Kiss Off Read online

  Instead of being so hard on yourself because you're afraid to venture back into the world, maybe you just have to accept that this is what you feel like doing for the time being. You are like the speaker in Guillaume Apollinaire's “Hotel.” You have checked in to a cage in your own heartbreak hotel, and even though the sun “puts his arm through the window,” begging you to come out and play, you won't budge. In fact, you'll use the heat and warmth of the sun to light your self-destructive cigarette—“I don't want to work I want to smoke.” You are filled with ennui and existential angst. And as the French philosophers suggest, perhaps for a while anyway, you need your cage, your own lonely space, your time to mend.

  And as you pull back even further, you may begin to resent and fear the life around you. The sounds of life that penetrate your “shadowy upstairs bedroom” may not be reassuring. In “Summer: 6:00 A.M.,” Jane Kenyon paints a picture of the neighbors that only confirms your decision to hide from the world. The mom next door is trapped by the defiant toddler and the unhappy infant, the older one wailing like a cicada. Meanwhile you hear her husband's footfalls, hard and deliberate, walking away from the house, leaving her with the kids and the beige, brown sameness of the day. So if this is marriage and motherhood, who needs it? you say. You can roll over and go back to sleep on your pristine, 300-thread Egyptian cotton sheets. You don't have to contend with screaming brats or sticky puddles of spilled juice. You belong to no one.

  And if you happen to drag yourself out of your fortress and go for a quick walk around the neighborhood, your reflections on the natural world will confirm your decision to stay hidden away. In Larry Velez's “Plainsong,” a large loud raven comes across a sad remnant of human vanity, a discarded brown toupee (must belong to the pathetic bald guy across the street who's always yelling at his kids). You decide you'll be like the raven who “hasn't learned to want/what he doesn't need.” You can stop wanting, you tell yourself. And then you notice the neighbor's unfinished skylight, and you are reminded of the wife's breakdown—she wanted too much (neighborhood gossips suggest that the stepfather was doing more than construction) and she paid for it. Even though it's spring, there's “death in careless abundance” out there in nature—and in human nature. Better to turn away from all of it, to play it safe, ask for less, want less, spend nothing.

  Good luck, because guess what? You're doing what you set out not to do—setting yourself up for a big fall. How can you possibly be this superior being you've created in your head? You think you get to scoff at the way everyone else lives because only you know how to distance yourself from the messy spills and sad vanities of real life? Like the speaker in Richard Eberhart's “In a Hard Intellectual Light,” you think you can outsmart life—you can build this citadel, beautiful and austere, that will protect you from the desire for closeness, tenderness, and intimacy. You will not give in to feeling. You will see everything only “in a hard intellectual light.” But it won't work, Eberhart warns us—not only will we all have our fall, but our search for absolute perfection will kill all delight.

  At this point, some part of us begins to understand that this hiding out, this “bubble-wrapping” of our hearts isn't working. Hiding is no longer any kind of refuge. You have tried to shut yourself away from pain and sorrow, but in the process you have also shut out joy and pleasure. You can barely taste the fifth or fifteenth Oreo, the air in your apartment is stale, and the Fiona Apple CD that you play over and over sounds like elevator music.

  Jane Hirshfield, in “A Room,” and Derek Walcott, in “The Fist,” both show us that we are trying too hard. In “A Room,” Hirshfield tells us that we cannot control what Eberhart calls our “body's soft jails,” the weakness of the flesh. However desperately we want to deny our humanity and especially our feelings, we are still full of anger, grief, and, yes, desire. We do our best to become inanimate matter like the room that imprisons us, instructing our ribs each morning so that we will “neither respond nor draw back in fear,” so that we will desire nothing. But to achieve this nothingness, you must clench yourself too tightly, like the fist that holds on to the heart in Walcott's “The Fist.” Just hold on for one more day, you tell yourself. You try hard to ignore the brightness, the world with its pleasures and dangers. It's like learning to ride a bicycle. If you only concentrate on holding on, of course you'll fall.

  The longer we continue to hide, the harder it becomes to ignore all the things we really want, like love and connection with others. We're holding on tightly to our defenses, but at the same time we desperately want to let go—as a result, we begin to develop “the strong/clench of the madman”—we start making ourselves a little crazy. Billy Collins's “Embrace” tells us to relax the grip, drop the pose, stop playing that goofy, seventh-grade parlor trick—the one where you pretend to be making out with someone when really it's just you with your arms wrapped around yourself. Do you really think you're fooling any-one, least of all yourself? You know that with your “crossed elbows and screwy grin” you have never looked so alone. If you don't start looking for a real embrace, if you don't release yourself from this restraint, you are not getting better. Instead, you have become your own straitjacket, locked in fear and bitterness, unable to move in any direction.

