I Belong There
by Mahmoud Darwish
Translated by Carolyn Forché and Munir Akash

I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born.

I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell

with a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own.

I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon,

a bird’s sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.

I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.

I belong there. When heaven mourns for her mother, I return heaven to

her mother.

And I cry so that a returning cloud might carry my tears.

To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood.

I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a

single word: Home.

From “A Backward Glance” by Walt Whitman

“And it must be carefully remember’d that first-class literature does not shine by any luminosity of its own; nor do its poems. They are grown of circumstances, and are evolutionary. The actual living light is always curiously from elsewhere–follows unaccountable sources, and is lunar and relative at the best.”

From “A Way to Love God”
by Robert Penn Warren

Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true.
And the line where the incoming swell from the sunset Pacific
First leans and staggers to break will tell all you need to know
About submarine geography, and your father’s death rattle
Provides all biographical data required for the Who’s Who of the dead.

Since I lost my friend, the fictions do not come. I find myself instead drawn to the shaping of fact, the variations of nonfiction, the learning of truth-telling built on such facts, rather than the lie that tells the truth that has been my pursuit for so long. I’m reading memoir after memoir, text after text, made of the narrative shaping of fact, the world as it is according to that particular author, rather than the fiction writer’s reshaping of a world as one imagines–questions–it, or as we might wish it to be. I’m also reading the advice of those who know this genre so much better than I ever will. And I am more terrified than I have ever been facing the page. No lies here. No lies to be told. Not for now anyway.

In fiction I can hide the others upon whom I build my characters, upon whom I cast the burden of asking my questions. I can hide, as we say in the South, “my own self.” I can test the edges of whatever so-called truth I explore, bend people into whom or what I want them to be, or whom I myself want to be. I can take the best–or worst–and weave those pieces–damaged or glorious–into a single person, captured in a single moment, a single frame of a conjured lifetime, then I can stand back, safe in this creation of characters who can bear all of my fears, my weaknesses, who can take the risk, the hazards, the thrill and pain of my search for me.

There is luxury, comfort, distance, in that lie. There is safety. At least for me.

The hiding, the fear I discuss here is only my own. I would never make the argument that nonfiction writers are more courageous than fiction writers. Who can come close to the courage of the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquz, Tobias Wolff, Jose Saramago, Italo Calvino, Edwidge Danticat, Harry Crews or Larry Brown? Brown, when I asked him about those who would call our fiction out as too violent, too harsh, answered, “Life for a lot of folks is brutal. You can call my fiction brutal if you want, but you can never say it’s not honest.”

Poets too embrace without fear the way into truth. From my father’s beloved Yeats, the unyielding pen of Whitman, the intellectual fearlessness of my own most loved Eliot, the unflinching sensual gaze of Sharon Olds, Ira Sadoff, and my dear friend Aaron Smith, the challenging countenance of the speakers bearing witness through Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks, the grit and sand and wisdom of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Agha Shahid Ali and Seamus Heaney, daring us softly to dig. All braver than I can ever hope to be.

I’m using the fear as an excuse.

Recently I met a young man who has served multiple times in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is keen of intellect, articulate, and impassioned, thorough and disciplined in his approach to everything. He measures the world around him with long strides and looks out on whatever acre of earth he is crossing with eyes that precisely catalog details, mapping the space through which he crosses. He scans what he sees long before he approaches it, as if weighing options, considering alternate routes. Some days, when his eyes are downcast and dark, too dark for the bright summer green of a college campus, he chooses those alternate paths, his feet careful on the lawn, his hands tightly curled on the strap of his backpack. Other days, he seems the quintessential American boy, smiling and open, trust trying itself out on his young face, the playfulness of a childhood in New England still evident in his smile and his eyes. On good days and bad, however, one aspect of this young man is consistent–the way he moves. He walks with the upright strength and certainty, the grace of limb identifiable, if you’ve been around them, almost immediately as a United States Marine.

The sandy swamp-studded coastal lowlands where I grew up are also home to every branch of the American military. The concentration of military personnel in the area is among the highest in the country. More than 113,000 active military personnel live and work in eastern North Carolina; for years, in peace and war, young men so much like this student have served in and deployed from the gates of seven Eastern Region bases: Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base, Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, New River Marine Corps Air Station, Naval Aviation Depot, Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station, four Coast Guard Stations, including the busiest in the country at Elizabeth City, and as we say back home, down the road a bit, in what’s called the sandhills, Fort Bragg, and its airwing Pope Air Force Base.

