American poet Ada Limón (1976 – )
DEAD STARS
Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.
Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.
Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels
so mute it’s almost in another year.
I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.
We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out
the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.
It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.
And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.
But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full
of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—
to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward
what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.
Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We’ve come this far, survived this much. What
would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
No, to the rising tides.
Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?
What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain
for the safety of others, for earth,
if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,
if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,
rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?
Ada Limón from THE CARRYING, Milkweed Editions, 2018
Ada Limón rose to prominence in 2015 when her book, Bright Dead Things, was nominated for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award (NBCCA). It didn’t win but her book The Carrying, that came out three laters, did win the NBCCA. And when I picked up that book today as I was reshelving books (my Sisyphean task) I started to read DEAD STARS and thought this could be a poem for this crazyily disrupted time. And I was glad of the chance to feature Ada for a second time in my blog. To see my previous post on Ada from April 2018, please click here.
I am grateful for what DEAD STARS calls out for me to strive for. How it reminds me of what we can be. Not our smallness but our bigness! Our direct relationship to the stupifying power of stars.
So much of poetic craft and value in Ada’s poems that I find compelling can be seen in DEAD STARS . You can see clearly her mixture of lyric and narrative, showing and telling! The speaker is out for a walk with cold coming in, when she captures the lyric isness of what she is feeling: I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying. Then the narrative moment of taking out the trash takes over and the focus on the stars, constellations. Then the speaker takes another lyric jump, risking the cliche that we are star dust but avoids by saying it differently, unexpectedly: we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising— to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.
What a move from the specific image of stars to a meta thought of the speaker rising to what’s larger within us, toward how we were born. Of a sudden we move from the specific humanness of the moment to the idea of what lies so large inside us. Something overwhelming large, with a burning intensity. Taking out the trash becomes a moment of cosmic bigness and reflection. And this turn takes place right in the middle of the poem after reclaim the rising. This makes the poem what American poet Carl Phillips calls a bi-valve poem.
And once the poem turns Ada is in a different poem thinking about big metaphysical questions. How the poem shifts with the conditional grammar. Starting with how far we have come as a species she asks such unexpectecd and inspirational questions: What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder? Now we have really moved past the trash to how do we deal with climate change, the huge challenges facing us. And this was way before the pandemic!
And this is where this poem could have been written today: So many echoes of what we going through with the unprecedented economic shutdown of the world. And the way some people are responding to the pandemic by hoarding, by lining up outside overwhelmed gun shops, not reaching out to others but reacting with fear: What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain/ for the safety of others, for earth/ if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified? What great questions for today. And also the many answers of homan goodness we are seeing in response to the pandemic. The singing from balconies, the celebrations of how we are the same, not different. The front-line health care workers risking their lives for all of us.
The construction of the last lines of the poem are skillful. All the if phrases that build suspense and lead to the increased impact of the concluding phrase : when all of this is over. After what is over? Reading this before the pandemic I would be more puzzled. Does she mean when the climate crisis is over? When the speaker’s life is over? Or something else? But now I can see this phrase as a huge question for me and you and all of us: what do we do when the pandemic is over. Do we go back to our old consumer, earth-eating ways or do we change? Do the smog clouds lessen over Wuhan, the freeways of L.A.? The dolphin stay in the canls of Venice?