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 The phone rings & surprise! It's your mother calling & the last 40 years Haven't happened: your father's alive, Your sisters speak, your wife's days Are not yet spent rehearsing for her widowhood, & you, you are still a 16-year-old fuck-up Who has stayed out too late w/o calling Her—. Again. If she could see the death mask Your face has become, she'd know you'd paid The bill for those mistakes. Those—, & 1,000 Others. All that bourbon to say grace over, All your lapses. & you will say grace When the time comes—. Believe that. Until then—, all you can say is: Forgive me, Mama. I'll be home soon. No need to worry. from Still Life (McSweeney's, 2022)

Every time I open to this page — page 34 — of Jay Hopler’s final book, Still Life, I think that I am looking at one of the most moving open books that I can recall. Because, on page 35, there is another poem — “The Vacation Over” — that reads:

The vacation over, see from the train who remains on the beach playing, bathing in the waves; their vacation isn't over yet: is this how it's going to be is this how it's going to be to leave this life?

The first time I read this short poem, I was shot through the heart with echoes and stillness and sorrow and gratitude. The repetition of that final question’s first phrase. And then the final line. I felt myself there, watching through the window. We sometimes call death passing. Strange word, this is. And true. And strange still. To read Jay Hopler is to hold that moment on the subway underground, when one train passes another in the tunnel, and you find yourself — surprised, wonder-struck, moved — catching someone’s eyes for the briefest instant, the two of you borne separately on your separate ways. It’s to hold that passing moment. To be reminded that we are each looking out the window of our life.

Reading Hopler’s poem again, I’m thinking of a short paragraph from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead:

This afternoon we waled over to Boughton’s to return his magazine. You held my hand a fair part of the way. There were milkweed seeds drifting around which you had to try to catch, but you’d come back and take my hand again. It’s a hard thing to be patient with me, the way I creep along these days, but I’m trying not to to get my heart in a state. There have been so many fine days this summer that I’ve begun to hear talk of a drought. Dust and grasshoppers are fine in their way, too, within limits. Whatever is coming, I’d be sorry to miss it.

Whatever is coming, I’d be sorry to miss it.

Is this how it’s going to be / to leave this life?

Facing me, Still Life’s open twin pages feel — to me — things to be grateful for, reminders of that incomprehensible ability of poetry to offer a reader an idea of what a life can be or could be or might be, what a life is, at its heart, which is a thing so different and multitudinous for so many — the each-ness of our collective life, and the collective experience of each life. It really is an incomprehensible thing. It’s the mystery of encounter, a bird alighting beside you. It’s surprise and wonder, wrapped up as one.

Still Life was published just over two months before Hopler’s death from cancer — a pending death that is so evident throughout the book’s pages, a death that Hopler writes into and out of with great generosity. It’s a gift, this book, and to even say anything about it in such a way — like the very idea that it is a gift — feels trivializing and reductive. But these are last words. It is hard to put into regular words what it feels like to read them.

Though, in a beautiful review of Still Life constructed as a letter-to-the-author, Christian Detisch does a beautiful job of putting the experience of reading Hopler into regular words. In that review, he writes:

I think of my friend, a palliative care physician who often tells me, “We die the way we live,” which he says not to induce fatalistic despair, but to point out there’s some vital aspect to a person even the approach of oblivion can’t erase. And as I’ve read these poems, the moments that seem most durable, that contain the kind of writing that no one but you could make, are the ones in which you see the world with such precision that you change it.

I read this moment and felt it wildly apt. And I thought of today’s poem as I read it. I thought particularly of the lines:

All that bourbon to say grace over, All your lapses. & you will say grace When the time comes—. Believe that.

I thought, too, of another moment from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead:

Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.

Or, too, of Robinson’s statement — in the same novel — that “there is guilt enough in the best life.”

Or, even still, from that same novel again:

And grace is the great gift. So to be forgiven is only half the gift.

I thought of what it might mean to die as you live, to write into that dying, which is like living. And I thought of grace, of how the need for it makes itself known — I imagine — in every person’s life. And I thought of the wild gratitude I experience at reading someone else’s vitality, at becoming aware of the way in which the need for grace might be part of their vitality, which is to say part of their life.