As a child in the tobacco and cornfields around our trailer park, I remember stopping in our play, kneeling in the dirt and shading my eyes against the hot sun, to look up, to follow the faraway drone of the military jets in flyovers, contrails lacing the wide sky even when they flew too high to be heard. Trips to the beach found my brothers and I counting the passing camouflage vehicles, amazed at the size and power of them all as they rumbled past us. The men we glimpsed through the open windows, their eyes usually concealed by sunglasses, one strong left arm casually draped elbow-angled out the driver’s window, fascinated me: the obvious physical prowess, the confidence, the knowledge that they, ultimately, were trained to kill–in order to protect us. They brought to life the square-jawed strength, straight-ahead stare and upright Americanness of my brothers’ G.I. Joes.

But I knew better, even then, than to fully romanticize them. These men and their families made up a large part of our landscape. Their daughters were my friends, their sons my classmates. Their wives stopped to talk with my mom in the Piggly Wiggly, comparing notes on the cost of milk and gas. The families filled the folding chairs of the poor Catholic church we attended on Sundays, and as I grew, I came to know the younger just-got-paid Marines who poured into Greenville for the nightclubs and what must have seemed to them an endless supply of college girls. I dated some of them, my fingers curling around the steel-tough cords of neck muscle and fluttering across the bristle of the standard issue high and tight haircut as I tipped my head back to be kissed.

But the things I learned from this constant exposure to the employees and families of the American military included much more than the obvious strength. What I learned was about the sacrifice. They were/are routinely underpaid, salaries considerably lower than the average American would ever think; military housing is as a rule minimally acceptable at best. The long absences of the fathers, the constant moving, the required duality with which they all lived–soliders and their kin–crossing back and forth between military and civilian life with its variations of both the spoken and unspoken rules, took a toll on many I knew, a toll evident even in peacetime. There were advantages. My friends who called themselves ‘military brats’ demonstrated a chameleon quality, an instinctive eye for and ability to adapt to whatever community they encountered. They possessed a discipline and a worldliness I envied, a knowledge of places and customs that to those of us for whom the long straight hot lines of eastern North Carolina were all we knew seemed to make them more sophisticated, more adult.

I was in my teens when I realized that what actually made them seem so adult was that they lived every day with the knowledge that when their dads went to work, it meant they could die. That even the air they breathed as they sat to eat with their families was thick with the knowledge that being military–soldier or wife or son–meant being willing to sacrifice everything. What I had been seeking to understand, what seeded my fascination even as a child, wasn’t the strength so much as it was the vulnerability. A daily exposure to–intimate knowledge of–death.

Not death from afar, not the flag-covered caskets I saw on the news as a kid, warriors returning home from Viet Nam for burial, not the G.I. Joe mock-battles my brothers waged in holes dug in our sandy yard, not even the medical mysteries or maladies my own family of nurses brought home in the blood-stained stories their scrubs told. This was real and daily and the day I realized that this was what my friends lived with, I tiptoed into where my dad was napping, preparing for a night shift of working with alcoholics fighting their way to recovery. I sat on the floor to watch him sleep. His chest rose and fell, his full-lipped mouth slightly open, a whistly snore light on the air, and I wrapped my arms around myself, sitting there against the wall in the bedroom he shared with my mother in our double-wide, even my body feeling dark with imagining him going to work daily with the risk of not coming back alive.

I had forgotten that day, until I watched the young Marine in my class try to make his classmates understand how impossible it is to leave Iraq and Afghanistan behind, how it invades his dreams, the shadowed corners of his day as he walks to class. How he and all of the other young men and women like him who continue to serve in the deserts and mountains of the middle east fight to return to civilian lives and routines.

“I need you to understand,” he said. He paced in front of us, giving a required presentation on a civic project he’d designed for the class, a support network for young veterans returning to college. He paced, long legs eating up the small breadth of the classroom and with every third step, he dropped an empty magazine behind him, the hollow metal clanging on the tile floor. Step, step, clang. Step, step, clang.

“That sound, that sound,” he said. The tinny metallic sound, jangling loud as nerves, as each magazine hit the tiled classroom floor. “That sound-hear it?–that sound is always with me, I hear it still, all the time.”

