The Patience of Ordinary Things
by Pat Schneider
It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
What a gorgeous little poem, right? I bet you read this poem and then looked out the nearest window and noticed how the pine boughs swayed in the wind or the cars whooshed by. The poem is a reminder, yes, to appreciate ordinary things, to find gratitude. I find the gorgeousness most in the verbs—hold, stand, receive, know, be, wait, dry, drink. There’s a remarkable passivity, an insistence on patience, that stands out from the daily messaging under capitalism to pursue our dreams, pull up our bootstraps, go after it, have ambition, etc. etc. The poem doesn’t go so far as instruct you, reader, to breathe and just be for a moment, but it does cause you to do so. It’s a poem that helps you just be.
I was thinking this Notions & Notes would give attention to the unremarkable, the simplicity of a moment. But as I messed around and put things next to each other, I found unexpected resonances that I wanted to make space for. So in some ways, this episode is about existing in a liminal space of unremarkable moments between more notable events. But it is also a triptych. There is a section about windows, a section about hotel rooms, and a section about the aubade.
Reprieve
By Jenny George
Before the insects start to grind their million bodies,
before impulse scatters the deer into the trees,
before desire:
there’s a rest.
The dawn and the day observe each other.
The herd begins to move over the field, one shared dream
of grass and wind.
The small stones of their hooves in the stony field.
I’ve exhausted my cruelty.
I’ve arrived at myself again.
The sun builds a slow house inside my house,
touching the stilled curtains, the bottoms of cups
left out on the table.
Devin Kelly brought this poem to my attention and has a beautiful essay on his Substack that I will not try to outdo. I just want to talk about that last stanza because it is one of those instances when a poem illuminates life in such a way that I say, “yes, that’s exactly what it feels like.” It captures that feeling of watching the sun move across the floor of my home, how the light touches the things of my life—the collected seashells on my windowsills, the house plants, the stack of books—how it brings me into my own life. It is a reminder that who we are is not the remarkable moments when we make ethical decisions, when we connect with our community, or do good work—it’s the unremarkable ones, the ordinary moments we’re unlikely to remember, that tell us who we really are.
And the window serves as the entry point for the light.
I can’t think of another song that does what this one does. It captures an unremarkable moment among strangers and freezes it in time. The songwriter is a witness to their unguarded moments, uninvolved, mirroring the woman standing outside looking in. Even without a traditional narrative arch, chorus, or any of the other normal song things, this song still has emotional resonance.
I think about the woman shaking out her umbrella often. I wonder if she recognizes herself when the song comes on the radio.
(Side note #1: I enjoy the Scottish artist Caroline Walker’s paintings, all of which derive from random, ordinary moments in the realm of women’s work. They capture the random instantaneity of Vega’s song as if a single moment were just sliced out of time and saved for no particular reason other than the beingness in it. Check her out.)
(Side note #2: I’ll admit, I think sun slanting through a window across a floor is one of the most beautiful things, right up there with thunderstorms. Though I generally feel uncomfortable self-promoting, I have two poems where the image of sun/window/room plays a part—they were published in Hunger Mountain (print) and Palette Poetry and it’s been long enough that their little blip in the world is basically forgotten.)
Kansas, 4 A.M.
By Kim Addonizio
The train brakes to take the bend behind the grain mill.
All night, at the motel, you listen to the ice machine’s cold labor.
Does it ever stop?
Thunk. No, says the vending machine as the next train goes by.
On the highway, the big rigs whine,
some carrying things that would kill you if one jackknifed off the overpass.
The chicken truck passes with its load of small-brained misery.
You can’t hear the chickens, but you sort of think you can,
the way you can almost hear the sounds of the bar car on the train—
the bleary passengers trapped in their windows,
peering through their doppelgängers at the black
fields of wheat as they whiz past.
Childhood, did it ever exist?
What about the bar your father drank in, giving you
endless quarters for pinball . . . There it goes,
carried aloft by a maniacal wind.
