There are many many things that Larry Clarke’s 3 Days with Dad does really well. The cast is incredible, from the large parts to the bit roles. The performances are beautiful. The ensemble is really worthy of the name: you believe these people are a family. The script is both hilarious and deep. Its small jumps around in time are extremely effective. Each character is fully drawn (even the bit parts get fleshed out).
But what 3 Days with Dad does like almost no other film I can think of is show so clearly (so much so that I was getting flashbacks) – the sheer chaos of what it’s like when a parent starts “failing,” when it’s clear that the end is drawing near, when medical decisions need to be made (often, under the gun), when every day brings another crisis, when a family’s entire life swirls around the death throes of the loved one whose time to go is now. Anyone who has been through it knows what it’s like. There are moments of sheer hilarity, because everyone’s nerves are so shattered. There are moments of howling anticipatory grief. You’re not ready. You’re not ready to say goodbye. But add to that the horror of watching a loved one – a parent, especially – suffer, endure excruciating pain, the indignities of the failing body … and suddenly you find yourself doing all of these things you never thought you would be able to do … or even imagined doing. The stress is intense. People crack up. People start laughing hysterically for no reason. People bicker. People sob. And then pull themselves together to try to listen to the update from the doctor, who uses big words nobody understands. For me, grief following death was easy compared to the year before, which was an unremitting living nightmare, for us certainly, but mostly for him. There were times watching 3 Days with Dad when tears literally POURED off my face, and then the next second I would burst into laughter at some wisecracked comment, or even just gasp in recognition of how TRUE it all was.
I’ll start off by saying that Larry is a friend of mine, and the film is filled with people I know (including a member of my family). Larry and his wife Fielding Edlow are amazing (I interviewed the two of them about Bitter Homes and Gardens, the web series written by Fielding.) Larry has a lengthy career in film, television, and theatre, but 3 Days with Dad is Larry’s first as a writer and director (he also stars). You may recognize him as one of the Detectives Fusco on Twin Peaks: The Return. (The other two Fuscos are also in 3 Days with Dad.)
David Koechner, Eric Edelstein, Larry Clarke
3 Days with Dad starts with the funeral of Bob Mills (Brian Dennehy), a problematic prickly patriarch, with 4 adult children, Zac (Eric Edelstein), Andy (Tom Arnold), Diane (Mo Gaffney), and Eddie (Larry Clarke). Diane’s husband Tim (Jon Gries) is so omnipresent he may as well be a 5th sibling. This is a close family, even with the political and religious differences (Andy has a rosary on hand at all times, whereas Eddie was never confirmed – a scandalous event that still gets radio play in the family). Bob has been married to Dawn (Lesley Ann Warren) for 35 years. As stepmother, she didn’t raise the kids, but she is woven into the texture of family life. Even the “kids'” eyerolls at one another about her quirks (her hot outfits and red lipstick, her concern-trolling Diane about her weight, her obsession with her dogs) feels like a well-worn piece of carpet. They aren’t surprised by this. They’re like, “Oh. That’s Dawn. Whatever.” These people all know each other really well. They don’t stand on ceremony with each other. The banter has some bite, but it’s not toxic bite. They have all been arguing about the same things for 40 years. Like, can everyone just get over the fact that Eddie didn’t receive the sacrament of confirmation? No? Well, okay then.
Eddie, the lead character, lives in Chicago and works as a doorman in a 5-star hotel. But, he’s defensive about his life, snapping for no reason at his dad, which is a major “tell” that he is not doing okay. He flies to his hometown when his dad is hospitalized, and everywhere he turns he runs into someone from high school. He can’t go visit his dad in the hospital without running into his high school sweetheart Susan (Julie Ann Emery), who seems weirdly intense in her “hey how’ve you been” conversation with him in the parking garage of the hospital. (This is how it is every time I go home. A quick trip to CVS leads to an encounter with the guy I asked to the Sadie Hawkins dance when I was 15. It makes you want to wear a disguise.) So Eddie, holed up with his family, dealing with the whirlwind of his father’s illness, is suddenly drawn back in time, to people who knew him when. This is not just a “literary device.” This is what happens sometimes when a parent is ill and/or dying. Death can be a Great Reckoning, a moment to take stock (whether you want to or not), where you are confronted with the You Now and the You Then and the You you Want To Be. Because if your parent dies now, you will be left with the feeling that you didn’t live up to their hopes for you, or you’ve let them down, or you want to make them proud, but now it’s too late. This may not be “true” – a wise friend could counsel you out of feeling this way – but it is REAL and 3 Days with Dad gets this.
