This past June, I was honored to have my poem, “the new command,” published in the third issue of Blue Moon Review.
I often don’t like to discuss the inspiration behind particular works, as these inspirations are either entirely too personal or they derive from fleeting images and thoughts that don’t even entirely make sense to me. Often the initial catalyst has nothing to do with the final work, and its evolution is so convoluted that it’s not worth discussing its roots at all.
That being said, “the new command,” is one poem whose composition was a clear burst of energy. I had that spark of inspiration, wrote it down almost immediately, and hardly changed it. That is very much not the case with most of my poetry.
This particular poem was born after listening (for the hundredth time) to Billie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe.” We all know this song, and if you don’t, please go give it a listen. It is a song that is haunting, alarming, horrifying in its casual views on life and death. There’s this repeating idea of something being thrown from the Tallahatchie Bridge, and people for decades have been trying to figure out what, exactly, was being tossed off into the Tallahatchie River. I, being sometimes morbid, always imagined it was a fetus.
Looking into it more, others have conjectured that what was thrown was Billie Joe’s Vietnam draft card. I love that idea if only because it isn’t as disturbing. I also like the act of rebellion. But Gentry tells us that it doesn’t matter what was thrown off the bridge:
“…the real message of the song, if there must be a message, revolves around the nonchalant way the family talks about the suicide.”
So much in life is taken for granted, including the end of life. I often think that is perhaps a defense mechanism. If we thought of all the horrible things that could happen to us, that do happen to us, we would be unable to leave the house. Life would, through fear, stop being life at all. And when those we love and cherish die, grief does abate with time. We don’t forget them, but we do learn to live with a new normal and understand, eventually, how to go through daily rituals without their guidance.
If we didn’t, life would grind to a halt.
Take childbirth – if women didn’t forget, at some level, the sheer pain of childbirth, the population would stall. A new normal is assumed.
This brings me back to “the new command,” which, after listening to “Ode to Billie Joe,” made me think on how I could have ever moved on from losing those who I have loved with an immense ferocity. I moved on because I had to, because – as horrible as it sounds – sometimes I must simply pass the peas and say, “What’s done is done.” Otherwise, how would we, as a species, as individuals, continue to function?
Perhaps the only thing that gets us through the day, besides an assumed sense of the casual, is love. It’s almost laughable to put that in writing. The word love is used so casually (there’s that word again) that it contains almost no weight. I love gin and tonics and I love my husband, but I do not love them in the same way or at all equally. But that’s another discussion for another time. What I mean to say is that, unlike “Ode to Billie Joe,” I felt that my poem had to end on a higher note if only for my own sanity.
I didn’t have to think too hard about those I love. I wrote this poem at my desk not ten feet from my husband. His small movements – castling on the chess board, speaking low to his friends, drawing lines soft and beautiful with his charcoals – are the actions that make me remember what life is and who it is lived for.
And although I don't exactly believe in reincarnation, I also don't disbelieve. I do not know what is out there or how God works or what His ways are. I don't think they're for us to know. But I do know that, in some other life, neither my husband nor my thousand loves were ever some lowly, crawling thing. For each and every one of them "look[s] at hate and me and say[s], what grace in everything."
the new command
that said, I’ve had it
spades, death.
who has come
this far
and not?
who has not passed
the peas and said who died
today, who has not,
who is near,
who went well
and who went
hard, who crumbled,
withered, whose spirits
set the standard,
settled Heaven
like a worn boot,
what or who went back into
it, back into life,
a bather in a sea
of other bathers, wet and raw
and still believing,
seeing earth’s morning once
again, the fire of a sun
on sea, the single mountain,
town, the skirts
of women, then –
(ask me how I know you
weren’t a wasp
or some low thing.
you walk the world
and look at hate and me and
say, what grace in everything).