Before science, a lot of wind gods
blew things around. The dead went to live on the moon.
A man might be half scorpion, a woman half fish.
An omniscient, omnipotent stranger who looked
like Santa Claus and had a throne in outer space
knew everything about you, yet still somehow loved you unreasonably.
Another chunk of ice clunks into the bin.
Under your window, an insect in the bushes scrapes out its longing.
The sounds of the world at this late hour sadden you,
but then enters the rain, hastening down, the rain that wants
to touch everything
and almost does.
I love this poem. And I hate hotels. There’s something about the corporate blandness of those spaces—inoffensive, forgettable, interchangeable, anonymous—that I find depressing. But, it’s these qualities that make hotels interesting places to write poems. They’re a blank canvas, and you’re transient there. In a hotel, you are taken out of your life. You pass through the goings-on of other lives—a truck on the highway, people on the train, crickets—and are witness to their unremarkable moments, their continuing onward. It’s a good place to ‘scrape out your longing.’
Ode to the Hotel Near the Children’s Hospital
By Kevin Young
Praise the restless beds
Praise the beds that do not adjust
that won't lift the head to feed
or lower for shots
or blood
or raise to watch the tinny TV
Praise the hotel TV that won't quit
its murmur & holler
Praise the room service
that doesn't exist
just the slow delivery to the front desk
of cooling pizzas
& brown bags leaky
greasy & clear
Praise the vending machines
Praise the change
Praise the hot water
& the heat
or the loud cool
that helps the helpless sleep.
Praise the front desk
who knows to wake
Rm 120 when the hospital rings
Praise the silent phone
Praise the dark drawn
by thick daytime curtains
after long nights of waiting,
awake.
Praise the waiting & then praise the nothing
that's better than bad news
Praise the wakeup call
at 6 am
Praise the sleeping in
Praise the card hung on the door
like a whisper
lips pressed silent
Praise the stranger's hands
that change the sweat of sheets
Praise the checking out
Praise the going home
to beds unmade
for days
Beds that won't resurrect
or rise
that lie there like a child should
sleeping, tubeless
Praise this mess
that can be left
Devin Kelly has also written beautifully about this one. It’s impossible to read this poem and not be moved deeply, to feel compassion for the anonymous people sharing that hotel and sharing that terrifying time in their lives. The hotel is a space where everyone’s going through the same terrible shit that is different for everyone, but it’s tacitly understood. You can know everything and nothing about these strangers you share a space with. It’s a sad, liminal place, and leaving the mess of it, hopeful.
Charles Simic has a book, Hotel Insomnia, in which all the poems share the in-betweenness of hotels and sleeplessness and nighttime.
Hotel Insomnia
By Charles Simic
I liked my little hole,
Its window facing a brick wall.
Next door there was a piano.
A few evenings a month
a crippled old man came to play
"My Blue Heaven."
Mostly, though, it was quiet.
Each room with its spider in heavy overcoat
Catching his fly with a web
Of cigarette smoke and revery.
So dark,
I could not see my face in the shaving mirror.
At 5 A.M. the sound of bare feet upstairs.
The "Gypsy" fortuneteller,
Whose storefront is on the corner,
Going to pee after a night of love.
Once, too, the sound of a child sobbing.
So near it was, I thought
For a moment, I was sobbing myself.
I’m interested in such aloneness while existing in close proximity to strangers, how it brings us closer or further from ourselves. Here’s one more from that book:
“All they got inside is vacancy” is such a great lyric, how it plays on the signs outside of hotels and the existential, transitory state of being inside.
An aubade is a poem that greets the dawn. Often the praise of morning time is mixed with a bit of lament for the end of night and for lovers must separate themselves from their shared bed.
Here’s a little fragment of the aubade scene from Romeo + Juliet to set the vibe:
(Side note: You can only truly love this movie if you’ve analyzed each detail with a room full of 9th graders.)