He dropped another magazine, its echo reverberating against the closed windows, the sectioned ceiling. The other students’ eyes widened each time the sound repeated, their shoulders narrowing as they pulled back from him. “That sound, that sound, hear it?” They tightened in their desks, tried to make themselves smaller targets, evading the hard truth he piled before them.

This wasn’t who they thought he was. More, this wasn’t who they wanted him to be. He was the big broad-shouldered Marine with whom they’d sat for weeks in class, impressed by his being older, by his obvious intellect and attention to detail. They had, in those weeks before, shown him a certain deference, asking him for advice on their written projects, stealing sidelong looks when he spoke with the confidence born of his experiences.

They didn’t want to see his hands tremble. They shuddered when his voice cracked with emotion, when his pacing increased, when he couldn’t look at them as he described his friends dying, damaged, struggling with alcohol and loneliness and thoughts of suicide after coming home. The last empty magazine he pulled from his pocket he threw, loud metal rattle across the floor, a soft empty thud when it skidded against the wall. “That sound–that sound, hear it?”

That last day of our class, he needed to show them. He didn’t want deference. But he didn’t want pity either. He wanted them to see. Sacrifice–courage–means vulnerability. It means searching the shadows. No excuses.

Echoes
by Barbara Guest

Once more riding down to Venice on borrowed horses,

the air free of misdemeanor, at rest in the inns of our fathers.

Once again whiteness like the white chandelier.

Echoes of other poems…

I May After Leaving You Walk Quickly or Even Run
by Matthea Harvey

Rain fell in a post-romantic way.
Heads in the planets, toes tucked

under carpets, that’s how we got our bodies
through. The translator made the sign

for twenty horses backing away from
a lump of sugar. Yes, you.

When I said did you want me
I meant me in the general sense.

The drink we drank was cordial.
In a spoon, the ceiling fan whirled.

The Old World smoked in the fireplace.
Glum was the woman in the ostrich feather hat.

For my mother, who has always worked harder than anyone else I know.

Womanhood
by Catherine Anderson

She slides over
the hot upholstery
of her mother’s car,
this schoolgirl of fifteen
who loves humming & swaying
with the radio.
Her entry into womanhood
will be like all the other girls’–
a cigarette and a joke,
as she strides up with the rest
to a brick factory
where she’ll sew rag rugs
from textile strips of kelly green,
bright red, aqua.

When she enters,
and the millgate closes,
final as a slap,
there’ll be silence.
She’ll see fifteen high windows
cemented over to cut out light.
Inside, a constant, deafening noise
and warm air smelling of oil,
the shifts continuing on. . .
All day she’ll guide cloth along a line
of whirring needles, her arms & shoulders
rocking back & forth
with the machines–
200 porch size rugs behind her
before she can stop
to reach up, like her mother,
and pick the lint
out of her hair.

Reminder
by Michael Ryan

Torment by appetite
is itself an appetite
dulled by inarticulate,
dogged, daily

loving-others-to-death—
as Chekhov put it, “compassion
down to your fingertips”—
looking on them as into the sun

not in the least for their sake
but slowly for your own
because it causes
the blinded soul to bloom

like deliciousness in dirt,
like beauty from hurt,
their light—their light—
pulls so surely. Let it.

When I was fourteen, my mother sat me down, her corduroy blue eyes careful, and said bluntly, “You’ll need to find a man who is as strong–or stronger–than you are. And that’s not gonna be easy.”

Before I married–which I’ve done twice, once at eighteen, then again at twenty-three– she sat with each of the young men who had in his proposal done what my father called “braving the wilds,” and asked them, “You do know, right, that you are marrying a full-blown Irish windstorm? She leads with her emotions, her heart–always–and god help ya, son, if you let her get bored.”

My father gave me away in St. Gabriel’s tiny beautiful sanctuary the first time, a Christmas wedding, the men in dove gray morning suits with tails, flowers the color of wine and ice entwined in my dark hair; the second time we shifted anxiously before a justice of the peace, a few friends in tow, the only other plan involving a run to the beach after. But both times, as my lips opened to form the words I do, I knew I didn’t–well, sort of–I loved each man in that moment but the until death do you part part? I knew, even as I said the words, that it wouldn’t take, that I’d leave.

Eventually. And I did. Both of them.