And there is vitality in this poem called “Erasure,” isn’t there? Read that first line again: The phone rings & surprise! Notice that exclamation point, the little joke of it, the lifted voice, the attempt at a smile, even. Notice how it immediately contradicts the title, which hints at dying while this opening line announces itself so purely and almost wistfully with life. I read the entire first stanza with a smile amidst the sorrow. I read the self-deprecation in these lines: the 16-year-old fuck-up / Who has stayed out too late w/o calling / Her—. Again. And I noticed that same sneaky deprecation in the abbreviation of without, that stubborn and sly Again sitting as its own sentence. It’s a real joy to read these opening lines. It might be odd to say, but it is. It is such a joy, because I feel the precise voice behind the words. I feel the looking. I feel the reaching. I feel the life, how precious it is, how it remembers and how it wants and how it mourns and how it jokes and how it loves and how it apologizes and how it lives, still. Lives always, you might say.

In Heaven’s Coast, one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read, Mark Doty writes:

Imagine illness as this light; demanding, torturous, punitive, it nonetheless reveals more of what things are. A certain glow of being appears. I think this is what is meant when we speculate that death is what makes love possible.

That glow of being is radiant in this poem called “Erasure.” The gift of this poem is not, I think, in the more trite, though well-meaning, things we might say about a poet writing into illness — that they are courageous, say, or brave. The gift, I think, is that we are offered a gaze right on the precipice of its ending, and that such a gaze is rapt with attention, precise with clarity, and so profoundly curious, compassionate, and loving. The gift is that we are offered life. And if it is true that we die as we live, then I am trying to remind myself to receive such a gift. Because that as is important — it means that all of this is ongoing, is happening at the same time, life and death and all of it. I want to have enough gratitude to receive the gift, and to look out the window of my life with the same clarity, curiosity, compassion, and love. And humor, too, right? A little joy? Surprise, yes. Surprise.

What I also want to say is that there are four em-dashes in today’s poem. They might seem like little things compared to everything else the poem reaches toward, but I do not think they are little things. They each signal a pause before a moment of punctuation, which is to say that they signal a pause before a pause is signaled. I love these moments. I think of these two moments of the four:

When the time comes—. Believe that. Until then—,

In these em-dashes is something like a life. In each one is that pause before the scheduled pause, that moment of uncertainty, that recognition that life is uncertainty, even with the certainty that marks its ending. And in these em-dashes is something like a reaching, something like breath. Do it now. Breathe out. Notice how long it takes before you pause. That pause after the breath? A comma. A period. That breath, though? An em-dash. And in that breath is everything. The memory. The gathering of the self. I feel it. I feel the speaker saying until then and then breathing out, and I feel in that breathing out a gathering of hope and reassurance. A whole lifetime.

And so I return again to these final lines:

All that bourbon to say grace over, All your lapses. & you will say grace When the time comes—. Believe that. Until then—, all you can say is: Forgive me, Mama. I'll be home soon. No need to worry. 

And I hear in them grace, and the recognition of a self as a flawed thing, flawed and beautiful and trying. And I hear in them the breath breathed out, and I hear in them memory and compassion and love. Life; I hear in them life.

I first read this poem on the subway on the way to teach awhile ago. I had been reading Hopler’s book, and I turned to this poem just before my stop, and I read it as I was walking down the aboveground stairs, past the Burger Hut diner, the woman selling empanadas under the tracks. I remember smiling at the first line, and feeling so seen, later in the poem, in my own 16-year-old fuck-up way. And then I remember reading more, and I remember feeling the weight of that word grace repeated, which is also a weight lifting, and I remember turning the corner onto Boynton Avenue and crying a little bit, the echo of that need in me making itself known. I was doing that little smile-cry, that beautiful fucking thing when you can’t help but know that whatever is making you cry must be coming from that near-perfect intersection of all that can be good in life. Erasure? No. This poem still lives. It lives and exclaims and laughs at itself and reflects and needs and asks and loves. I cried a little bit for that — the laughter and the love.

And so I hold this poem and this open book. And so I think again of this sentence from Marilynne Robinson:

It’s a hard thing to be patient with me, the way I creep along these days, but I’m trying not to to get my heart in a state.

I think our hearts will always be in a state, and we will always need the patience of others. And I think I find myself needing the same thing, creeping along as I am. What does it mean to live? I don’t know. But lately I have been thinking that it does require the patience of others, and their forgiveness. It must require grace, both given and received. Uncertainty, surely. A whole mess of it. And I think, no really, I think I long for this — that, on the edge of life, looking at the beauty of it or at the end of it or anywhere in between, I hope I am looking as this poem does today: with a wry smile, with a heart that does not forget, though it might want to, and with a handful of belief in feeling, and in feeling’s power. Until then, heart in a state, creeping along — be patient with me, and with each other.

A Note:

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