Contributor’s Marginalia: Brandel France de Bravo responding to Craig van Rooyen’s poem “Tenderness in Men”

As an older reader and writer (I hesitate to confess this, but will try to embrace it in honor of Craig’s poem), how could I not be drawn to this work touching on mortality and legacy?

Two men in their fifties, the speaker and his friend with cancer, are “drinking lattes and trying on / our deaths.” After only the title and first line, we begin to suspect that the poem is tackling more than individual death; it also may be alluding to the death or transmutation of a certain notion of “maleness.” The men are enjoying milky, frothy beverages, and women, specifically the men’s daughters, we’re told in the second stanza, “will have to save the world.”

In a humorous spin on the increasingly popular “death café,” the two buddies discuss their impending demise as though they were girlfriends sipping white wine in a dressing room, a heap of party dresses at their feet. The speaker’s friend, we discover a few lines down in the first stanza, has already lost one testicle to cancer, underlining the slow emasculation taking place.

The first line of the second stanza repeats the word “normal” for a third time (it’s used twice in the previous line): “I ask if it’s normal for two guys in their fifties / to prepare to shed their skins.” The friend shrugs, suggesting the futility of this question, much less of defining the word normal. What I really love in that line, though, is the verb “shed,” because shedding is normal for a snake (it happens multiple times each year), an animal that symbolizes rebirth as much as the underworld.

Further down in that same stanza, the shedding is reprised: “Just think, he says, men our age shed / 600,000 particles of skin per hour.” I imagine us / walking together through the time that’s left, / dunes appearing in our wake.” As their man-ness sloughs off, they are being reborn into a different kind of being: stay-at-home earthlings who wave goodbye from the Kiss-and-Ride to those boarding, not a commuter train, but a ship to Mars. Who will be on that ship to Mars? It’s not entirely clear, but a few lines down appear the daughters whose job it will be to rescue earth, or if not earth, humanity. The speaker and his friend, “like Moses, / …just want a glimpse of the promised land / before we take off our jogging shoes and lie down for good.” The jogging shoes are a lovely “dad “ touch, and the mention of Moses foreshadows the men parting time as if it were the Red Sea, leaving a desert of skin particles in their wake, at the end of the second stanza.

In the third and penultimate stanza, the poet twice refers to trees within view of their coffee shop table: “the bony trees in their grated squares,” which are specified as “stunted / patio sycamores” a few lines down. This isn’t the first time that trees become stand-ins for these two men (or all men?). In the previous stanza, while the speaker imagines himself waving goodbye to the astronauts, he does so among the “downed wrecks / of beetle-felled sequoias.” His friend says “he’ll be / right there with [him].” If these two are downed wrecks, who or what are the beetles? Cancer is often spoken of as “eating away” at us, but the speaker doesn’t have cancer, so perhaps the beetles are simply the voracious years. Regardless, what stands out is that all the poem’s trees are toppled, reduced, faltering, domesticated. This could be tragic but it’s not. Rather, it’s sweet and sour like the smell from “the noodle joint next door” drifting in on a breeze as it “lisps / through the last remaining leaves” of the hemmed in sycamores.

The rest of the penultimate stanza focuses on the two men’s roles as fathers/spouses, and what they’ll leave behind. The friend knows by looking at the speaker’s bitten-down nails that his daughter’s not eating again; the speaker knows by looking at the bags under his friend’s eyes that nighttime sleeplessness has driven him to the guest bedroom. Both of these actions—the self-inflicted one of nail-biting and the altruistic one of abandoning one’s partner to protect them—demonstrate the true tenderness of these men. And yet, like worrying about legacy, there is a futility in this: the father can’t make his daughter eat, just as the friend can’t ensure sleep for either himself or his spouse. The silence between the two friends observing one another is interrupted by a finch’s song. Their quiet joint prayer (“Attention, taken to the highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” Simone Weil) is likened to water, and the bird’s trill to a stone skipping over it, troubling it, causing the friend with cancer to reflect on his mortality and what will survive him. “Just think, / the exact same song for 150 million years, / passed down from one throat to the next.”

The friend’s comment about the transmission of song makes the speaker realize in the last stanza that his friend’s cancer has returned: “Then I know the shadow’s back in the scan / and he’s preparing me gently.” The friend chooses to convey the news through indirection; he says something that only a skillful and loving listener can hear, intuiting the message beneath the words. This form of communication—telling it slant and understanding what is conveyed this way—is more typically associated with women. Then, the speaker urges his friend to stop dwelling on a future from which he’ll be absent and live in the moment, this tender moment that they are together: “No more / ‘just thinks,'” he reprimands. And just as he says this, the finch begins to sing full-force while the two men sit “and will the moment to expand / and expand like a circle drawn on water / after the stone’s skipped on.” Perhaps the world has, in some ways, gone on without these two men, yet they’re still here inside a circle of caring—a circle like the ouroboro, a snake eating its tail in a symbol of everlasting life.

May we all be held in such circles.