Gardenback
Things pass from
me
To you. I am as
naked &
Without down as
you were
When you came
into the
World,
vulnerable,
Melancholic,
correctly
Unfamiliar with
love. Nothing
Anymore can be
simple
Between these,
our
Economic
bodies—but
The figs will
still be here,
Safe, when night
falls.
From the first edition of Light-Up Swan, published by Ornithopter Press, 2021.
[ 1 ]
Things
pass from me
To
you.
With this beautiful image and idea of transmission, Tom transmits this poem to us readers, which is nested roughly a third of the way into his debut collection, titled Light-Up Swan. Beyond the placement of the word itself, the “pass” of the first line is available doubly in this sentence: first, pronounce the word “pass” out loud to yourself, slowly, and it takes on a sort of onomatopoeia-esque ring—doesn’t it sound like something physically passing by you, like a train or a football?; and, second, the sentence itself clusters around a line break, and in the movement through time and page to the second line, we find another pass(age).
The “me” and “you” of the poem also imply a channel, not only between a speaker/sender and receiver/listener, but between writer and reader, a relationship that is gracefully and calmly engendered here and throughout the entirety of Light-Up Swan. As is the case with the best poems, so it is true here: the “me” and the revealed “you”—and, later, the “our”—offer enough room at the margins of their capture for us to find ourselves in them, whether or not we are the intended addressee or imagined readership.
[ 2 ]
I
am as naked &
Without
down as you were
When
you came into the
World,
vulnerable,
Melancholic,
correctly
Unfamiliar
with love.
Note first the alliterative music in this sextet of lines: the “&” and the “as” stacked atop each other; “without” and “were” hugging the core of the simile in the second line; and the flurry of full l-sounds in the word sequence of world, vulnerable, melancholic, correctly, unfamiliar, love. Isn’t it lovely?
The natalism in the initial section of the sextet cements itself, almost paradoxically, in the final phrase: “correctly / Unfamiliar with love.” It seems at first that the image and the description share no similarity whatsoever—how can a child, new to a world or to this specific World, be unfamiliar with love if it is (we hope; for the sake of our well-being let’s assume this child lives in the warmest and most generous of all places) constantly swaddled in a love by its parents or caretakers? If babies are wells of new love, might we think that this newcomer to the world is as too?
The speaker, as is refracted to them by the child, and as they see in the image of their addressee’s infancy, is as disrobed as the newborn, just cast off from the Ashberyian mooring of the first time for anything. Perhaps the addressee is the speaker’s first love, or perhaps that person has reconfigured love itself in the mind of the speaker such that love, as a concept—and the speaker, as a practitioner of that concept—is now “naked & / Wiithout down”, leaving fresh striae of footprints on the wide fields of intimacy.
[ 3 ]
Nothing
Anymore
can be simple
Between
these, our
Economic
bodies—
That nothing can be simple anymore reminds us that growing up is an exercise in making almost everything more complicated—a process that has numerous hidden treasuries and many snaretraps—and I am particularly enthralled by the gentle dualism of the phrase “Economic bodies—”: There’s the unignorable fiscal sense, in which we, as the mature grown-ups we are (or aspire to be, someday) are inevitably anchored to monetary systems by which we get by or flounder in our lives; and then there’s the economic-as-learned-decision-making spin, where we have traded in being “correctly / Unfamiliar with love.” for being wisened by the experience of assigning or allotting love to various people, places, and things, and then estimating how that devotion will fare across time and space, like an economist peering over her charts and imagining a number of possible futures to come.
[ 4 ]
but
The
figs will still be here,
Nevertheless, there remains something assuring about the figures—”figs”—of our new economies of adult togetherness. There is a way in which our numbered days and actions constitute a kind of ledger system for us, a thing to look at when we become uncertain about what we have around us. Though we are bound by them, these itemizations that we grow into have a weight to them we can hold: we remember phone numbers to call if we are down; we know how much our favorite gas station snack costs, and how it delightfully never fluctuates; we remember the time of day when we received that awful phone call; we remember the birthdays, graduations, and retirement dates of those we love. To be familiar with these things is to no longer be that newcomer to the loving game, but is to be an older athlete who has hopefully nudged themself into a pocket of this world, where the numerals of everyday life cohere into a system that is decidedly as frightening as it is secured.
[ 5 ]
Safe, when night falls.
Perhaps the final mission of all poetry is to ferry us through the twilight, and “Gardenback” does that wonderfully and completely. The “night” of this line could be many things—the literal night, emotional darkness, a collapsing economy that “falls”—but I take it to be a general stand-in for roughness, when the routine checklist becomes agonizing for simply no reason at all. The speaker takes care, in the departing note, to install these figs as a fixture of both day and night, the great and the sorrowful, where they are, even as the fruits of a love or the day’s labors or just nature itself, devices that somehow reconcile us to the lift of managing it all, of trudging hand-in-hand through this particular darkness and everything to come: the new economies, the splaying futures, the worlds just out of sight.
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Cole Chaudhari is a student at Middlebury College, and is from Concord, New Hampshire.
