As If It Matters

This morning, at 7:05 am in Boston, my beautiful wife completed the feat of her life: she gave birth naturally to a boy, Asa Archibald Mele. Both Morra and Asa are happy and healthy. AsaMele.com is up and running. And I wrote a poem for the occasion:

Prayer for Asa

Dear Lord, fire-eating custodian of my soul,
creator of the volcanoes and finches’ wings,
guardian of lost dogs and wayward alley cats,
please protect this wet-cheeked baby from disabling griefs.
Grant him curiosity as broad as the expanse of the oceans
and ambition in his chosen ventures like the Ancient Romans.
Let him be inspired by the stark beauty of the Grand Canyon
and piqued by the mystery of the Northern Lights.
Allow him personal courage in his every action,
whether it be telling a friend hard truths or slaying
threatening beasts. Give him a constancy in tribulation
and sound nerves for every crisis, from the missing sock
to the world’s bigger disasters. Provide him a world of
delight and imagination, from the beetles of the jungle
and giraffes of the savannah to the astonishment
of molten sand becoming blown glass. Send him the world over,
discovering a discerning palate from kimchi to nasi lemak.
Give him his mother’s erudite vocabulary,
and her intense athletic poise.
Bless him with musical gifts unknown to his parents;
help him sense when to grin and when to roar.
May exuberance be his inheritance.
“Bravely, he has ventured among us, disguised
as a new comer, shedding remarkably few tears.”

by Nicco Mele

(Inspired by Amy Gerstler’s poem “Prayer for Jackson“)

Time for a nap. We’ve been up for more than two days; Morra went into labor the morning of New Year’s Day.

No baby yet. So I’ve been going through some old photos and videos and posting them online, trying to recall my own early years. I just uploaded a set named Nicco Growing Up to Flickr. And earlier this morning I uploaded to YouTube some old family videos - Super8s - that I got from my folks a while back. There is no sound - because in the olden days there was no sound with Super8 videos:

• Uncle Jim, Aunt Tamara, and Cousin Jesse circa 1983 in Surabaya, Indonesia (there’s a brief black gap in the middle of this one)
• Two clips of my brother as a toddler in Indonesia - possibly the cutest little kid ever, especially when he’s clutching his monkey with those big brown eyes.
• Three clips of me as a infant in Ghana. Warning: these are long and not that exciting.
  • Eating
  • Diaper Change & Bath
  • With Grandma Mele and my parents

More to come…

Waiting for Asa, I have been thinking about the conditions of my own birth. They could not, in some ways, be more different than Asa’s experience. I was born in 1977 in Kumasi, Ghana, in west Africa at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology Hospital. The internet has failed me; I can’t find out the weather forecast for the week I was born in Kumasi. I think, though, that is safe to assume it was pretty warm. There was certainly no snow on the ground. Maybe latent African memories explain my obsessive listening to Archie Shepp and Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim)’s “Barefoot Boy from Queens Town to Mongezi” from the album Duet.

I have also been thinking about the naming of our child. Where did the name Asa come from? I am reminded of a poem I read years ago in the Harvard Review that I tore out and kept:

Christening

It was snowing, as it had all night,
And from the look of the drifts he waded,
He was the first one out on 24th Street.
In the faint light, dragging the sack
Of newspapers that erased his footprints,
He became aware of a sound barely louder
Than the hiss of canvas. A flock of birds
He’d never seen before, not sparrows –
Smaller, more colorful – swayed chirping
In the single maple along his route.
Day by day, he’d watched the tree turn
Scarlet, then fade to a glow the shade
Of overripe pears. Leaves still clinging,
Ladened with snow, were inscribed
With the hieroglyphics of bird tracks.
Suddenly, the flock gusted into the twirling
White, emitting as they disappeared
A shrill syllable left hanging – vowelless,
Unpronounceable in any language, its meaning
Foreign to words, secret, so that even then,
If he could, he wouldn’t have revealed it –
A cry farewell, perhaps, but he remembers it
As hearing – so many years before
He heard its gasp from his own mouth –
The first wild utterance of her name.

By Stuart Dybek

The first wild utterance of his name - where did I hear it?

I love reading poetry - it is my preferred leisure activity - poetry and dog-walking. But in the pace of my daily life my poetry bandwidth is constricted, and so it’s now, when things slow down and get quiet, that I can really dive in. Last night I read a wide variety of poetry - from my old favorites to some new titles I have recently acquired. And I found myself returning inexplicably this morning to some lines from Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes.

I was working downtown, at the corner of Fulton and Williams, on September 11, 2001. I was there and I know the entire terrifying madness first hand. I have written about it here before. The harrowing experience of that day continues to haunt me when I least expect it, and the only thing that has helped has been poetry. There are, in particular, four poems that have stayed with me as my salve: Try To Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski, Fragment by CK Williams (you can hear him read this poem on Slate, which I highly recommend), I, May I Rest in Peace by Yehuda Amichai, and a few lines from Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy. I have memorized these poems and carry them around with the other poems I have memorized.

