Contributor’s Marginalia: Katie Schmid on “Note to a Prospective Runaway at Bedtime” by John A. Nieves

John A. Nieves’s poem “Note to a Prospective Runaway at Bedtime” comes to the reader in the dead of night during that clear cold time when anxiety is threaded through every hour and the body is poised on the brink between paralysis and fleeing at a dead run into the unimaginable unknown. I wrote a poem a few months ago that spoke of the “thin blue bare hour of dread,” and this poem reports back from that place, a place where anything is better than what you have right now, where you are right now. The speaker of this poem has been there, and means to observe the suffering of the “you,” and means to follow her movements carefully, and means, very gently, to intervene at the moment when she can’t go on, which is this moment, the moment of the poem.

There’s a lot I admire in this poem, from its beginning faux-casual imperative, “So listen,” to the language that is so strange and so immediately accessible: “I was a dream scraper who stuffed dark / into my eyes.” Yes, that night work. What is it? Though I feel I know it.

And that “you”! Lodged in “night’s sticky throat.” The speaker watches night enclose the “you” and watches the “you” try to teach herself how to live from this place of abandonment. “The last thing you want is someone / to help…” the speaker says. “There is something / to be said for teaching your suffering to behave, // how to stand up to sunlight and other people’s eyes.” Yes, that terrible lesson. Yes, that moment when someone sees the suffering of another and knows that to touch that person and her carefully constructed boundaries would mean disaster.

And then the dim light appears to the “you”—“the red glow just out the window,” that is “not / the cigarette of a stranger,” and is “no bug…” The moment of fear as the body encounters what is alien and tries to understand, but cannot.

Gently, gently the speaker reveals: “This / is the part of you that is outside of you. […] It will never get in. […] None of us ever gets to be whole.”

“the part of you that is outside of you…” I came back to this phrase again and again. It seemed to me to be both impossible and completely correct. I had experienced it myself, when I gave birth, and again when I came to a lopsided kind of faith one day, all of a sudden. My child: both me, and never again me. And faith, or god: both me, and outside of me. There is no unity, only perfect brokenness. Only the practice of returning, again and again, to where you are most split, and honoring it: “…sing yourself whatever / song you know…” This seems to me holy knowledge gleaned from the hard, busted work of suffering. The most human knowledge.

An incomplete list of spiritual cousins to this poem: “mulberry fields,” by Lucille Clifton (Nieves: “…sing yourself whatever / song…” Clifton: “bloom how you must i say”), and “Suspirium,” by Thom Yorke (this is a waltz thinking / about our bodies / what they mean / for our salvation).