May 29, 2022

What We Wonder: On Heartbreak

Dear Reader,

It feels like heartbreak is everywhere lately. Over the past few years, there's a collective grief in the air, and it hangs over us like a storm cloud that doesn't seem to clear, and then there are griefs that appear on top of that, and they hit us like lightning rods. The last few weeks have been full of those lightning rods for me—the shootings in Buffalo, NY, Laguna Woods, CA, Uvalde, TX; the leak of the Roe v. Wade opinion; and more. It doesn't seem to end.

Sometimes, I don't know how much more grief we can collectively carry. I only know that somehow we keep going. Somehow we carry it in the midst of everything else going on in our lives. Most days, though, recently, it feels like the everything else going on in my life has only added to that sense of grief, confusion, and loss.

That is not to say that there aren't beautiful moments that happen. At my parents house, there is a robin's nest that has lodge in the middle of a huge rhododendron by the front window of their living room. For weeks, there were baby blue eggs nestled inside, and the mother would sit there, patiently warming the nest. There are now two baby birds that have hatched—you can see them, briefly, if the mother flies away, but you have to crane your neck to see them. They are so small and vulnerable and well-hidden in the nest.

But today when I went to look, the mother wasn't just sitting there in the nest over the birds. But another robin next to the mother, a male bird, presumably, the father of the baby birds. And when I saw that, I cried. Robins are not a bird species that mates for life, but from what I've read, they do stay together during the breeding season, and sometimes they raise the baby birds together until they are ready to leave the nest. Sometimes, too, the same mates come back to each other the next breeding season and begin again.

Recently, someone came back into my life. Someone who I cared for years ago and still care for a lot. And without getting into too much personal detail, it initially felt like a huge beginning. Until things took a turn I didn't expect. And though I believe all endings are beginnings, I'm in the liminal space that feels closer to an ending than a beginning. It feels more like grief than love.

And I'm struggling without how to hold these two opposing feelings. I'm struggling with the excitement over this robin's nest, but also the feeling of anticipatory grief should something happen to these baby birds. I'm struggling with the excitement of having expressed mutual care and affection for someone with the grief of realizing it cannot be more than that right now.

Is it possible to hold this grief with with love? I'm still figuring this out. Today's three poems, written by three wonderful poets—Cameron Awkward-Rich, Vievee Francis, and Maggie Milner—explore this exact theme. They are poems about heartbreak, and the grief and sadness of that, but also, they poems about what unfolds when the heart breaks open, and the possibility that resides there: the possibility to know ourselves deeply, to choose ourselves and our hearts completely.

***

Cameron Awkward-Rich's "Meditations in an Emergency"

"Meditations in an Emergency" (a title that nods to the Frank O'Hara poem and book of the same title) first appeared in Cameron's 2019 book Dispatch, but I first encountered this poem on the Ours Poetica YouTube channel, where poet Em Dial does a wonderful reading of it. It has become one of my absolute favorite poems, and if I'm feeling or talking about heartbreak, I turn to this poem immediately. The poem begins:

I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & / the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I / ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old / women hawking roses, & children all of them, / break my heart.

I love the honesty of "I wake up & it breaks my heart." I feel that so strongly lately. The day has barely begun, but in that moment of waking, I remember all the heartbreak that came before. The lines that follow also feel so relatable—to realize you are carrying grief, but then also need to walk into the week with its hustle and bustle and continue living.

And these things we encounter while living—the underpass, the huddled mass, the old women hawking roses—are things that many of us have probably encountered hundreds of times. I've felt it, innately, that these things break my heart, but I don't get the opportunity to stop and acknowledge them. Or at least, I'm not expected to stop and acknowledge them, which is a type of privilege: to just be able to keep moving in our own grief and absorbing or deflecting all the world's other grief.

In many ways, all this grief just becomes expected, a thing that we are supposed to just suck up and live with for those of us that have the privilege of doing so. In the throes of heartbreak or grief, it's hard to imagine another way of life. It's hard to stop and wonder: What would it be like if I didn't feel this way? But here is exactly where Cameron takes the poem: to a place where it's possible for something beautiful to exist:

There’s a dream I have in which I / love the world. I run from end to end like fingers / through her hair. There are no borders, only wind.