My fears and grief from that day are so strong, so intense and demanding, that I cannot manage them; they are beyond anything else I have ever known by an gigantic margin. When that sudden, inexplicable deep fear and anxiety from that day in Manhattan returns unexpectedly, I reach for one of those four poems, turning them over in my mind. I don’t think of them as hopeful poems; to me they are mostly dark, a way of expressing and understanding my own fears and grief from that day. One of the poems, Fragment, is very dark. Then they are by degrees more hopeful, going from Try To Praise the Mutilated World to I, May I Rest in Peace, to Seamus Heaney. But to me they have always been dark poems, poems I reach for only when it is pitch black and I cannot imagine any future.

So why am I writing about this?

Well, because these days I think about our coming child a lot. Every minute, just about. And I have been thinking about poetry for him - even writing a poem for him. Last night I was like Mark Strand: “Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. / There is no happiness like mine. / I have been eating poetry.” Eating poetry, gorging myself on its sweet fruit, looking for poems that spoke to the odd but gratifying mix of intense emotions that accompany the anticipation of my son. I was not coming up with much. But this morning Seamus Heaney’s lines came back to me as I brushed my teeth, and I wondered why that poem - a poem that I have always classified as one of my dark, September 11th poems - why that poem was coming to mind as part of the joy I am feeling around fatherhood:

Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted or endured.

The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don’t hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.

Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.

It is a birth poem at it’s core, a vision of redemption for all of us. “Believe that a further shore / is reachable from here.” That’s what I believe for my son, for Asa - a vision of the world’s future that is hopeful, “…a great sea-change / on the far side of revenge”. My desires for Asa’s world are filling me with an energy and willfulness that I have not known before - it is something even beyond hope, it is a sort of parental ferociousness to bring about a better world.

Years ago I visited the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC and discovered Wolfgang Laib. It was an odd exhibition, one that at the time I did not care for, but a single work of art has lingered with me across almost a decade from that exhibition - “Milkstone”. It’s best to quote the Sperone Westwater gallery in describing it:

A nearly square, shallow marble basin that is filled with three quarts of milk, it uses surface tension to redouble as a signifier for the apparent incompatibility of its materials. Milk is soft, liquid, perishable; marble, durable, solid, eternal. But in looking at a milkstone, the viewer is hard put to distinguish one from the other.

The work of art stands out now in my memory. It has surprising depth and resilience. I remember a docent explaining that every morning the stone is cleaned and the milk re-poured. I love that detail.

As I consider the last twelve months, and the next twelve, it has particular resonance. My life is taking shape, becoming rooted, cast in a stone. In 36 months I have gone from single with no real possessions to married with child and mortgage (and little white dog). At the same time, my life is taking on an mysterious, immediate fragility, a complete vulnerability with the birth of our first child, a willful gift of the rest of my lifetime to the unknown future of this baby. And yet - my life remains coherent, complete.

There is more that might be said, but the asethetic of the milkstone encourages a contemplative silence, a drawing inward.

I have been thinking a lot about what kind of life I want my son to have. I suppose this is a natural inclination. One thing that I noticed is that although both my wife and I love music, we’re not that musical. Neither of us read music; we play no instruments; we don’t sing. And this strikes me as a bit of travesty. Many of my earliest memories are musical - my mother singing, my father playing the guitar. I love this picture of my uncle playing the guitar for my niece (his grand-niece) Sophia - because I remember him playing the guitar like that for me when I was little.

A few days ago I heard this story on NPR about Brian Eno and his belief in the importance of singing together. Every week he gathers a group of a dozen or so people and together they sing. He even lists the songs they sing together:

Can’t Help Falling In Love
Love Me Tender
Keep On the Sunny Side
Sixteen Tons
Will the Circle Be Unbroken
Dream
If I Had a Hammer
Love Hurts
I’ll Fly Away
Down By the Riverside
Chapel of Love
Wild Mountain Thyme
Que Sera, Sera
Cotton Fields

I love this idea. I’m going to start a singing night for Asa. Anybody out there want to come over and sing with us? Suggested songs?

My wife is nine months pregnant and the baby is due now, literally any day. And so for the last couple of weeks we have spent our days waiting — waiting for Asa, which is what we’re pretty sure we’re going to call our boy. It is Sunday morning and it has been snowing steadily since Friday at noon, accumulating a significant amount of light powdery snow all around. It’s our first snow of the year and Rascal is beside himself with delight: snow is the most exciting thing possible in a little dog’s world. I’m not sure why; maybe because it means infinite digging, and there is nothing little terriers like more than digging.

