—HOLD ME CLOSER

 

Poetry Unbound  /  Padraig O Tuama, part two

 

 

I googled “what is a man?”

 

When I fell in love with Paul, I was overwhelmed with attention towards unexpected things. One morning I looked at the cups we’d drunk tea from the night before. I remember staring at them, thinking that I wanted to look at everything they meant. The cup he’d touched, had drunk from. I remember feeling foolish. Then I remember not caring. The point was love, and even a piece of pottery could hold it. I took a photo of the cups—I have it still.

 

Why doubts and loves? Why wouldn’t love be enough? 

Because it has never been.

 

I was a lonely child, given to reading and daydreaming. I would read about people and dream about meeting them. I would watch people and dream about being their friend. It’s not a bad school for poetry, but it did make for some solitary years.

I understand the drama—and crisis—of imagining my own loneliness as unique. It was, it wasn’t. It is true, it isn’t all true. Everyone is alone, and everyone is alone in their own way. In this, we are together.

 

After the sudden death of an old friend, I found myself forgetting everything I’d known about grief.

 

Every time I’m on a bus—which is quite often—I have this ridiculous fantasy. “If this bus were to break down now, what would we all talk about?”

In reality, people would probably get on their phones, look up complaint forms, ask about toilets and make calls to explain they’d be late. In my fantasy, however, people turn to each other for conversation. “What’s a before-and-after moment of your life?” we would ask each other. And then we could listen.

 

Who decided the hierarchy of selves?

 

Listen, if you wish to feed the birds, then feed the birds; this, too, is an impulse of survival.

 

I started writing poems when I was eleven. For years, I carried these poems around with me like they were a secret scripture, stashed in my bag, hidden in the back of books. All those early poems are lost now. But they’re in my body—I remember the hunger that drove them, the things that made me need to write them.

 

What a gift, to have friends.

 

What is this word bless? It’s a word of kindness, a word of beatitude, a word of generous enfolding. Blessing, like time, goes in many directions.

 

No wonder he uses this form of fragments on the page—he’s telling us, in those gaps, that it’s difficult to hold it together. He’s right, it is.

 

As years went by, I realized that good literature lasts, not because it has one interpretation, but because successive generations of readers have given it careful attention, using their understanding, learning, imagination and lives. This kind of reading allows language to breathe, to be part of an evolving exchange.

 

It can be a difficult thing to reckon with your parents’ sex life, never mind the desire between one parent and someone else.

 

Have you ever heard an angel panic?

 

Poetry doesn’t attempt to resolve these strange arrangements. Poetry doesn’t say we have to choose between happiness and sadness, between grief and relief, between catharsis and solitude. Poetry knows there can always be more than one thing happening at a time.

 

I remember the strange feeling of beginning to see grown-ups as people and not just grown-ups. I realized that they had anxieties, and that they performed their anxieties, sometimes, in the way they interacted with me.

 

Wherever art comes from, it’s always bigger than its source.

 

When I was eight or nine, I begged my parents for a copy of the Bible as a Christmas present. They got me a paperback edition for children, with pictures. The first thing I did was to leaf through the pages, searching for a picture of the devil. There he was: sky-blue, with flames for eyes, the hooves of a goat and a pointed tail. I have that Bible still. It never occurred to me then to wonder why that was the first thing I looked for; childish fascination with the macabre perhaps. Older now, I have started to wonder.

 

I came upon this poem by Richard Georges when I googled “exorcism” and “poetry.”

 

When I was eighteen, I underwent three exorcisms, the aims of which were to hunt the gay demons in me.

 

Perhaps that’s one of the functions of art, to become something it could never have been, if only in the mind of the writer.

 

There were all kinds of things alive in me that I wished to be dead in me. I thought the solution would be to cease having those dreams. The dreams had other ideas.

 

We can be so close to each other and yet never fully understand each other.

 

A poem can tell you many things by only showing you a few.

 

I’ve written many angry poems over the years. They helped me a lot, by channeling all that energy into something creative. However, I rarely show them to anyone. After a few days—or weeks, or months—I return to them and realize how limited they were. So, I have deep admiration for any angry poems that make it to publication. An angry poem that’s gone from needing to be written to needing to be shared is a thing of power and magnificence.

 

All love has strangeness and space in it. All connections have distance. We cannot possess each other, even when we try.

 

The gorgeous power of that word; our.

 

It was song lyrics I really turned to for meaning in my teenage years. I knew all the words to all the songs on the few albums I owned. I was the kind of teenager who read the lyrics to the new album on the bus home from the city. And then, as I played the album for the first time, I’d read along again. I’d learn the names of the musicians and producers, and if there was a note from the artist in the liner notes I felt like I got my money’s worth. If there were no lyrics in the liner notes, I felt cheated, but not defeated—I made my own, complete with chord sheets.

I had so much time.