Poetry / Ryan Black
:: from You Were Never Lovelier ::
“This seeing the sick endears them to us,” Hopkins writes, “us too it endears.” Confirmed in love. God, himself, the reward. My father-in-law died on a Sunday in August. For hours, the crackle of fluid in his chest. Then a small mercy—a productive cough. Then sleep. The smell of moonflowers in the late air. I sat alone in the driveway. Everyone I loved was asleep. My wife, my heart, exhausted, slept. My father slept in the earth. My mother, in her great distance. My sisters slept. My brothers. My nieces and nephews, curled up like cats. Once, he woke into sunlight. His daughters stood around his body like Athenians. His son pulled the blanket back and cupped his swollen feet.
——— I wake now every morning at 4am, thinking of my wife who called in March to say she couldn’t any longer. She just couldn’t. The half-light of an overcast sky paled the windows. “It’s irrational,” she said. The sky was white because winter clouds tend to be horizontal and summer clouds vertical. I knew it happened when it happened. The marriage over in a speech act. As performative as I now pronounce you. I now pronounce you no longer. Divorce is just paperwork. You pay for that. ——— We married in a municipal court overlooking the Sound. Her father signed as witness. He wore a beige jacket. My mother called him handsome. “The hardest thing,” Anne Carson says, is watching “the year repeat its days,” each one an anniversary. The soothing voice. A gesture. A fog so thick I was afraid to drive. Carson’s metaphor is a videotape running beneath the present tense. I looked it up because I thought I remembered a cassette. The song taped over heard beneath the new one. Always there. I was wrong. But I did remember the “lozenges of April heat.” ——— A friend calls. The president had been airlifted to Walter Reed. Twice, his blood oxygen level dropped. A fever. Then, three days later, on a White House balcony, breathless, he removed his mask. Sparrows gather in my mother’s yard. I hear them chittering. The virus like a circuit continues. My friend’s mind is quick. She reads the image—the president framed by the terrible symmetry of flags. An audience of cameras. Hyperreality. The masses’ self-expression. “I think he’ll win, again,” she says. Then she sighs. She hasn’t been sleeping well. She wakes too early or can’t get to bed. Her mother is sick in another city. Alzheimer’s. She worries. I want the habit of telling her she’s loved, but I don’t say it, having been raised otherwise. Not without love. No. That we had. Its naked expression. That we didn’t. ——— Nineteen students. Cameras off. Twenty. Twenty-one. We’re reading Tarfia Faizullah’s Seam alongside an essay on trauma, “another body inside your own.” I’m wearing a blue button down, my knee wrapped in ice. “We can separate the elegist from the mourner,” I say. One and the same and other. “But what does it give the writer?” Before class, a student emailed to tell me she’d lost someone. Then asked to be excused. A student posts in the chat. “Distance?” Another responds. “A safe distance.” Another. “What distance is safe?”
From the writer
:: Account ::
“You Were Never Lovelier” is a long poem occasioned by the dissolution of a marriage at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The poem’s primary settings are the adjacent neighborhoods of Jackson Heights and Elmhurst, Queens, the initial epicenter of the pandemic in the United States. The end of the marriage gathers and recalls a myriad of losses, often contextualized through the anxieties brought on by the virus. The “divorce poem” (or book) is perhaps its own poetic genre; its conventions often differ depending on whether the poet identifies as a man or a woman. I wanted to explode conventional expectations of how, for instance, “a man writes about divorce,” in particular as I found my experience of divorce more closely represented in women’s narratives than in men’s. “You Were Never Lovelier” is in conversation with both Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” and her work on desire in Eros the Bittersweet, as well as George Meredith’s 1862 sonnet sequence “Modern Love,” an exploration of the writer’s own failed marriage
Ryan Black is the author of The Tenant of Fire (University of Pittsburgh Press), winner of the 2018 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Death of a Nativist, selected by Linda Gregerson for a 2016 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. He has published previously in Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York, and lives in Jackson Heights.