In the space of the year it’s taken to compile and write 44 Poems on Being With Each Other I’ve met a lot of strangers, sat in a lot of meetings, and read a lot of things. I’ve been alone, with friends; I’ve wanted to join some groups and wanted to leave some others. I’ve hurt. I’ve been hurt. I cried on a train.

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I burst out laughing at a text message. I panicked when someone close to me got a diagnosis, then tried to de-panic myself. I’ve been late because the birdsong was beautiful. I broke a bone and had a long conversation with a medic who told me I’d have been a terrible doctor.

Out of the blue, someone from my past reemerged. I’ve wondered about my health while worrying about the health of others. I’ve watched the news about Ukraine and Gaza with horror. I argued with politicians while drinking morning tea. I gave money.

I gave attention. I was alert. I was lazy. I’ve been awake more hours than I wanted. I slept well. I slept badly. I gave gifts. I refused others.

I’ve inhabited the homes of friends, strangers and acquaintances for months at a time, drinking from their cups, looking at their photos. I stopped in front of posters displaying the names and photos of kidnapped Israelis. I was the celebrant at a friend’s wedding, and couldn’t have been happier. I heard from an old lover.

I’ve spoken Irish with some people, French with others, and wished I could remember the German word for world-sadness.

I’ve spoken Irish with some people, French with others, and wished I could remember the German word for world-sadness. I’ve judged my own body and judged my curiosity about the bodies of others. I’ve separated and I’ve joined. I’ve feared. I’ve introduced people to each other and watched their friendships flourish.

And that’s not all. I’ve seen life and death. I’ve seen hope and horror. I’ve seen grief, gladness, good food and greed. I’ve read articles, novels, headlines, text messages, letters, food labels, whiskey descriptions, departures information and station signs. A broken bone was not enough; I cracked another.

What happens in a life? All of this, and more. From the memorable to the mundane, moments appear that ask for our attention; we give it, we move on, we remember some events and forget many others.

The Irish word file translates as “poet” but also as “seer.” I’m hesitant to imagine that poets have special insight, or particular powers of perception. We don’t. We just work damned hard to see, remember, write, see again and write more.

So a poem is an act of noticing. What does it see? It sees forward and backward. It sees the futures that probably won’t happen. A poem understands the past has a life of its own, and is both patient and impatient with lament. It can contain rage and hunger, it can protest at the state of the world, and plot the low plod toward resented compromise.

Poems are recipes for happiness and prayers for when no other prayers will do. They record what’s unfolded, and also what’s been hidden in the folds. Poems confess, apologize, ask forgiveness, ask for mercy, ask for time, ask for space, ask to be read again, and ask for attention.

A poem might be addressed to someone who’ll never read it—be they estranged, or uninterested, or dead—but the address is to you and you can be anyone.

*

Poems see all kinds of things, but the ones gathered here are about being with each other. When we are with each other, anything can happen, and it has. I know you know this. Just think about what happened yesterday. Or this morning. Or last week. Or last year.

I’ve had longstanding unease with the word “family.” I come from a good one, but too many years hearing family values—from priests and politicians and many in between—left me with the distinct impression that my life was considered some kind of threat to those values. Why? Too gay, I suppose.

But that’s not the only reason people find themselves feeling alienated from the idea of the family. While I understand the usage of the nuclear family—from nucleus, a little unit—the adjective also makes me think about bombs.

This collection of poems explores fusion and fission: familiar familiars; the explosions and fireworks that happen when people are in proximity with people; the love so pure it breaks you; the pull of attachment and the draw of resistance. We all know all about this; it happens in and between us.

What happens when we are with each other? What happens in the aftermath? What do we do then? We use language. We make. We look. We hope. We speak. We listen. We change, in all kinds of ways.

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The Boss of Me

–Patricia Smith

In fifth grade I
was driven wild by you,
my teacher  Copper pixie
with light shining from beneath
it  Eyes giggling azure through
crinkled squint                  I
let you rub my hair  I
let you probe the kinks  I
clutched you, buried my nose
in the sting starch of your white
blouses I asked you if you thought
I was smart did you know
how much I wanted to come
home with you to roll and cry on
what had to be a bone-colored
carpet I found out where
you lived I dressed in the morning
with you in mind I spelled huge
words for you I opened the dictionary
and started with A I wanted to
impress the want out of you
I didn’t mind my skin because you
didn’t mind my skin I opened big books
and read to you and watched TV news
and learned war and weather for you
I
needed you in me enough to take
home enough to make me stop rocking
my own bed at night enough
to ignore my daddy banging on the front door
and my mama not letting him in I
prayed first to God and then to you
first to God and then to you
then to you and next to God then
just to you
Mrs Carol
Baranowski do you even remember
the crack of surrender under your hand?
Do you remember my ankle socks
kissed with orange roses, socks turned perfectly
down and the click of the taps in my black
shiny shoes that were always pointed toward
you always walking your way always
dancing for a word from you? I looked
and looked for current that second
of flow between us but our oceans
were different  yours was wide and blue
and mine
was

*

Patricia Smith’s “The Boss of Me” is a praise song to Mrs Carol Baranowski, a teacher who was a fixation—a term sometimes associated negatively, but here it’s something like salvation—for a pupil. Mrs Carol Baronowski’s hair (“Copper pixie”), eyes (“azure”) and clothing (“the sting starch of your white / blouses”) are all tangible and adored. Her home had been imagined and then “I found out where / you lived’.