God, I love these lines. "There's a dream I have in which I love the world." Again, the poem doesn't shy away from the fact that the world does not always feel like a place that is easy to love. But in an imaginal space, it becomes possible. And I love the juxtaposition of running from end to end of the world, which feels so expansive and dreamlike, with "fingers through her hair," which feels so grounded and tangible. It's an exquisite use of metaphor.

The close of the poem leans further into the heartbreak, and though it feels like the speaker has been talking directly to us, the readers, the whole time, it becomes a direct address in the last few lines:

Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the / institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand / on my stupid heart.

I've thought about those final lines over and over the last few weeks: "Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart." Some may question the use of the word "stupid" in this poem or any poem. But I don't. I think it's completely appropriate. The speaker seems to be saying in these final lines: "Look, I'm like you; I am human. I am encountering the world and over and over everything breaks my heart."

Yet, we are told by society and institutions to keep dreaming in spite of the grief. And this heart, this "stupid heart," is the origin of these feelings—the big joyous ones and the big grief-filled ones. The "stupid" then feels like a type of endearment, not just an annoyance. It feels like a beautiful reminder that we are not alone in our heartache and heartbreak. We're not alone in our emotional capacities for for deep joy and for deep grief. We're always holding both of them within us.

Vievee Francis' "I've Been Thinking about Love Again"

Like the previous poem, I love this poem, "I've Been Thinking about Love Again," for its unvarnished honesty. I can't remember where I first encountered this poem, but I was drawn in immediately to the title. It feels like I am thinking about love all the time anymore, and in particular, what it means to feel like you have it and what it means to feel like you don't. This is exactly where this poem begins. The title "I've Been Thinking about Love Again" leads into the first lines:

Those who live to have it / and those who live to give it. / Of course there are those for whom both are true, / but never in the same measure.

Immediately, Vievee starts the poem with a kind of division: there are those who live to have love and those who live to give it. And that might feel too dualistic, too binary, and the speaker acknowledges that point right away, saying it is possible for both to be true for people "but never in the same measure." Wow. I had to really sit and think about that. It feels like a true thing I hadn't articulated before. Sometimes we just want to give love, and sometimes we just want to receive it. Sometimes, we are both, but often our want of giving or our want of receiving are not equal in measure. Vievee uses the poem to further explain what she means by this:

Those who have it to give are / like cardinals in the snow. So easy / and beautifully lit.

[....]

Those who want it / cannot be satisfied. Eagle-eyed and such talons, / any furred thing will do.

The dichotomy here that Vievee sets up in metaphor—between those who want to give love: "cardinals in the snow," and her gorgeous description of them "so easy and beautifully lit," with those who want to receive it "eagle-eyed" and with "talons"—might feel, again, like a generalization or simplistic division between prey and predator.

But when I think about it, it really isn't that simplistic. Too often, in love, particularly romantic love, it can feel like we are being pursued or someone is pursuing us. When the hurt happens in love, it can feel like we are the victim or we are the perpetrator. Still, I don't think the point of this poem is to simply call out these divisions. It's important to remember those earlier lines—that it is possible for use to be both, just maybe not always in the same measure. I think the heart of this poem, and the reason I love it so much, lives in the final lines:

I walk out into the winter. / I know what I am.

In those final lines, we see the speaker entering the landscape with those that want to give love vs. those that want to receive love: "I walk out into winter." But the speaker doesn't tell us what they identify as, and the poem simply ends with "I know what I am."

I'm so fascinated by the way this ending complicates the poem. Does it matter which that we are? If we are both, does it matter which way we lean? Maybe it only matters that we try to understand ourselves. That we try understand how we engage with others and accept the truth of that. For better or for worse, I love that this poem invites in the truth of what we are: complicated humans, flawed humans, and these complications are worthy of our understanding and self-exploration.