  So free yourself from that loony bin. Stop hiding from all that's bad—and very good—in the world. Like the speaker in Louise Glück's “Mutable Earth,” learn that you were wrong when you thought “if I had nothing/the world couldn't touch me.” That safe room you created could never protect you anyway, because “the boundary, the wall/around the self erodes.” Ultimately we realize that we weren't really hiding, we were waiting for our numbness to morph into hunger.

  In the end, that hunger will drive us back into the world. Like the defiant child in Hirshfield's “Red Onion …” (she was waiting too) you will finally feel appetite. At last, you'll unbar the door, go lie in the new grass that greens the marshes, feel the evening breeze that “bends the water-rushes.” And you'll feed your hungry heart.

  Red Onion, Cherries,

  Boiling Potatoes, Milk—

  Here is a soul, accepting nothing.

  Obstinate as a small child

  refusing tapioca, peaches, toast.

  The cheeks are streaked, but dry.

  The mouth is firmly closed in both directions.

  Ask, if you like,

  if it is merely sulking, or holding out for better.

  The soup grows cold in the question.

  The ice cream pools in its dish.

  Not this, is all it knows. Not this.

  As certain cut flowers refuse to drink in the vase.

  And the heart, from its great distance, watches, helpless.

  JANE HIRSHFILED

  Wants

  Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:

  However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards

  However we follow the printed directions of sex

  However the family is photographed under the flagstaff—

  Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

  Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:

  Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,

  The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,

  The costly aversion of the eyes from death—

  Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.

  PHILIP LARKIN

  Returning to My Cottage

  Faraway bells echo in the valley

  one by one the woodsmen are heading home.

  White clouds at the summit still beckon me

  but how dark and somber the mountain has become!

  An evening breeze bends the water-rushes

  catkin fluff flying everywhere.

  Far to the east new grass greens the marshes

  but here it is dusk. I go in and bar the door.

  WANG WEI

  (Trans. Taylor Stoehr)

  Hotel

  My room's shaped like a cage the sun

  Puts his arm right throug
h the window

  But I who wish to smoke and dream

  Use it to light my cigarette

  I don't want to work I want to smoke

  GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE

  (Trans Anne Hyde Greet)

  Summer: 6:00 A.M.

  From the shadowy upstairs bedroom

  of my mother-in-law's house in Hamden

  I hear the neighbors’ children waking.

  “Ahhhhhhhh,” says the infant, not

  unhappily. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!”

  replies the toddler to his mother,

  who must have forbidden something.

  It is hot already at this hour

  and the houses are wholly open.

  If she is cross with the child

  anyone with ears will hear.

  The slap of sprinkler water

  hitting the sidewalk and street,

  and the husband's deliberate footfalls

  receding down the drive …

  His Japanese sedan matches the house.

  Beige, brown …Yesterday he washed it,

  his arm thrust deep into something

  that looked like a sheepskin oven mitt.

  His wife had put the babies

  in the shallow plastic wading

  pool, and she took snapshots, trying

  repeatedly to get both boys to look.

  The older one's wail rose

  and matched the pitch of the cicada

  in a nearby tree. Why

  is the sound of a spoon on a plate

  next door a thing so desolate?

  I think of the woman pouring a glass of juice

  for the three-year-old, and watching him

  spill it, knowing he must spill it,

  seeing the ineluctable downward course

  of the orange-pink liquid, the puddle

  swell on the kitchen

  floor beside the child's shoe.

  JANE KENYON

  Plainsong

  A large loud raven falls from a branch

  a hundred feet high, falling past

  branches invisible to me,

  and frozen squirrels

  on their telephone highwires

  caught in the act of taking a shortcut,

  and others on the roof tops—

  claws scattering across the tiles—

  and smaller birds

  protesting greed and bloodlust

  and loud unlettered birds.

  He does not stop

  until he bounces down

  onto the pavement in the alley

  and he dances carefully, busybodily

  around the brown toupee.

  Or is it a squirrel

  curled up in exhaustion?

  The large black bird now peeks and pecks

  and ponders, until I turn away and leave him to his work.

  He hasn't learned to want

  what he doesn't need or to spend

  what he hasn't earned.

  A white stripe under the neighbor's eave

  marks the unfinished skylight

  her stepfather started

  until the husband found out.

  One was tall and one was dark

  and both men beam at the sight of a beer

  and a bouncing

  ball. She fell

  featherlike. Her threaded

  secrets delayed the world's

  desire to crush her.

  And in the time I took to write about the white

  the band of reddish blue has disappeared, dropped

  from above the roof

  to well behind the distant silhouette

  of silent houses.

  The sequence in the sky is now white and gray and white and black.

