Reading Far Away


The day before we took off for our recent trip to Mexico, a book of poems came in the mail. It was one of those online used book purchases from Amazon that take so long to arrive that when they do show up, you’ve long since forgotten when you ordered them. I’ve had other books take so many weeks that as I crack them open I wonder what could have possibly motivated me to buy them in the first place. This has happened more times than I ought to admit: I look down at the book, and the book stares back haughtily-- “Hey, I don’t know why I’m here either. You’re the one who thought One Hundred Suppers with Lentils would be a good idea. So, here I am. What are you going to do about it?”

I always shelve these books politely. It never occurs to me to send them back.

I didn’t exactly have that reaction to this particular book, The Afterlife of Objects by Dan Chiasson. Ever since I stumbled across one of Chiasson’s poems in a magazine, I’ve wanted to get my hands on the book. The title alone, containing two of my favorite words, “afterlife” and “objects,” would have been enough to sell me. The day we left for Mexico, I threw it in my bag along with a battered copy of The House of Seven Gables. I didn’t have any reason for taking these two particular books except that they interested me at the moment (I wonder if the two of them bothered to get acquainted as they lay squashed together, undignified, in the overhead compartment.) But I also really love these accidental combinations—how books and circumstances can fall together like an unplanned meal. The other night there was nothing else in the house to eat, so we had a supper of Baba Ganoush, roasted red peppers with thyme, and a side of crispy fried tofu with peanuts. Odd, mismatched and too snacky to really count as a meal, but sometimes it works, and it often works well with books. (One notable exception was my idea to pick up Charlie and the Chocolate Factory during a month when I’d decided to give up sugar. I suffered through the book like a martyr but probably gained five pounds anyway just from all the passages about chocolate rivers and candy flowers, etc. )

I wrapped up The House of Seven Gables after we arrived in Oaxaca, and it was—not to gush or anything—really thrilling to read Hawthorne’s long, baroque passages about generational curses and then step into the cramped, pungent aisles of the covered markets. The intricate knots of his characters’ minds, so alien to one another, seemed to hang over my attempts to speak to strangers, and the story’s view of home as a prison you just can’t stand to leave contrasted with a place that eventually seemed familiar and stomach-ache inducing, while home grew more and more elusive, accessible only on the far side of a plane ticket.

By the time I opened Chiasson’s book, we were a few days into our trip, and its cool title had taken on a new significance. The airline had lost our single suitcase somewhere between Houston and Oaxaca, and sitting in our hotel without any of our precious stuff and only a slim volume of poems called The Afterlife of Objects for company, we could appreciate the irony.

Chiasson’s book is fixed on losses, especially ones from long ago. He seems to say that some of the most beautiful objects and moments seem born with their future loss already inscribed in them, like a genetic code. He reaches into the past for objects (kind of like reverse souvenirs), but he avoids any whiff of sentimentality by forfeiting the usual pleasure of nostalgia—that backward-facing soliloquy that allows you to dabble in your old, innocent self, but really, wink, wink, only reveals how much time has passed, how you can never go home again, how you’re a grownup now and you’ve put away childish things but, damn, weren’t things pretty and sparkly back then, and that’s what really matters in the end: the sparkliness of it all.

Thankfully, Chiasson never resorts to this line of thought (which, come to think of it, sort of sums up a lot of Romantic poetry). Instead, he fall into the past in all kinds of odd, jarring and bruise-inducing ways, like a kid who’s had it with the limits of gravity and decides to throw himself backward into a leaf pile, suspecting that it might blow away before he reaches the ground, but not really caring.

Look at how his mind works here:

Spade

I dreamed I was the spade
my mother used

to dig her marigolds in spring,
her bloom and worry.

her digging, throwing, patting to bring
rows to life, each
bloom familiar

to worry, every row perfect, bloom,
rich dirt between, planned
absence and full, superfluous bloom—

I made the trench her hand proposed;

I was the pressure in her palm;

her ache from planting
was
my presence in her life.

Here’s one more. I read this poem several times on the trip and again this morning, and each time it I love it more, and it speaks more fully to the trouble of trying to access the past. It’s a given, I guess, that memories are not fixed places in time that we can visit at will, like points on the map. But the harder thing Chiasson is saying here is that even in the act of speaking or remembering—i.e. writing—the past can’t be retrieved, corralled, explained. At first this seems a blow, a reason for despair, but for me it’s actually unexpectedly reassuring—to think that the past is as itinerant as we are, and as stubbornly resistant to being pinned down.

Poem

When I picture 1940 everyone poses
for me, as though I had the one

camera in the world. I cannot distract them
from their studied, ghoulish jolliness.

My grandmother is posing, yelling
Smile and my grandfather is horsing around

with a tire, making his biceps big. I
can’t know the past, because the past

keeps arranging itself before my lens. People call
out Here and Over here, striking

their prewar, rural, easygoing stances.
That night, when I try again, everyone

is indoors, in parlors, reading quietly.
A woman rocking in and out of lamplight

studies me. The neighbor’s
middle child died this afternoon.