Eddie gets wasted with his high school friends: Brick (Mike O’Malley), who is Susan’s brother and a quadriplegic from a surfing accident. Brick describes finding God when he was pulled from the water, but his tone is so deadpan you can’t tell if he’s putting Eddie on or serious. Then there’s Matt (Nate Shelkey), a stoner who wants Eddie to take his mind off things by hooking up with the perfectly named Velma (Amy Landecker), a wild woman who also went to high school with them. Eddie’s sudden fixation again on Susan and what she represented to him back in his youth, as well as staggering into the hospital still drunk from being out all night … all of this is a perfectly normal and yet totally wacko response to the cataclysmic event of his father’s decline. Nobody’s sleeping. Nobody’s eating right. Everyone’s nerves are on edge. Everyone is exhausted.
Larry’s script moves around fluidly. There are a couple of flashbacks to earlier times, a Fourth of July cookout where Bob makes MAGA-hat-wearing-type comments as the entire family screams at him to shut up, a confrontation between Bob and Eddie, showing the underlying tension in the relationship. But the main movements of the script take us from the aftermath – the funeral arrangements, the funeral – to the weeks leading up to Bob’s death, as his health fails. It all blends into one narrative, which, indeed, is how it feels in real life. It’s like it’s all one very very long day. This is a difficult thing to achieve in a script, but with 3 Days with Dad you always know where you are in time.
Bob is a “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” kind of guy. He’s a Vietnam vet, he worked hard all his life even though he wanted to be an artist. He loves his kids, he loves Eddie even though he doesn’t know what the hell Eddie is talking about half the time. You want your life to have meaning? Get a job in the civil service. Stop whining. Why are you drinking a beer at 2 in the afternoon? When I drink a beer at night, it’s because I’ve earned it. Bob is a tough guy, gruff, who is emotional but doesn’t show it. (When Andy says, in a tone of pride, at the funeral, “Dad didn’t tell us he loved us. He didn’t have to” – it made me want to cry. He may not have had to say “I love you”, but maybe it would have been nice for his kids to hear the words?)
This is one of Dennehy’s sweet spots as an actor, and he’s just wonderful here. Bob is not a monster, nor is he a saint. He’s a man, the sum of his experiences, just like you or I or Eddie or anyone else is the sum of theirs. Dennehy can break your heart too, like the moment where – before the oxygen mask is put on his face – he gasps with pained breath at his fractious kids, “Take care of Dawn.” It’s incredibly vulnerable work.
Bob adores Dawn, and she adores him, although she also seems to have a flirtation going on with a neighbor, whom she chats up when she walks her beloved dogs. (Dawn puts on red lipstick to walk the dogs.) Dawn takes care of Bob, managing his menu, cutting out sugar (she is extremely weight-and-health conscious), and scolding everyone else about their diets. When she orders sandwiches for the family, and hands Eddie a steak sandwich “with hummus and quinoa paste”, ordered from “a vegan deli”, the look on Eddie’s face made me laugh out loud.
The four siblings sit in the hospital cafeteria, or at Diane’s house, or in the funeral home, wherever, and argue, sometimes forcefully, about the decisions they need to make. It’s a grueling process. They are burying their father. For the first and only time. They have never done this before. They’re not prepared. Nobody is ready, nobody knows what to do. Bob has said to “pull the plug” after three days on life support. The kids want to honor that. Dawn is in denial, though. She’s determined to exhaust every option, to keep him on life support for a couple more weeks to get another pulmonary guy in to look at him. There’s a major power struggle. Right as things get extremely heated, she smears on red lipstick and races home to walk her dogs, leaving the kids staring at each other like, “Is she losing her mind, or …?”
In the planning stages for the funeral, every step of the way there’s some bump on the road, pulling the family into its orbit. The priest is going to mention a “prayer for the unborn” in his homily, and Eddie is pissed at the “politicizing” of Dad’s funeral. Andy and Zak argue back that Eddie is over-reacting, which becomes – yet again – an argument about Eddie not making his confirmation a bazillion years ago.