  The fat and glossy black bird has left the alley,

  its brittle leaves and broken branches.

  He'll have to wait another day

  for springtime's florid display

  of death in careless abundance.

  LARRY VÉLEZ

  In a Hard

  Intellectual Light

  In a hard intellectual light

  I will kill all delight,

  And I will build a citadel

  Too beautiful to tell

  O too austere to tell

  And far too beautiful to see,

  Whose evident distance

  I will call the best of me.

  And this light of intellect

  Will shine on all my desires,

  It will my flesh protect

  And flare my bold constant fires,

  For the hard intellectual light

  Will lay the flesh with nails.

  And it will keep the world bright

  And closed the body's soft jails.

  And from this fair edifice

  I shall see, as my eyes blaze,

  The moral grandeur of man

  Animating all his days.

  And peace will marry purpose,

  And purity married to grace

  Will make the human absolute

  As sweet as the human face.

  Until my hard vision blears,

  And Poverty and Death return

  In organ music like the years,

  Making the spirit leap, and burn

  For the hard intellectual light

  That kills all delight

  And brings the solemn, inward pain

  Of truth into the heart again.

  RICHARD EBERHART

  A Room

  A room does not turn its back on grief.

  Anger does not excite it.

  Before desire, it neither responds

  nor draws back in fear.

  Without changing expression,

  it takes

  and gives back;

  not a tuft in the mattress alters.

  Windowsills evenly welcome

  both heat and cold.

  Radiators speak or fall silent as they must.

  Doors are not equivocal,

  floorboards do not hesitate or startle.

  Impatience does not stir the curtains,

  a bed is neither irritable nor rapacious.

  Whatever disquiet we sense in a room

  we have brought there.

  And so I instruct my ribs each morning,

  pointing to hinge and plaster and wood—

  You are matter, as they are.

  See how perfectly it can be done.

  Hold, one day more, what is asked.

  JANE HIRSHFIELD

  The Fist

  The fist clenched round my heart

  loosens a little, and I gasp

  brightness; but it tightens

  again. When have I ever not loved

  the pain of love? But this has moved

  past love to mania. This has the strong

  clench of the madman, this is

  gripping the ledge of unreason, before

  plunging howling into the abyss.

  Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.

  DEREK WALCOTT

  Embrace

  You know the parlor trick.

  Wrap your arms around your own body

  and from the back it looks like

  someone is embracing you,

  her hands grasping your shirt,

  her fingernails teasing your neck.

  From the front it is another story.

  You never looked so alone,

  your crossed elbows and screwy grin.

  You could be waiting for a tailor

  to fit you for a straitjacket,

  one that would hold you really tight.

  BILLY COLLINS

  Mutable Earth

  Are you healed or do you only think you're healed?

  I told myself

  from nothing

  nothing could be taken away.

  But can you love anyone yet?

  When I feel safe, I can love.

  But will you touch anyone?

  I told myself


  if I had nothing

  the world couldn't touch me.

  In the bathtub, I examine my body.

  We're supposed to do that.

  And your face too?

  Your face in the mirror?

  I was vigilant: when I touched myself

  I didn't feel anything.

  Were you safe then?

  I was never safe, even when I was most hidden.

  Even then I was waiting.

  So you couldn't protect yourself?

  The absolute

  erodes; the boundary, the wall

  around the self erodes.

  If I was waiting I had been

  invaded by time.

  But do you think you're free?

  I think I recognize the patterns of my nature.

  But do you think you're free?

  I had nothing

  and I was still changed.

  Like a costume, my numbness

  was taken away. Then

  hunger was added.

  LOUISE GLUCK

  Reeling

  WHEN YOU

  GO WILD

  The good news is you've sprung yourself from the prison of Hiding. No more holding yourself hostage from the world, no more waiting for some miraculous something to rescue you from misery. You're free, hungry, and determined to prove that the world has in no way kicked your ass.

  You're making a comeback—great! But not so great—you're coming back with a vengeance, and it's the vengeance part that's worrisome. You're out to settle a score with the world, to show that you're as tough as any heartache the world throws at you. You're going to try everything, risk anything—being good hasn't kept you from getting hurt, so what have you got to lose by going a little wild? At least you're not sitting home letting life pass you by.

  Welcome to Reeling, where you're desperate to grab on to something—anything—that will pull you into feeling alive. This is the stage where you throw yourself into the world with abandon. Blind date with the cab driver's cousin? Sure! Train for a marathon that's one week away? Why not? And while you're at it, run up your credit card at Banana Republic, join two book clubs, a gym, and a cooking class, volunteer at a shelter, plan the company retreat, scam invitations to every event in town, and try any drink or drug that comes your way.