Seven Letters to My Tears by Rachel Stuck (2020)

I know how arrogant it seems to end a whole month of poetry with my own poems. And worse—to be one of two poets (the other being Wallace Freaking Stevens!) to warrant two posts. But this is not out of arrogance, cross my heart.

Deciding what to end on was tough. And endings are so important, especially with poetry. But this whole endeavor was pretty egocentric to begin with—I didn’t pick poems that I thought would be the best-received, I picked poems that I have a personal connection to. And I can think of no better illustration of that connection than sharing my own work that has been so heavily influenced by, among others, the poets I’ve highlighted this April. So no, I’m not ending on the best one—not remotely. But I’m ending on the one that’s closest to me.

I remember in high school, as I put down my Edna St. Vincent Millay book to stare dreamily at the red brick walls of my English classroom, wondering out loud to my teacher how Edna’s poems were so much better than mine and my peers’.

Mrs. Puckett responded, “You know she didn’t write a poem in a day, right?”

Haha, it’s kind of embarrassing, but no, I had not known that. I didn’t think about revising and editing poems—I just wrote all my garbage in my notebooks, threw some line breaks in, made sure to be as cringey as possible, then called it a poem.

The two I posted this month are the second and third I’ve ever really written, if you think of writing as a process, which I do. They are the only ones I’ve gone back to revise, to consider line breaks, sound, and rhythm. I had never done that before. Really! I’d never gone beyond a first draft of a poem! (And Lord, does it show.) So in a sense, these are my first.

Poetry has crashed into my life in so many unexpected ways. I have forgotten more than I know, and I have a sense that even stanzas forgotten are not truly gone. Because they come back to visit. They put words to a new moment that was, until then, undefined by language. There’s a reason that at my acmes and nadirs I am never alone. I find everything I need in the pretty ways humans say things. And it is in honor of this enduring love that I embark on the singular act of bravery that is sharing my own poetry with you.

About the Poems:

The night my husband abruptly moved out, I cried. And then I didn’t cry again for almost a year.

The day after he left, I went to work in a daze. It was a Wednesday. A co-worker had brought in donuts for the Language Arts crew, and they were the best donuts I ever had.

I was one month in to my first year of teaching, which is already an impossibly difficult time. (In fact, 35% of teachers leave the profession during the first year.) Adding this heartache was too much for my psyche, so I ‘handled’ it by completely pushing it aside. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing, really, but it turns out I am very, very good at it.

I made lists, dropped boxes off at his new apartment, and focused on the enormous task of building a curriculum and learning how to manage a hundred charming-but-in-a-maddening-way seventh graders.

There was no talk of divorce. There was no talk of reconciliation. I was in a self-imposed limbo. And fear, complacency, or pure exhaustion prevented me from moving out of it.

I remember one day, after the school year had ended, realizing that my inner life was not the rich Curiosity Shoppe I was accustomed to. Everything was on an even keel, mathematical almost. And it hit me—I hadn’t cried over my husband leaving me since that random Tuesday night. At the realization, I actually narrowed my eyes in suspicion, like a cartoon character would.

I mean, I cry at everything. I cried at a radio commercial advertising Feivel Goes West. (Honestly, I’m tearing up now at the memory. It was a really well-done commercial.) So when I was like, “Hmmm…why haven’t I cried more?” my immediate response was, “Girl, you done fucked up. This does not bode well.” Then I was like, “Shrug. Guess that’s a problem for Future Rachel.”

It. Was. A Problem.

Once I actually accepted the situation, it was entropy at “Go.” I could feel it coming, like a tsunami after a quake, and found a therapist within two days of my husband and me deciding to move forward with the divorce. After my first session, I had a six-hour panic attack, accompanied by uncontrollable shaking. Six hours! (Great cardio, btw.)

And then it was like nothing belonged to me. My thoughts, my emotions, my tears—they were those assholes in A Clockwork Orange, and I was only watching. It was horrendous, but also kind of fascinating. I did a great job keeping it together at work, but it’s like that effort expended all my energy, so at four o’clock, anyone who crossed my path was gonna get cried on.

Moving forward has been a multi-faceted and recursive journey. I couldn’t be doing it without my friends and my family. And I couldn’t be doing it without poetry.

Topics

divorce; necessity of art

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Seven Letters to My Tears

I

Crossing the Marquam, your absence
sprang a sudden blue. I was
struck by a memory of you
when, like the Willamette below,
you must have reflected the city.

I wondered where you had gone.