Larry manages these switch-backs in time and place with ease. You never wonder “where” you are in the story. I’m not quite sure how Larry pulled it off, but he did. Part of this is the strength of his ensemble. THEY all know where they are in the story at any given time. The entire VIBE changes once Bob is gone, and the arguments about the homily have an entirely different feel than the arguments about how terrible the hospital is. (It’s a running joke, the ineptness of the hospital. But it’s not really a joke at all. Trying to get proper care for your loved one, trying to get someone to get in here now, to GIVE A SHIT about bed sores … in a place where the staff is already overwhelmed … all of the adult children talk about “suing everyone” every other second. All of this has such a ring of truth.)
There are funny moments all along about having to deal with bureaucracies, organizations, businesses, while you are in a howling whirlwind of grief. How ABSURD things are: your life is changing forever, you’re sobbing, and these people are there making money off of it. I mean, that’s the way the world works, but when you’re IN it, everything is through the looking glass. When the family arrives at the funeral home to make arrangements for the service, they are greeted by a “staff” member (played by J.K. Simmons in a hilarious cameo), chomping on an apple, leaning down to their car window, confiding with them about how his brother gave him this job (“it’s a mid-life career change kind of thing”), and it’s all incredibly inappropriate. This is a grieving family. Nobody cares about your career!
Then there’s a mix-up with the crematorium which leads to an absolutely hysterical sequence – which I’m sure the family will HOWL about later – but in the MOMENT, it is an outrage. (A friend of mine had a similar experience with his mom’s death, when he had to deal with an incompetent funeral home. To say the funeral home was “insensitive” is to COMPLETELY understate what occurred. My friend went APESHIT on the blase funeral home employee, and rightly so … but later that night, he and his siblings laughed so hard they were falling off of their chairs. Such is death. It’s amazing we all make it through.)
They are adults, but even adults become small children again when their father – their strong gruff father who “didn’t need to tell them he loved them” – starts to become frail, can’t eat, can’t breathe on his own. It’s heart-rending. There’s one incredible scene when Bob suddenly has to “take a crap” and his children all help him to his feet to get to the bathroom. But everyone is in a panic. Bob is screaming, the kids are screaming, they’re moving him and his IV drip across the room and it’s MAYHEM. It’s funny but it’s also not. No one can prepare you for a moment like that. It’s unimaginable until it is upon you.
Lesley Ann Warren has been a favorite of mine for decades. Mitchell and I have discussed her often. She has always brought a unique energy to her roles: she is funny and sexually alert, she is intelligent, and she vanishes into the character. Imagine Victor Victoria without her. Impossible. There’s a reason she was nominated for an Academy Award for that. She’s one of those actresses it’s always good to see. She brings with her the affection accrued from a long career of doing good work. She has never stopped working. But this is the meatiest role she has had in a long long time. She does some really intricate character work, the stuff she’s so good at as an actress: Dawn’s outfits, sunglasses, nails, behavior, line readings: it’s all perfection. Dawn seems to have it all together but Dawn is weird, let’s face it. Warren makes Dawn real, and not a caricature. Warren’s work is so good here that when the facade falls – when even Dawn, with her bright smile and pink pants and long pink nails, has to admit that the time has come to say goodbye to Bob, that it’s time for Bob to “go” – it’s absolutely devastating and cathartic. Her swoon into grief has been such a long time coming it’s like the entire film takes in a heaving breath of air. It’s a phenomenal performance.
Larry had many balls to juggle, and this is a film with a big cast, multiple locations, and multiple intersecting timelines. As writer, as director, he keeps it all afloat, while at the same time giving a touching and funny performance. Cinematographer Christopher Gallo, who comes from mainly a documentary background, has a gift for catching behavior as it happens, the spontaneity of the moment, bringing us behavior that feels “caught” as opposed to staged out and planned. (All of it may very well have been planned, but the fact that it doesn’t feel planned is a testament to everyone involved.) Gallo’s style is unobtrusive and yet very sensitive. In the group scenes, you never lose the thread, even though everyone is talking at once. You always know where you are. The camera isn’t static. The camera feels where the moment is happening, and gravitates towards the center of it. When there’s a closeup, it really means something. And when a moment calls for stillness, Clarke and Gallo aren’t afraid of that either. (So many films are afraid of stillness.) All of the work done here is in service to the story and to the performances. There is nothing to distract.
My friend Alex called me on the night my dad died. It was a freezing January, and I stood out in the driveway, shivering, the bright stars in the wintry sky above me. His illness had been so harrowing it was a weird relief that his pain was over. But I didn’t know how I was going to feel, I didn’t know how I would make it through, what my life could POSSIBLY look like without this man in it! I am in tears writing this. I said to Alex at one point, “Well, you know about this … you’ve lost your parents …” and she interrupted me, firmly. “Listen to me. Okay? As far as I’m concerned, right now, your father is the only parent who has ever died. Nobody can tell you what to feel or how to feel it. Nobody can compare their experience to yours. Each of us must walk through this alone. I will be here for you. And I know that pain. But this is YOUR grief. It is the only time this has happened in your whole world, and the only time it WILL happen.”