The last couple of weeks have had frantic waiting - my to-do list prior to the baby’s arrival was gigantic, enormous, incomprehensible. But as the holidays have approached, and I’ve been able to get a lot done, things have slowed down. There are still a few urgent things, but generally the pace and meter of the waiting has slowed to a crawl, so that it is me, Morra, our dog, our cat, the snow and waiting. We’ve gone from an urgent, frantic waiting to a slow, waiting-out-a-blizzard, zen-like waiting. I am reminded of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle; there is an early chapter in the book told from the point of view of the dog, Almondine. It is, I think, the only chapter in the book told from the dog’s point of view, and in my opinion it is the best chapter of the entire book, really stands head and shoulders above the rest of the book. And the chapter is about the dog, waiting. The dog knows she is waiting for someone or something; the dog is constantly poking around the house and barn - knows this thing she is waiting for is present but not here - and she is perplexed, but also excited, eager and patient. And then finally this thing arrives, and it is a baby boy, and Almondine understands this is what she has been waiting for.

So we’re waiting. Even the cat and the dog seem to understand we’re waiting for something, something exciting. Waiting for Asa.

In early October, the Massachusetts Poetry Festival happened. It was the first one - and I was proud to have been a part of making it happen. But a few days after the last reading, an email went out to the conference organizers: Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate, was missing his jacket. Had anyone seen it?

Inexplicably a poem came to my fingers, fully formed, like Athena sprouting from Zeus’ head. This is an unusual occurrence. I have written perilously few poems in my life, and only three that really qualify for me as true Poems. And here appeared a fourth! A little clumsy, perhaps. Lacking a certain grace. But undeniable a poem, effortless in its own way. Which was both a delight and a disappointment. Shouldn’t poems require effort? Without further ado:

Pinsky’s Jacket

It fits fine,
although there is a slight tightness under the armpit,
and I might add some sequins to its broad shoulders,
perhaps spelling out POET or just WARRIOR,
and when I put it on I pat the pockets
looking for something to surprise me,
a delightful surprise, a poetry-infected pen in the
left breast inside pocket, or a few crumbs of
inspired prosody left behind in the right front side,
a slight scent of a muse of fire left high on the lapel;
although all in all it squeezes my frame,
maybe not such a fine fit after all,
more of a pot-bellied pig in biker’s spandex,
people glance at me on the street and avert their eyes,
aware i am uncomfortable
wearing a poet’s jacket.

- nicco mele -

These days I’m reading “Sunday Mornings in Fascist Spain” by Willis Barnstone. It’s out of print so I had to track down a copy, a fairly straightforward task in this wired age. How I came to be reading this particular memoir is odd in and of itself; I don’t have any idea who Willis Barnstone is.

Ten or eleven years ago, in the winter of 1997, I visited Haiti for a few weeks. An acquaintance of my parents’ heard of my impending travel, and asked me to bring this book to his brother. I carried the book around Haiti for a couple weeks, never reading it but reading the title over and over again. Haiti was in complete disarray and it took me some time to track down my friend’s brother. It seemed like it was going to be an odd quixotic quest that would end without delivery of the book until finally I found him in that strange, dis-jointed semi-providential way people found each other before mobile phones in a city without street names. The brother invited me in to his house, and we sat across from each other, a bit uncomfortable, nothing really in common, or so it seemed, so I handed him the book and left after just a few minutes of silence and snippets of conversation.

But I continued to carry around the title of that book, “Sunday Mornings in Fascist Spain”. A few years later another friend gave me a translation of C. P. Cavafy’s poems by a woman named Aliki Barnstone; I wondered if she was related to the Willis Barnstone of the Haiti Brother Book Quest. Turns out she’s Willis’ daughter (and a fine translator of poems!).

The title of the book stayed with me, completely without any context and so my imagination added context and layered meaning. When Morra and I traveled around Spain, I would find myself imagining Sunday Mornings in this particular spot in Spain half a century ago. But still I had not read the book. Finally, inexplicably, a month ago I tracked down the book online and ordered it. The siren call of that title had finally become to great to resist, and so now I find myself devouring Barnstone’s delicious memoir of poetry and a time when American and indeed the World was quite different.

My last blog post was two months ago; what gives? Well, in the aforementioned blog post I talked about my bike trip through the Outer Banks of North Carolina. On that bike trip, I fractured several bones in my hand and ended up in a cast for two months (but I finished the bike trip!). In the last 10 days I’ve come out of the cast and begun my rehabilitation. For a serious nerd like me, returning to typing was a genuine relief and the return to the Xbox was rapturous.

In the mean time I have tried not to take up any new projects – but my instinct towards excitement has led me to the organizing committee of the rent a car bulgariaMassachussetts Poetry Festival, not to mention starting my term as a Fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics.