Brief Explanation

 


I remember years ago when I would write letters to my friend Adam’s kids. Before I had my own. If you’ve never done this before, I highly recommend it (& can even recommend two children who light up like firecrackers if they get mail). It does a curious work to your voice & your habit-worn modes of perception. The notes I would write were fundamentally absurd in their scope– trying to convey the broad landscape of a disparate life to a five-year-old who I’d never met, for instance, without compromising the vocabularies required to convey the thing. They were fevered & hurried & kaleidoscopic, or at least I thought they were. 


I’ve started writing that way to Ada & Whitman too, in an ongoing letter to them I’ll write the rest of my life, trying to fill in details I think they would appreciate some day. It’s a sort of application to futurity, an investment in the fervent hope that our goodness will carry & endure, that the world won’t permit us to grow embittered, cleave us from each other. & as a parent, sometimes, astonishingly, you start missing the company of your kids minutes after you put them to bed, or while they’re at school, or when you simply think of them, & I can reach across a paragraph to embrace them & tell them I love them with the simple confidence that some day, decades from now I hope, when I am gone, they can stumble into those words & find comfort. 


I thought about that while flashing between the news outlets. The New York Times reports on the stock market & the outfits worn at Cannes, & then on the same day, I read elsewhere that 70 more children were killed overnight in Gaza, gunned down by drones after the bombs fell. I read about every spin of politicization you could ever hope to muster, & never about the basic sympathies of our humanity. It isn’t, apparently, worth more consideration or emotional investment than a score from Rolland Garos. 


& so I thought maybe I would try to at least hold myself accountable to my humanity. I don’t know anything at all really, but I know, as I think we all do, that these children & these families don’t deserve erasure. I know also that singing the names of the departed does a small magic for me. I am in conversation with my dad, Granny Frick, with Kabob, with Josh. If they flit across my thoughts I reach out my hand & I look them in the eye & in that way, along the old Wordsworthian tropes, they live a little longer, sparked with sudden animus. 


I don’t know. 


I’m writing poems & letters to Palestinian dead children sometimes now. To senators & congresspeople too, but maybe this other avenue is more important for me right now. It’s not the only thing you’ll see around here, but if you wonder, that’s the why of it.  

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