Back to the aubade and how it ended up with windows and hotels. For one thing, it’s a celebration of a very specific moment in our day. Waking up is such an ordinary moment we don’t usually stop to appreciate, and unless you have Simic’s insomnia, you do this every day. For another thing, it’s a time and place of transition, from our dreaming selves to our waking selves, from being entwined with a lover to being an individual going about your day. Also, as with hotels, the bed is often central to the space and experience.
Aubade as Fuel
By Traci Brimhall
Your lip an abstraction of iris always arousing
the question of the bed. Which goodbye lasts?
Only yesterday my hands rich with dirt. I told you
Milkweed is my new salvation addiction. You know
I always need to save something, to control it.
I can make a pollen island, make your collarbone
a spiritual landscape, the air around us orange
and alive. The shape you left in the sheets
a Rorschach I read as a rattlesnake’s skeleton
in the silverware drawer, no, a fire in a cabin,
no, a cabin on fire, the absence it will make.
But look at me now, my heat signature a whole
bouquet of howling, straddling scarves of smoke.
It’s O.K. that it’s over. Leaving is a lesson of
pleasure. My ribs, sets of parentheses. My heart,
an aside, an apple ready for the twist. My legs
around your hips, a pillory, our shame public
to the night. Tulip shadows on the nightstand,
an apology marooned and lightless, each bite
mark on your shoulder synonymous with grief.
You ask me to brush the match against the red
phosphorus of Goodbye in a way that makes
you believe it. I ask to be the one on top, the one
struck bright when God pours out the lightning.
If you ask my partner what he loves about me, he has only two answers: “falling asleep with you” and “waking up next to you.” Though it would be nice to occasionally be told he loves my eyes or sense of humor or whatever, there’s something really amazing about how he appreciates these foggy, ordinary, daily moments together.
Twenty-One Love Poems (Poem II)
by Adrienne Rich
I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.
Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,
you’ve been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:
our friend the poet comes into my room
where I’ve been writing for days,
drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,
and wake. You’ve kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone . . .
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.
The last four lines are so beautiful, but they are also what makes the poem radical, what brings the aubade from the personal to the political. Twenty-One Love Poems is a celebration of queer love. It’s worth considering this poem alongside Rich’s essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality”. Here’s a good quote from it:
“The retreat into sameness—assimilation for those who can manage it—is the most passive and debilitating of responses to political repression, economic insecurity, and a renewed open season on difference.”
I’ve been letting the aubades move gradually from the interiority and intimacy of the bedroom outwards into the world. The aubade is most fundamentally about waking up to a new day.
Nate Marshall’s poem is still about love—love for a community—but it hinges on the importance of waking up. Each. Day. The world is full of injustice, particularly if you are Black in America, and knowing that terror does not preclude knowing the breath in your body, or how your favorite food, a joke with a friend, or walking in your neighborhood is a reason for hope and joy.
aubade for the whole hood
By Nate Marshall
today i offer my self
all the small kindnesses.
i’m out here
with breath in my body
though it may be stank
& body in my control
though it may be too soft
or too large or not enough.
today i offer the whole crib
a jam we ain’t heard in a minute
& permission to turn the news down
& move a hip like a suggestion
to a lover.
on this day i declare the pockmarked
street i grew up on a miracle.
i declare the bills, even the overdue
ones, a blessing. who knew
that we would still be here
to see these injustices. how can we measure
the disrespect of lack against that precious surprise?
real talk,
today i tell myself truths
other than the one that makes me low,
i give myself the gift of a joke with the homies.
real talk,
today i stay woke
to all the terror
but also to my favorite food
or my favorite place
or my best hope for our people
& i work to make all
my best lives possible.
That morning sun is slanting through my window as I finish this. I hope you enjoyed the resonances to be found between windows, hotels, and aubades.
I’m always grateful that peopel read Notions & Notes. I have a lot fun doing this. It takes a lot of time. It’s also free. So please share with other readers if you’ve enjoyed something here. Thank you.