UNDIES IN THE BRIARS

A LitCafe🔥 production

A guy I knew in grad school wrote a poem a few years ago that snagged me like underwear in a berry patch. (Sorry, but my access to similes is affected by people I live with, who do wander around in their unders or less in any season. The fate of the body-clad-in-undies-only is never super far from my mind.)

This poem, “Dear Florida,” it tells the truth. It is truthful the way the nearly-naked body in the berry patch tells the truth. It is truthful in the way finding your kid’s lost tooth with your tongue in a bite of cheese from an unmonitored cutting board tells the abrupt and absurd truth to the inside of your mouth. (Whether anyone in the house will own having left their tooth in a communal hunk of cheddar is another matter. I believe the tooth fairy in this case became overwhelmed and provided two rolled up wads of money, nebulously placed in the pillow area of my children’s shared floor-nest.)

The absurdities of parenthood, like poetry, keep it real, more real than we might like sometimes, by letting us know on repeat that we are astonishingly weird, tenacious, fragile creatures; we hold the anguish & ecstasy of being alive in our disastrous, gorgeous little forms. So too with poetry, if you can find the good stuff.

As with any writer who can give me my own experience, whole and sparking with vividness in a way I’ve never seen, I’m grateful to Adam Scheffler for this poem, perhaps much in the way I’m grateful to be on the planet: with deep, cantankerous ambivalence, a kind of bruised loveliness inside, and a faithfully dangerous compulsion towards whole truths, wherever possible.

In the unending project of trying to make anything at all doable, I’ve come to believe that the list— that is to say structure, or constraint— is a stupidly excellent tool. So let me list the three ways I think this poem does a phenomenal job of telling the truth, before we begin: it strikes me that three main channels the poem finds life in are the described, the description, and the describer.

Let’s read the poem before I dive for the greased pig.