Shotgun Gospel

Some mornings you wake up needing a shotgun to the stomach. I’m not sure why that is, but I learned a long time ago that I don’t make the rules around here. Years ago I started to feel strongly that learning how to write was closer to learning where to stand, maybe because of how much I loved baseball growing up. The whole team would shift their positions depending on who was at bat, hoping this time to be where the ball was hit before it got there, and I felt like the same could be said about memories and emotions. If you were patient for a long enough season of life, you could start to catch them because you began to know where this was going. And to some extent that metaphor has held up since then.

But that isn’t a replacement for the underlying grief. There is a mental model for suffering but not for the lack underneath it, and if good writing is anything I think it’s an honest excavation of our animal pain. A tow truck pulling the wreckage up from the water. And an example of what I mean is this poem from Catherine Pond that I read this morning. It felt destructively true and, maybe strangely, like the only honest way I could start the day.

The Gallery

This painting doesn’t get any less ugly
the longer I look at it,
but it’s mine. My sadness, my voice
cracked in half,
bright wound around which darkness
arranges itself, like flowers
along the highway—color
at the end of long sadness—
Have you ever walked through years of rooms
of dark canvases
wanting to die?
If so, you know how I feel.
I want to be back in the city,
years from now,
all the dead hearts washed clean by rain.
If I hadn’t spent those six seasons
covered in snow
I wouldn’t recognize the terrible
burst of hope
in a slash of pink paint––
Georgia in summer, the smell of hydrangea
rotting in the sun. Sweet
and punishing.
If I love you the way I love myself,
I will be ruthless.
Rothko said it was his brightest paintings
that indicated deepest grief.
I never was good at letting go.
By now you know
it is raining. By now you know
I have entered
the room.