I have a bad habit of sending people on quests. Like any Non-Player Character, it’s my role to wait to be found by heroes who are stumped on their journeys and offer them a chance to hunt for a word in their life. Usually its after a long talk. And often this talk takes place at a bar. But wherever and whenever it is, I persist in this bad habit of telling people to go in pursuit of a word. I have assigned people quests for Kindness, Intimacy, Acceptance, and once, Private Joy.

Unlike a Non-Player Character in a video game, I assign this to myself as well. Last year, my quest was Gentleness. This year, I’ve assigned myself Open-Heartedness, but with the helpful parenthetical: (but with boundaries!). Often when I start looking for a word, it feels like it appears more. I notice more gentleness in myself and others. I start seeing more opportunities for open-heartedness. It often becomes the answer when I’m at a place of emotional bewilderment. I can ask “what’s the gentle answer?”

I love questing for and with a word, but sometimes the word is a difficult one with multiple meanings and histories. Such is the case with the word Saudade. In Portuguese it is a word for an impossible longing. A longing for a place that no longer exists or a person you’ll never see again. It’s the title of my most recent book, and the quest I went on with that word was a long and complex one. The journey I set off to have was, of course, not at all the adventure I ended up having. I have written elsewhere about my longing for the town of my mother’s childhood in the Amazon and how that changed when she died, both the nature of the longing and what that meant for the book I was writing about that place. One of the things that has struck me lately is that I don’t think saudade is that untranslatable after all. Doesn’t longing already imply distance and impossibility? Isn’t longing already more grief than want?

At this past year’s AWP, I had dinner with Elaina Ellis and talked about the difference between longing and desire. Desire is proximal. A mirror even. Something only as far away as an arm’s reach or a breath. I think that is often the project of a book, or at least this one. I’ve thought that poetry was an art that makes you suffer twice—first the experience, and then the rendering it into language. But perhaps it is turning the longing into a desire, taking the longing that is distant and impossible and making a desire that is nearly and almost fulfilled. I think often about the quote from Stendahl that says “a novel is a mirror walking along a road.” If a desire is a mirror, perhaps that’s what a book can achieve as an art. I took my saudade for my mother’s childhood and her first home and made it something I lived in, experienced, drew close with desire and held with open-heartedness so that she breathed again and told me every story I’d forgotten or never heard. Poems are a way to live twice, certainly, and maybe it’s also a way to resurrect those we’ve lost, to translate a longing grief into stanzas and have those people return to us, however briefly, with as much gentleness as we can bear.