an honoring. You let silence do the speaking alongside your voice, and that is where grief breathes.
Chapeau for this poem.
I feel honoured that you allowed us to read it.