So. Zipped up in his suitcase, I supposed.
Nearly a year ago. And me only just noticing
you were missing.

It’s too easy.
It’s only relief.

Maybe even then I suspected—
yes—
maybe I’d even accepted that you
and other tiny brightnesses had gone
alongside him.

II
Powell’s City of Books
Blue Room

And the movement is distant in poems from the dead,
and in you, stirring up in my chest,
as if pages brushed dinner bell rust
or lit street lamps at dusk.

(Not in my bone-knees planted
to linoleum below sepia light—
that dual dimness of dying/coming to life.)

Paper, glue, binding are fixed,
rooted in ritual circle around me.
But within them their ink has immortalized breath,
has captured the wing-flutter hush of a moth
as it circles and flits and dances and moves
and so dies
on everyman’s doorstep.

Your pull is a sacred disruption
of stillness, a fight to escape
from lung and from duct,
a fleeing not from
but toward
a Love Song;
this confined riot
is your requirement
to shimmer
across Prufrock, to douse
Lady Lazarus, to fling
yourself out,
as far as Chō-fū-Sa.

When finally you break, it is not with discretion,
but with thunderous war-hooves and choking war-trumpets
that call forth and then banish
the everyman footsteps that fall
in civil response through the Blue Room.

They retreat not to abandon me
but to acknowledge you,
as if to say I, too,
have held hunger. I, too,
have seen a street lamp’s glow. I, too,
have known what it means to heed
a thunderous and choking
call home.

III
The Shell Station

Oregonians do not pump their own gas.
An attendant approaches and asks,
“How can I help you?”

That day you roared, leapt from my chest at him.
You ate up my voice. And he had no choice
but to hover in uncertain confusion.

Oh, tears, that was your first betrayal.
A Tuesday at 4:30.
Pick-ups and hatchbacks and commuters
blank in their everydays,
and you made us all stand there and wait
just for me to be able to say
“Fill it with regular, please.”

IV
My Therapist’s Couch

On Maggie’s couch, you are welcomed. She and I make room for you, allow you to stretch out in glittering, drawn-out streamers across my face. You are a violent parade, a rag-time need to be seen, but we both come to a bewildered caesura when Maggie asks if I am still in love with my husband. (Because he is still my husband; he is still my husband, though he has made a home with someone else by now.) Together we agree, in this marching symphony, you and I, finally, playing together to concede that we don’t know, we don’t think so, but you don’t just stop loving someone, it’s not a thing that can be undone just because you are.

V
Signing Divorce Papers at Starbucks

He was Hawaii-tan and wearing earrings again,
a flash of fresh tattoo—black and gray—
nothing bright like my blackberries.
And he said it would be his last one.
Huh. I never thought he’d be done,
and there I was just getting started.

Never on the same canvas,
that was us.

In the parking lot, we let go, but I pulled
him back in, one last pulling,
and you called out to his,
and met, tear for tear, in a frozen, gray ghost moment,
an infinitesimal vibration of goodbye,
I think maybe the last
time I will touch him.

VI
Driving Down Oleson Road

Over the eleven years of being married,
I’ve driven down Oleson untold times as Wife.
This time, I have TNT papers on the seat,
signed in minutes-fresh ink,
and I am The Final Wife on Oleson.

So cue your revolt!
Your deconstruction of asphalt!
Your utter disfiguration of my such-a-pretty face!

I avoid eye contact with other drivers in other lanes
because this pain is contagious,
and I don’t want it catching.

I want to keep it. I want
something to be mine.

VII
Washington County Courthouse

When I arrived I wasn’t there,
but you were.
I was only a leaking body,
aiming to carry you, impossibly,
in a once-bucket now splinters.
You were not in me at the courthouse;
I was in you.

Your salt-built kaleidoscope
arranged a truth from that place,
disclosed for me, at last,
the specific end I was grieving.

It was this third thing.
It was not my soon-to-be-ex-husband.
His suitcase was gone already.
It was the parts outside of us, him and me,
that we had together built and dismantled,
this third thing so deeply flawed but god
how I’d loved it,
down to the cracks in the tiles,
that packed-down ancient dirt peeking through
because in that old wounded place—
that’s where the wildflowers grew.

Until that moment, I was still
in it.

Then I moved
into you, and from within I signed it away.

The final blast.

You carried me out of the courthouse to day,
where the sky was a brutal absence of ash.
As we sat together, you and I,
you became a glassy funeral procession,
a flashy farewell to a vacant composition
now, officially, condemned.