The title—”The Boss of Me”—evokes a speaker who has found someone worthy of her love and submission. Could the teacher have borne such love had it ever been expressed? Could the child have borne the communication, or rejection, of such love? We are so filled with hunger.

This teacher is better than God:

I
prayed first to God and then to you
first to God and then to you
then to you and next to God then
just to you

Why? Because she was there, responding, educating, inspiring, correcting. She was touchable and touching, even past boundaries: “I / let you rub my hair / let you probe the kinks / clutched you, buried my nose / in [you].”

Worship is etymologically linked to worth and this woman with “[e]yes giggling azure through / crinkled squint” was worthy of love. To love her was to be loved back into being. The single word “I” occurs seventeen times, five times at a line’s end, and once as the single word on a line of its own.

The attention given to the teacher allowed the student—a child who knew “my daddy banging on the front door / and my mama not letting him in”—to flourish. The educator was good enough to be the focus of a pupil’s love, but paradoxically, the love was not just for the teacher, rather it was a nascent love of the student for their own life.

“I asked you if you thought / I was smart.” Patricia Smith – she speaks warmly of how autobiographical this poem is—knew she was intelligent but needed to hear it from someone else who also saw it.

Under such a gaze, she expanded:

I spelled huge
words for you I opened the dictionary
and started with A
….
I opened big books
and read to you and watched TV news
and learned war and weather for you

She experienced something of citizenship: in her own life, her classroom, her mind and creativity.

I was lucky to have such adults in my life. Ruth Maybury and I shared a birthday, and when I wrote letters to her, she replied. Ray Murphy—I thought he was so old, but he was only twenty-five—taught me the guitar. Aldo Magliocco was a Belfast man with an Italian name whose ease and kindness was a balm in complicated years.

When I heard he died, only in his early fifties, I walked miles in Manhattan with rain diluting my tears. As an eleven-year-old I noticed, and copied, the handwriting of Colin Green. Decades later, far away from Ireland, I was in a meeting and someone said “My name is Colin Green” and I instantly knew why I’d not been able to take my eyes off him. We reconnected and are still in touch. No parent is enough, and love comes from many sources. It needs to.

“I didn’t mind my skin because you / didn’t mind my skin.” Alongside Patricia Smith’s childhood devotion to her teacher is the recognition of their dissimilarity. The “white / blouses” and “what had to be a bone-colored / carpet” locate the distinctions in objects. Between a white teacher and her Black student from the west side of Chicago there are racial, cultural and historical differences.

Perhaps this also goes some way to explain the conclusion, if it can be called that: “yours was wide and blue / and mine / was.” The abrupt ending leaves the reader in the unbridged gap of what is not narrated, what was not said, the message that does not know if it ever reached its addressee.

I interviewed Patricia Smith at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival a few years ago. She spoke of how she’d never been able to trace her beloved teacher, so the poem acts as a voice of praise to all teachers deserving of such adulation. Mrs Baranowski saw in the young student what her family didn’t see, and urged the poetry out of her, allowing her to locate herself in the here-and-now, even though the here-and-now was a place that evoked fantasies of escape in the child.

She spoke of how she’d never been able to trace her beloved teacher, so the poem acts as a voice of praise to all teachers deserving of such adulation.

Writing was her way to engage safely with a world she couldn’t leave. And when she did finally leave, she brought writing with her, having honed it by responding to her teacher’s repeated—and sometimes illogical—questions: What sound does that color make? How does that color taste? If that home had a voice, what would it sound like? It was by such close attention that writing sharpened.

Studying phenomenology a few years ago, I was relieved to read philosophers who assert that nobody knows what “being” is. According to some, you need to stand apart from an experience to describe it objectively, and we are not capable of standing outside existence in order to explore what existence means.

All of this is to consider the sense of self that arose in Patricia Smith: what caused it? Why that teacher, at that time? Could she have heard herself by any other means? I don’t know the answer to these questions, and it’s impossible to step outside of what happened to imagine if it could have happened in another way.

What this leaves us with, then, is a song of praise for the salvation that did break in, not through divine intervention, but through someone who made her want to be herself. All stand. All praise Mrs Carol Baranowski.

______________________________

44 Poems on Being with Each Other by Pádraig Ó Tuama is available via Norton.