The first after only six months, and the second after almost four years, when I left with my first two beautiful children–my daughter, who looked at me with the most solemn version of my own round eyes, the child who had the steadiness I would never have, and my oldest son, my Traveler child, his fall of blond hair bobbing to the music he still hears, and whom I knew had inherited the leaving, the motion forward apparent, genetically encoded perhaps, even in his first trembling steps. The reasons for the marriages ending are myriad, and complicated, and excruciatingly boring this late in the game, and there’s enough blame to go around for all of us. I’ve refused marriage in the twenty years since, but have managed several stable relationships–one long-term that gave me the gift of my third child, the son who inherited his father’s Indian eyes but my willfulness and uncontrolled curiosity. In each case, even in these relationships that didn’t involve marriage, some particular morning flared above me, and I knew when I opened my eyes to the yellow of day, that I’d be packing, or calling around for a new place, beginning the tasks of whatever that leaving required.

Like whole-body hunger, an unbearable urge to pace, the need to leave moves like a tremor that echoes down my calves into the arches of my feet. This leaving for me didn’t–doesn’t–involve the traveling the Brother-Man craves to feed his soul, although I recognize, understand, the road’s call, and followed it myself more than a few times. For me, the leaving is more internal, less about land and more about loneliness, a desire to be alone. It is the rolling of my hands, opening and closing of my fingers, the push to pick things up and put them down again, a bone-stretching need to be by myself, alone in the roaring of my own brain, an unwillingness to share space, a desire humming on my skin to feel silence tick around me, to walk sock-footed into the kitchen and to see only one coffee cup in the silver bowl of the sink.

But as my mother warned my husbands and tried to warn me again and again, I lead with my heart. And I love men, everything about them, the way they look, smell, move–especially the way they move. I love how they think, their innate drive to solve or fix things. I love the physicality of them, the angles and planes, the squareness of their hands, the pulled broadness of their backs. I generally prefer the company of men even as friends, although I have in the past ten years made female friends whom I cherish beyond words.

I love loving, not just sex, but the extreme passion of it all, the sharing of meals, the unfolding knowing of another person, learning the intricacies and idiosyncrasies, the intimacy of tracing a well-known arm or curve of lip, the quietude in a shared routine.

So I met another loving lovely man, who gave me twelve years of stability and security and quiet assurance in his Vermonter’s stoicism. He cared for and loved my older two children as his own, fathered my youngest, and I loved him. We built a home, a life together. I threw myself into the relationship as I never had before. I flung myself and all that passion into motherhood, the children being the only people I’ve never even once had the desire to leave, thinking that this would cure the restlessness, sate the need to leave. I had, it seemed, all I should have wanted. Or needed. Until it wasn’t anymore.

So I left. Again.

Again, there were other reasons–a new job, a new state for me, but the truth was I had already left. And I was more aware than ever of this cycle of motion, this pushing toward something, someone, somewhere, that would eventually quell the seeking. Over the years, in the alone times, i deliberately put myself into situations where the men would have no expectations of my staying, only having relationships with married men, men who had to leave themselves, return to their wives and lives, and leave me to the solitude of my own work, the onlyness of the life I was creating for myself. Surrounded by monogamy, I sought out a therapist. He put me on anti-depressants, warned me repeatedly that I would be hurt by these patterns. Disconnected from everything by the drugs, unable to write, unable to feel, I demanded to be taken off the meds, and waited for the passion–for anything–to return. The therapist used words like emotionally unavailable and fear of commitment. I didn’t think I feared commitment. I committed to the men I married. I committed to my Vermonter. It simply didn’t sustain. I came to think of myself as a serial monogamist. Right or wrong. Windstorm or Traveler.

I made the conscious decision that I prefer to feel, for however long it may last, or however fleeting it might prove. Or for whatever pain it might bring. I’m learning to accept my contradictory nature and needs, hearing my mother’s advice about men from those early teen years, seeking strength and tolerance, being wary of anyone who might try to hold me too tightly. It’s lonely at times, but being more aware, more conscious of who I really am, will, I hope, allow me to avoid hurting another man by my departure. I also think–hope–that I might still find him, the one I won’t leave. But I’ve learned–come to terms with–the risk this entails, learned intimately the “beauty from hurt,” the only way I think this blinded soul can even make its way to bloom.