In the whirlwind following his death, so many people said the craziest shit to me. “I was so upset when my grandfather died. I understand.” Why are you talking about YOU right now when it’s MY dad that just died? “He’s dancing with the angels now.” (If you knew my Dad, you would know how RIDICULOUS that image is.) “I remember crying for 3 weeks when I got divorced, so I really feel you.” You don’t really get how fucked up people are about death until you yearn for the smart soul who knows that “Sorry for your loss” is sometimes the best thing to say.
Alex’s words really stuck with me. I held onto them. She wasn’t saying that other people haven’t lost parents, of course. She was saying that right now … on the day he died … to ME – it was a singular loss, unique in the universe. Because HE was unique in the universe, as am I, and my family, and our various specific relationships. This is true for all of us. We are not replicants. One size does NOT fit all with grief.
Nobody can prepare you for what it will be like. You really have to have gone through it to get it.
3 Days with Dad “gets it.” Watching it was practically a healing experience.
Release date: September 13, 2019 (VOD/select theatres)
The avant-garde filmmaker has just died at the age of 96. I haven’t seen any obituaries yet, and will add links as they come in. (My NYFF colleague Bilge Ebiri interviewed Mekas in 2017 for the Village Voice– where Mekas had served as the paper’s first film critic.)
But for my purposes, here on this personal blog, it’s gotta be about Elvis. Because Elvis is everywhere.
In 1972, Mekas attended the final show of Elvis Presley’s 4-show gig at Madison Square Garden. He brought with him a 16mm camera. He shot what he could. It’s wild footage. Chaotic. He did not record the sound. He did not try to sync anything up. He said, “Some of it was filmed normal 24fps speed, some not.”
Decades later, in 2001, the Viennale International Film Festival asked Jonas Mekas to prepare a trailer for the festival. He could do whatever he wanted with the trailer, obviously. He’s Jonas Mekas.
He spoke later about why he created the trailer in the way that he did:
I was lucky enough to see Elvis Presley’s final concert at Madison Square Garden in June 1972. Usually, you are not allowed to bring a camera to a concert. But the audience and the entire event were so wild that no one paid any attention to me. Over the years I watched the footage again and again. Then the Viennale called and I immediately thought of my Elvis material. The only problem was that I didn’t know what kind of musical soundtrack to use. I tried everything and was close to giving up when I happened to hear a Viennese waltz on the radio. That was it! What could be better – or funnier – than Elvis and Strauss?
It’s beautiful.
Thank you, Jonas Mekas. Your career has meant so much to so many and I have barely touched on the scope of what you have done. But here’s a small portion of gratitude to you from a hardcore Elvis fan.
That’s Missy Yager there, as the mom of the Queen Bee of middle school in Eighth Grade (which I reviewed for Ebert.)
What is so funny about this small moment is that the mother is happy to see Kayla come to her daughter’s pool party – she greets her warmly and excitedly – but REALLY she’s happy because she was looking forward to seeing Kayla’s hot dad. There’s a voiceover from Kayla going on, plus music, so you can’t even hear the dialogue, but Missy plays the moment: she’s like, “Kayla!! Hi!!” Then she does a quick sweep of her eyes behind Kayla, asking, “Is your dad here?” Kayla: “No.” Then there’s a brief flash of disappointment on her face, before she shakes it off and welcomes Kayla inside. It’s one of the little details I love. It’s not even developed in the script but it’s just there as texture. Because Josh Hamilton totally would be “that dad” to the other moms, especially since there is no wife in the picture. They’d look forward to flirting with him even if it never went anywhere. Later, you hear the mom off-screen scolding her husband for bringing the cake down too early, and the argument gets toxic almost immediately. So in 5 minutes you get the whole picture of this woman’s whole life.
Missy was the first person to read the role of Neve in my script, in the very first reading of the only scene I had written thus far (it would be the scene eventually turned into the short film July and Half of August). At that time, the script didn’t even have a name, and neither of the characters had names either. Her reading was so extraordinary I will never forget it as long as I live, and it was the first inkling I got that what I wrote … worked. A year later, she directed the workshop of my script – which was by then a full length script, called “The Black Wave” at the time – out in Los Angeles. She was essential in helping me ask the questions that needed to be asked to whip the script into shape. She was so good at script and scene structure, and she really helped me achieve what I wanted to achieve. I will be forever grateful for her work in bringing July and Half of August to fruition.
She’s also a wonderful actress. Ask anyone. Ask Kenneth Lonergan.
So this is a shout out to good actors like Missy Yager doing their thing, helping a movie be good, in ways big and small.
I don’t care about Maggie, I don’t ever want to see randos running around the bunker in camo ever again. I cannot STAND gunfights in Supernatural. Gunfights became a regular feature only under this new regime and I resent the hell out of it. I am AGAINST it. It’s totally against the spirit of the show.
That being said:
I think the device of this ep was beautiful – and beautiful in a way I haven’t felt in 3 or 4 years. The symbolic weight of the device was in place – and the resurrecting of an old character worked in the way it has in the past – not in a pandering way like Charlie/Mom/Bobby – but in a way that deepens our understanding of this character’s purpose and meaning to Sam and Dean. I haven’t felt this in a long long time with this show. AND nothing was sacrificed. You still got your story, you still had a plot-line … you moved your Arc forward … but it had that deeper THING going on – emotions, basically – it was interested in WHAT IS GOING ON WITH SAM AND DEAN. (The fact that I don’t feel that anymore mostly is such a bummer. It’s why I watch the damn show. Monsters shmonsters.)
The “resolution” to the episode’s arc – with its Babadook echoes – was haunting and very well done (not to mention an accurate representation of what it feels sometimes living with a mental illness – it actually gave me a little chill, thinking, “Wow. Yeah. That’s what it’s like. Ouch.”) The resolution had that OTHER LAYER going on, so it works on the surface literal level, just in terms of plot – but it also works on that deeper metaphorical level, where all the good stuff happens (or, used to happen). The episode, and these elements, were sensitive to all the resonances in these characters, their relationships, their past, etc.
Had a great time on the latest Film Comment podcast, talking with Andrew Chan (web editor for the Criterion Collection), and Nicolas Rapold (Film Comment editor-in-chief) about Amazing Grace, the long-awaited concert film of Aretha Franklin’s 1972 gospel concert. (In the current issue of Film Comment, Andrew Chan wrote a gorgeous essay about the film.) We start off discussing Amazing Grace, and then in the second half of the podcast, we each had come prepared with a concert film we wanted to discuss. You’ll have to listen to see what each of us chose. It was so much fun to geek and fangirl out!
Mary Oliver is so woven into the fabric of my life, I gasped when I heard the news she died. And I immediately thought of her poem “When Death Comes.”
When Death Comes
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
It’s a weird thing. Mary Oliver is as successful a poet as you can get. Her stuff is “excerpted” through Pinterest, through Instagram … and if I hadn’t been into her already, and into her for years (I encountered her work via The New Yorker back in the 1990s) I might have been turned off by this. You know, the Oprah-fication quote-worthy cross-stitch feeling of it. Like, if it’s THIS popular, it’s probably not all that good. But her stuff strikes a chord. I’m sure you’ve all probably read her poem “Wild Geese” – that’s the one that starts with the line “You do not have to be good.” It’s everywhere.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
But … just because something is everywhere doesn’t mean it’s not good. The critical world kind of ignored her, even though she won the Pulitzer, her books were (are) literal best-sellers, etc. She is a well-loved contemporary poet. Like a Robert Frost of our time. Another thing that added to the general critical dismissal of her is that her poems are not “topical.” She writes nature poems, basically. You read her stuff and you get the feeling that she spent the majority of her time taking long walks. Then came home and wrote a poem about the ocean, or sunflowers, or whelks. This isn’t seen as “important.” It’s old-fashioned, a lady poet writing about flowers. I don’t mean that I AGREE with this assessment. I just mean that that’s the assessment that seemingly was out there. This New Yorker article is really intereseting about Mary Oliver and her detractors as well as her fans.
If you love Mary Oliver, as I do, you love her passionately.
There’s always a moment when her poems flash into transcendence, like when a gliding swan suddenly rears back stretching out its wings. It has that feeling to it.
Whelks
Here are the perfect
fans of the scallops,
quahogs, and weedy mussels
still holding their orange fruit —
and here are the whelks —
whirlwinds,
each the size of a fist,
but always cracked and broken —
clearly they have been traveling
under the sky-blue waves
for a long time.