Maggie Milner's "Couplets"

This final poem, "Couplets," adds wonderfully to this them of self-knowledge. It appeared in The Nation last month, and I started crying as soon as I read it. Maggie Milner has such a beautiful way of writing about heartbreak and grief. A previous poem of hers I fell in love with was "Magical Thinking." Very broadly, it's a poem in which the speaker describes watching a girl skate and spin on an ice rink and relates that to the grief the speaker experiences in the world and in her personal life. But I am not doing the poem justice by this brief description—go read it for yourself.

But the poem I want to share today, "Couplets," feels similar. It's a meditation on grief and heartbreak, although it doesn't rely on metaphor the same way. It also is written in couplets, as the title states, which are two-line stanzas. Couplets are one of my favorite poetic devices, and this poem demonstrates so many of the reasons I love them right from the start:

I became myself.
I became myself.

No, I always was myself.
There’s no such person as myself.

These opening couplets are so effective. The repetition of "I became myself" is so gorgeous not only from a sonic perspective, but also because it adds meaning to the poem. One of my favorite poets, Jericho Brown, often says, "Repetition is holy" when it comes to poetry. And this repetition adds a kind of reverence to the poem. From the get-go, it's as if the speaker is trying to convince herself of the fact "I became myself," yes, "I became myself." By the second line, she seems certain.

But then the equivocation comes in: "No," that's wrong, "I always was myself." And I think, of course, we are always ourselves, right? That makes sense. But still, the poem pushes toward more uncertainty, more wondering in the form of a new realization: "There's no such person as myself."

Uff, that line hits me so hard. What does it even mean to be ourselves? I think about this a lot. I've often said that when I write poetry, or am in community around poetry, it's the time and place that I feel most like myself. But what does that even mean? If I had to give that person a name, who would she be? I have guesses about this, but can I really know? Does this person really exist at all?

These are deeply introspective questions, and I love that the poem goes there next, and describes how the speaker actively tries to resist this introspection of figuring out who she is, which most, if not all of us, can relate to:

I wouldn’t have to turn my eye
inward, I thought, if I could train my eye

on him—the one I loved.
But I was wrong. My eye loved

everything it fell upon.

I feel like these lines speak directly to me. Too many times I have thought that I could avoid looking at myself, my grief, my hurt if I could focus on someone else. If I could, like Vievee Francis' poem describes, be a person more interested in wanting to give love rather than receive it.

But as Maggie describes here in this poem: "I was wrong." And the aftermath of why I was wrong is something I am very much dealing with in this exact moment in time: "My eye loved everything it fell upon." I deeply relate to that. A similar line in my own poetry that I'm working with right now is: "I have always loved too many things." And it feels like one of the truest things I've written.

If you are a person used to wanting to give so much love to the world, including in your friendships or romantic relationships, it feels like the list of what you should love doesn't end. But somehow, in having to love everything and everyone else in the world, someone gets missed. Someone always gets abandoned. And this beautiful poem ends there, in that discovery:

And then one day it fell upon

a mirror. And he was nowhere
in the mirror. And she was everywhere.

This is the part where I cried: "And he was nowhere in the mirror. And she was everywhere." Because the person we forget when we train ourselves so hard to love other people is always ourselves. And it's not just that realization of missing ourselves that makes me heartbroken, but also, that no one else is capable of feeling that particular heartbreak but ourselves, which makes me more heartbroken. So often, when I feel heartbroken over the end of a friendship or a relationship, the hurt comes from no longer being able to give that person the love that I want to.

Of course, I can also feel slighted or hurt for myself based on another's action, but I truly have never thought to step back and notice how heartbreaking it is to have so much self-abandonment in that dynamic. I have never thought to look in the mirror at myself and said, "look, this other person is 'nowhere,' and you are here, 'everywhere,' so what are you going to do now? Will you finally learn to love yourself?" I am hoping that, this time, my answer is yes.

***

These three poems—"Meditations in an Emergency," "I've Been Thinking about Love Again" and "Couplets"—are the ones currently getting me through the grief and heartbreak, both personal and collective, that I am experiencing.

If you are feeling this way too, I hope you know that you aren't alone. I hope you know know that I'm sending you light and good words and kindness. I hope that even in the grief, that you know moments of joy, even if they are brief, or you have to crane your neck to see them. I hope you know that your heart is capable of this—capable of holding it all.

All my best,

MEK