Liam and I talked about the leaving. He saw it in me, understood it personally having done it himself, but he also advised me, just over a year ago as we sat in the cricketed Virginia darkness, that there comes a time when one must learn to stay. I told him I didn’t know how to do that–wasn’t sure that I would ever know. We smoked and I told him I figured I’d probably already scared the right one off. He laughed, leaned back his head, and said, “If he’s scared, he’s not the right one anyway.” He patted my hand. “Ah yes, we are difficult people.” He drew deeply on his cigarette, leaned into the dark night air, and a palpable feeling of contentment radiated from him. Obviously thinking of his own dear Tree, the wife he loved so clearly, his voice softened. “It’ll happen,” he said. “You’ll find someone. And when you do, it’ll be like coming home.”

I want to believe that.

Thank you, Jason, for your unexpected gentleness, and overwhelming kindness. Thank you for your work, for those moments of sharing souls and silence.

Eternity
by Jason Shinder
1955-2008

A poem written three thousand years ago

about a man who walks among horses
grazing on a hill under the small stars

comes to life on a page in a book

and the woman reading the poem
in her kitchen filled with a gold, metallic light

finds the experience of living in that moment

so vividly described as to make her feel known
to another; until the woman and the poet share

not only their souls but the exact silence

between each word. And every time the poem is read,
no matter her situation or her age,

this is more or less what happens.

from The Door
by Robert Creeley

Nothing for You is untoward.
Inside You would also be tall,
more tall, more beautiful.
Come toward me from the wall, I want to be with You.

So I screamed to You,
who hears as the wind, and changes
multiply, invariably,
changes in the mind.

Running to the door, I ran down
as a clock runs down. Walked backwards,
stumbled, sat down
hard on the floor near the wall.

Where were You.
How absurd, how vicious.
There is nothing to do but get up.
My knees were iron, I rusted in worship, of You.

I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone
by Rainer Maria Rilke (Translation by Annemarie S. Kidder)

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone

enough

to truly consecrate the hour.

I am much too small in this world, yet not small

enough

to be to you just object and thing,

dark and smart.

I want my free will and want it accompanying

the path which leads to action;

and want during times that beg questions,

where something is up,

to be among those in the know,

or else be alone.

I want to mirror your image to its fullest perfection,

never be blind or too old

to uphold your weighty wavering reflection.

I want to unfold.

Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent;

for there I would be dishonest, untrue.

I want my conscience to be

true before you;

want to describe myself like a picture I observed

for a long time, one close up,

like a new word I learned and embraced,

like the everday jug,

like my mother’s face,

like a ship that carried me along

through the deadliest storm.

Power
by Adrienne Rich

Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.

I’ve been thinking about power. Personal power–not the kind that comes from money or status, those slim measures of control and gratification afforded so few in this country that boasts of so much. The rage and scars born of class-associated differentiated power is a topic for another time. Instead, caught in the throes still of the transition I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been considering from where my own power to be stems, and if I have even begun to fully recognize it yet, realize it yet, here in the middle years of my life. This definition of power for me concerns being able to make a difference, creating then fully living the life and work that is truly mine.

I have found my work; that I know. But am I truly doing it yet? Doing it justice? Doing service to the help and belief and encouragement I’ve received from so many along the way? And is it only about the work, as beautiful as this work is?

So much of the transition I’m feeling is about stepping up, finally, to being the full-grown woman and full-blown professional, and force that Liam thought I could be, a full and totally realized integration of self that I’ve never allowed myself, never dared. In the periods in my life when I was avoiding growing into the professional me, I thought my only self came from womanness, my only power from sexuality. Then I discovered the mother in me, that unspeakable joy and connection to everything through these magical people who came into my life, and I subverted whoever else I might have been to that. Then, when I began to seek this writing life, I compartmentalized again. But for the first time, with Liam’s help and guidance still, I feel as if I have to bring all of me to this life, and I’m scared as hell. And more fully alive than I ever have been, as if the energy that he was dances on my skin and in my blood, and now that the haze of grief and sorrow has begun to clear a bit, my brain and the manic way it works is functioning again, like chain lightning in colors and patterns of possibility like I’ve never even imagined before.

But I think Liam dreamed it for me, of me, and I’m finding my way into who he saw me to be.

So I’m becoming this whole. I feel like I’m walking on stones just beneath the water, and I don’t know where the next one is, not even for sure that it’s there, so I just have to trust that when I put my foot down, something will be there. And how beautifully crazy and dangerous and blood-thrumming it is.