The Poem that Kept Me Going
Faint Music by Robert Hass
My friend Paul once gave me a poem. It’s a poem by Robert Hass. He gave it to me as support during my first and still one of my most painful experiences, grieving an intimate relationship.
Since then, I have carried this poem. In fact, it is this poem that taught me how to carry, and I have summoned it at various times in my life to keep going, to make sense of things. For example:
In my late-teens and early twenties, I had an incredible friend group. It was a foundational experience for me, and though we’re all not as close now, they are precious to me still. I learned a lot from them, my humor, how to ask questions, great music. It was a friend group that gave me space to nurture excitement for life. When one of them took his own life, I would read this poem to those of us who visited his last home. I remember his last message. I remember how smooth his handwriting looked on the wall, the sharpie beautifully applied. What else could I do but summon a poem to that moment? Something for the rest of us to hold onto.
This poem has been with me in many seasons of my life.
There is a line in that poem that has often confused me, though. Understanding it has been a more temporary situation. It is this moment:
“As in the story a friend told once about the time
he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him.
Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash.
He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge,
the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon.
And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,”
that there was something faintly ridiculous about it.
No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch
he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass…”
In the fall of 2020 and the early winter of 2021, I was the most suicidal of my life. But I did not realize this until restarting therapy and taking antidepressants that spring.
Near our apartment in Cambridge, there was an old church. I watched them re-landscape their front lawn to host a small labyrinth the summer just before. My same friend, Paul, who gave me this poem had also once told me that labyrinths were misunderstood. They were not traps to get people lost; they were originally used as tools to help meditation in the process of thinking, of learning yourself. It struck me that there were now two labyrinths near me. This one, and the other by the divinity school.
One specific day during this brutal depression, I took a walk. With the pandemic, conversations about staying mentally healthy abounded, and I took a recommendation to do “fake commutes” before and after work. The snow was heavy and rich on this day. It buried so much and simplified the rest of the world I could see. I love the snow for the stillness it invites into the everyday.
On this walk after work, I was thinking about suicide. Not about committing it, but it was a present thought. As I trudged through the snow over the front lawn of this little church, it occurred to me with sharp brilliance that there was a labyrinth under the snow. I stopped immediately. I stared as if to see through the snow and see the path of the labyrinth again.
The thought is so simple now, but this bizarre little comment distracted me enough to lose the hold of thinking about suicide. “There’s a labyrinth under there.”
Later, I would realize this was my “seafood” moment from the poem and the sporadic grace of curiosity.
Later, I would realize that suicidal thoughts don’t need to be hounding impulses of self-harm but are sufficient enough to erode you instead.
I’m grateful to have learned both.
More soon,
Trevor