All my life
I have been restless —
I have felt there is something
more wonderful than gloss —
than wholeness —
than staying at home.
I have not been sure what it is.
But every morning on the wide shore
I pass what is perfect and shining
to look for the whelks, whose edges
have rubbed so long against the world
they have snapped and crumbled —
they have almost vanished,
with the last relinquishing
of their unrepeatable energy,
back into everything else.
When I find one
I hold it in my hand,
I look out over that shaking fire,
I shut my eyes. Not often,
but now and again there’s a moment
when the heart cries aloud:
yes, I am willing to be
that wild darkness,
that long, blue body of light.
Gannets
I am watching the white gannets
blaze down into the water
with the power of blunt spears
and a stunning accuracy —
even though the sea is riled and boiling
and gray with fog
and the fish are nowhere to be seen,
they fall, they explode into the water
like white gloves,
then they vanish,
then they climb out again,
from the cliff of the wave,
like white flowers —
and still I think
that nothing in this world moves
but as a positive power —
even the fish, finning down into the current
or collapsing
in the red purse of the beak,
are only interrupted from their own pursuit
of whatever it is
that fills their bellies —
and I say:
life is real,
and pain is real,
but death is an imposter,
and if I could be what once I was,
like the wolf or the bear
standing on the cold shore,
I would still see it —
how the fish simply escape, this time,
or how they slide down into a black fire
for a moment,
then rise from the water inseparable
from the gannets’ wings.
She has put voice to things I haven’t been able to even properly FEEL because the experience of whatever it is is so confusing. Or you resist looking at something. You resist facing something. She writes about death, and loss, and grief. Terribly traumatic experiences. But she does so in a way that gives those feelings a container, a space where the words can form and so you, the reader, can look at it and say, “Oh my God, yes. That is how I feel.” It’s deeply healing. There aren’t too many poets who have written poems that I cling to in tough times. Off the top of my head I can think of only three, Yeats, Auden and Mary Oliver. Each of these poets have written poems I have memorized, not from trying to memorize the poem, but from sheer repetition of reading, the sheer amount of times I have gone back again and again to their work.
I have written a lot about Auden’s “The More Loving One” and what it means to me, the relationship I have had with it, which now stretches back to high school when I first encountered it. That poem has been there for me. I have wrestled with it. I have accepted it. I have argued with it. I have rejected it in a tantrum. I wrote this insane essay over 10 years ago here called “The Total Dark Sublime” – the title taken from “The More Loving One” – and that essay was me wrestling with the poem and what it was telling me to do. Or … not what it was telling me to do, but just telling me this is the way things ARE. It’s one of those crazy essays I used to write, which sometimes I think, “Uhm, maybe delete that?” But oh well, will let it stand. Like, this is a lifelong relationship with a poem. Mary Oliver’s “In Blackwater Woods” is another poem like that for me. It holds such a special place in my heart it deserves to be called sacred. It has provided something for me, something I have NEEDED, something I keep forgetting (because forgetting is the human condition), something that has helped. It doesn’t help in a “everything will be okay” way, because the poem doesn’t say that at ALL (and I wouldn’t buy it if it did. Sell that shit to someone else. Everything is not and WILL not “be okay.”)
My Dad was not familiar with Mary Oliver’s work and so one day I recited “In Blackwater Woods” for him. I knew it by heart. In the last 2 stanzas, I heard him exhale – a whoosh of breath – and he said, “Boy, that’s a great poem.” If you knew Dad, you would know his reaction was a big deal. He was a deeply emotional man, but he tried to keep it in check. When he felt something, it was obvious in a 10-mile radius.
Years later, when we stood in a small fragile grieving group to bury his ashes, we each said something beforehand. Memories or thoughts. I read this poem. The connective tissue between reciting it for him and then reading it out loud in the vast absence he left behind was so strong I thought I might not be able to get through it. I also had no idea when I first recited it to him that it would end up being about my own feelings of loss when he left us.
In Blackwater Woods
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
This is what poets can do, at their most transcendent. They are muses, voices. They speak when we cannot. They see farther and deeper. Their ability to put experience into words helps beyond measure. It helps create a container for our lives, for our understanding of our lives.
Mary Oliver did that for me, more than any other living poet.
I absolutely loved the Paraguayan film The Heiresses. It’s my kind of movie. Incredible lead performance from an actress who has extensive stage experience but this is her first film. Mind-boggling.
