THE END

a LitCafe🔥 production

How to begin without yelling? Why begin without yelling?

RACHEL ABRAMOWITZ IS A GENIUS.

Reading her book The Birthday of the Dead I found myself recognizing, in a felt and immediate sense, what it is to be alive. What it is to be mortal. What it is to have consciousness. Rachel is not paying me to say any of this.

Many creative writing classes use the advice “show, don’t tell.” I’ve often used the advice, “don’t show or tell; do.”

Rachel leaps all of these fences cleanly, smiling, while eating an apple, doing her taxes, and changing her kid’s diaper, and then she heads for the far fence, the one no one even saw, way out in the mist, that enormous crowning line of ancient cypress, at a flat-out gallop, and she sails over it without blinking.

I’ll get around to how she does this. I hope.

But let me back up to a conversation about endings I just had with a friend who is, among many other things, a fiction writer. She wanted to talk through the ending of a story, and as I recorded a huffing-and-puffing voice memo on my run (we send voice memos back and forth, as our brilliant way around opposing schedules and the constant swarming of my available bandwidth by child-tarantulas) I realized that I’ve written a LOT of endings compared to the average fiction writer.

Why? Because I’m a poet. My dead friend Dean (he was a mentor more than a friend but “Dead friend Dean” sounds better, and he would support me going with it for that reason alone, plus he’s Rachel’s Dead Friend Dean too) —well he used to say, “poets hate middles. That’s why they write poems. They just want to do beginnings and endings.”

Why do we want to do this abrupt, sort of torturous thing, setting up something to live and then bringing it almost immediately to an end, over and over?

Maybe, and bear with me here, poets are most interested in the why, like, as in, why tf are we here if we’re just going to all get hit by buses or cancer or dementia. And if you want to think about why we’re here, you have to really face the fact that we leave. Not just in your content, which is to say yammering about death, but in your form, or the way or quality or disposition with which you’re doing the thing— which is maybe also to say you have to speak not just about it but from it. You gotta move in, get inside that dumpster fire of death and dying, and be it, if you wanna really see and know what it’s up to, and what it’s capable of. Get yer best death-dress out and bust a few disco moves.

Poets are interested in why we’re here at all, in spite of all this dying everyone seems to be required to do, and the way one “dies” enough times to work on this question, without losing the plot entirely due to actual rigor mortis, is to end— as in end the words on the page. Over and over. Poems are like little practice-deaths. Death etudes.

*

Rachel Abramowitz is a master of the ending.

In every poem, she finds the move that takes what she’s already said and opens it out, thrusts or spins or sinks or lofts it forward into continued motion, no matter how difficult or painful or what rending honesty is required— all without abandoning what has come before. It’s stupid-slick.

The book in its entirety is dark, funny, precise, extraordinarily smart. Still, many poets manage those things. What Rachel does that I haven’t seen anywhere else is she leaps. Or rather, it’s how she leaps that challenges and thrills this particular fleece-robe wearing norovirus convalescent.

The quality of her suspensions, associations, synapses— those interstitial spaces that neither crouch in certainty nor dissolve into the air of unknowing, but persist in an almost hypnotic between-state of leveraged access to deeper reality— these moments begin to rise and spread around and through and below the words, constituting a type of knowing and experience that squeezes juice from every discernable anatomy-bloop inside our greater gray-matter blobdom.

So in case it’s not clear, by “leap” I don’t mean she’s helter-skelter jumping from one idea to another. Although one thought often seems rather geographically far from its subsequent peer in her poems, rather the opposite experience seems to unfold, as they near each other so rapidly they almost merge into a single phenomenon. Insight is offered not as a resolution but as a set of wings to join the flock in the aerial saccades that bring these confluences into being.

And it’s in that invisible bridging, in that unspoken but deeply, dimly felt association, association that runs along a deep undersea cable, perhaps, that she initiates us into her strange and enchanting, wing-gifting, cyprus-leaping species. She forges deeper understanding by surrendering, beautifully and skillfully, what is known: always into the field of all that is possible.

Like me, you may wonder why I haven’t offered any evidence, any quotes yet. Reader, I’ve tried. Her poems so thoroughly resist any part of themselves being lifted out and away that I found it nearly impossible. Oh, she’s got plenty of one-liners, real zingers— a thousand thousand of them— but to me, each one reaches, and holds, and intertwines so dearly and truly and faithfully and fruitfully to all its brethren that to remove any one of them from its greater bed of being is to cheapen and misunderstand it on sight, because it is a “one” that can only be fully known in the active presence of its counterpart “many.”

I mean, how cool is that, though— having almost every line be fully capable of virtuoso performance, and yet each of these little phenoms of contemporary poetry also *genuinely* seem to defer to, and indeed actively prefer, the company of their living entangledness, their inextricable implication in the life of all others.

So what I want to look at is a series of Rachel’s ending lines. Since her endings both embody and transform what has come before, they seem a decent way to solve the entanglement problem for the bogarting reader. I want to look at each of these little deaths and ask it what flavor it gives to our living.

[Note: I will be italicizing all last lines I use. For the audio, I’ll be reading in a slightly regrettably arch way to try and make the auditory distinguishment.]

flesh so terrible / you would cut off your own face to be free of it.

This is the end of her opening poem. You’re not crazy; she is not messing around. The poem’s title, “Severed Head of a Giant 40,000-Year-Old Wolf Found in Russia” is ballsy, funny, horrifying, drool-out-of-one-side-of-the-mouth fascinating, and most importantly, very much in conversation with her ending line, which, again, is flesh so terrible / you would cut off your own face to be free of it.

Why is the speaker (and reader) fused with this dead and rediscovered, terrifying creature? Why is the corpse’s head somehow also “your own face” suddenly? Oh, wait— because we, too, will be dead and gone; we, too, are predators; we, too, lay waste to life around us and very much should terrify ourselves at this point, given all evidence.

So that’s one flavor we get: our own stank-ass, disgustingly/stupidly cruel human carcasses. You know, like the ones that STARVE ACTUAL CHILDREN OVER A GODDAMNED PISSING MATCH FOR FEDERAL DOLLARS. I imagine that’s one of the many horrors she’d cut her own face off to be free of.

But the parallel, between the hideousness of the wolf and so much of what I’d call the Western self, doesn’t just sit there, spreading in a pool of smug knowingness. It jumps up on the little tumbling pony of the word “would” in the phrase “would cut off your own face to be free of it,” that leaning conditional, and launches out into the rest of the book with that keening sense of striving…

For what? Well, as she says, “to be free.”