My mouth fell open the first time someone asked if my newborn was a “good baby.” How do I answer that? Of course he was good, but people really weren’t asking about goodness. On any scale of goodness, all babies are good.

What they really wanted to know was whether my baby cried or slept. I got the same question when my second baby was born. By then I knew to answer simply: Oh, yes!

My mentor during the final term of my MFA program warned that he didn’t much care for crying in stories. No tears, please.

I have generally been what people call a “good student” because I will almost always do what is asked. So I cut tears from my stories in 2007. I literally went through my fiction and delete, delete, delete.

Tears are sentimental, sometimes trite, obvious, a distraction from drama? I’ve heard all that.

But here’s the thing: tears are sentimental, but they are also releasing, honest, and human. They are our natural response to fear, anger, embarrassment, and grief and joy too. Overwhelming emotion. Sometimes we laugh so hard we cry.

I knew all that, but I set that knowing aside in my fiction. No tears.

And then I read a new translation of The Odyssey and engaged so closely with the line breaks, form, and word choice that I found several other translations into English, some in prose, some attempting verse. I sat with three and four books open at a time comparing translations. Meaning and form and music—a lot going on in poetry. Something has to give when you rewrite someone’s words in a language that might not have all the words you need. No translation is ever perfect, and poetry is particularly challenging. I studied how translators revealed Homer’s epic poem. Did they leave out details? Move them around? Did they miss something I thought was important? I wrote a long review here and on Goodreads.

One thing I noted in every translation of The Odyssey from that ancient Greek tale of manly men is how often the characters cried. The homebound soldiers cried because they were scared of monsters or storms or never getting home, or because they grieved for dead shipmates, or because they felt overjoyed by success. They cried in pain. They cried for their losses. They cried with relief and hope. Tears. Real tears. Sitting down on the rocks, they sobbed and wailed to the sky. Odysseus was one of those who cried because he missed his home, because of death or disappointment or fear, and for joy. He cried for the same reasons as his men. Brave men crying is not a paradox.

Crying is not weakness. It is not failure or foolishness or feminine. Human beings cry when we feel and are able to reveal deep and overwhelming emotion. Important stuff. We cry when our mother dies and the first time we hold our baby.

My good babies cried because they were wet or hungry or uncomfortable or lonely.

I cry because someone has died or suffered in a way I cannot make better, or because I broke my little toe or read something or heard some story that touches or breaks my heart.

Heartbreak is a metaphor that almost makes sense since grief and shock and disappointment are bad for the heart muscle. The ancient Greeks did not share that belief in the heart as the site of our passionate selves. They believed the seat of passion is the liver, the organ in our body that filters out poison from our blood. They believed that literally. Sometimes I think about “liverbreak,” as if the heartbreak I think of metaphorically might literally be filtering through my actual liver, removing the poison there. Sometimes I feel better after I cry. The poison has been filtered out. Metaphors are not literally true, but powerful for all that.

Sometimes I take a deep, deep breath and I remember how often Odysseus cried.

My babies were good. Even when they refused to sleep and cried, they were good.

Tears are going back on my pages.

---

and for those trying not to be afraid and for my friend in Edmonds…

from Rattle


NOT ENOUGH TO SKI ON
by David Oates

This morning as Ukraine was invaded I shaved my neck
while listening to ancient orthodox music, with beards and ikons
on the illustration, Russian saints and astonishing harmonies
deep, slow, apparently permanent. And I noticed
that I needed to clean out the dirty soap-dish on the sink.
What an odd thing, I thought. A filth of cleanness.

Anyway, what is “Russia”? What I know is next to nothing.
It’s big but kind of useless, right? What does the world buy
from a nation of angry alcoholics? And wife beaters. And
wives who are beaten, and who admire the strongman leader.
I’ve always remembered a line from Gogol, or maybe Chekhov:
“He beat her right in the stomach, like a hero.”

When you know as little as I do, it’s hard to think.
I remember Khrushchev beating his shoe on the lectern at the U.N.
His bad teeth and peasant body. Peasant mind, too, I guess.
I knew about Ukrainian farmers killed by Stalin because
anticommunist conservatives mentioned them all the time. What else.
Amazing novels and music. How the heck does that happen?

I looked it up a few years ago: Russia’s economy is smaller than Italy’s.
Below Canada’s. Below South Korea’s! How can such a place be a Great Power?
I guess the collapse was because they couldn’t afford it. But here we are
thirty years later, same script. O then let us fear the Russians.
Let us rue them, and oppose them, and mock their shirtless
machismo. What their point is, we don’t know. Or what we offer instead.

Oh! And as a Sign to Poets, it’s snowing as I write! Late February. Weird.
Fluffy, pretty, symbolic. But not enough to ski on. Later
I’ll walk over to the little orthodox church with its wee silver dome
and signage in Korean. I went inside once and the walls were whited out
and all the ikons and strange double crosses taken out. I don’t know
anything about Korean Baptists, either, but I don’t like them too.

I’m an all-purpose bigot, catholic in the range of my disdain.
I can’t figure out why the world works this way, that evangelists
whose noisy ignorance failed so completely with me
should go to Korea and find success. Really, how the heck?
And how do soap-dishes get dirty? And why does Russian music
make me feel sad and joyous all at the same time?

My close-shaved dyspepsia offers no insight into this world.
My poetry will never appear on a syllabus at Moscow U. If there is one.
I don’t know why some are beaten while others are cheering. America
won the Cold War. What temperature will this one be?
The Luke Warm War, maybe. We’ll install tepid little dictators
worldwide to support the effort. Then forget them.

When I get lost while writing, I ask, What is the poem of this poem?
So maybe the question here is, What is the war of this war?
Who has been dying unnoticed, who made millions by it?
What’s the secret of this overt thing, what soap is its filth?
Questions like this vanish in a day or two. What I know
mostly is that I don’t know. Not enough to ski on.

I won’t make famous novels of it. Nor all-night vigils.
What we won, that we will lose. Suffering covers everything,
until later when it doesn’t. We will come out from hiding and
cleanse our wisdom with afterthoughts of great seemliness.
All the while wishing for beauty and harmony.
That alone is deep, slow, and apparently permanent.

—from Poets Respond
February 28, 2022

__________

David Oates: "Like everyone else, I woke up to war one day last week. It felt new/old. And I didn't know what to think, except how lousy it was. Who ever really knows how to think about 'history' as it unfolds around you? There's always this pathos of strangeness. And the scary question mark of what happens next—how bad it will get. And for whom. Later we'll turn it into 'history' and know what the plot turned out to be. Once it's in the rearview mirror, it all seems manageable. But in the moment—just weird and very hard to think clearly about." (web)