radiantfracture | Poetry post: "Miss You. Would Like to Take a Walk With You" by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

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Our Zoom writing facilitator has been finding incredible poems lately. Here I am trying to tease out what makes tonight's poem so brilliant.

Content note: grief, death

Miss You. Would Like to Take a Walk with You.
~ Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Do not care if you just arrive in your skeleton.
Would love to take a walk with you. Miss you.
Would love to make you shrimp saganaki.
Like you used to make me when you were alive.
Love to feed you. Sit over steaming
bowls of pilaf. Little roasted tomatoes
covered in pepper and nutmeg. Miss you.
Would love to walk to the post office with you.
Bring the ghost dog. We’ll walk past the waterfall
and you can tell me about the after.
Wish you. Wish you would come back for a while.
Don’t even need to bring your skin sack. I’ll know
you. I know you will know me even though. I’m
bigger now. Grayer. I’ll show you my garden.
I’d like to hop in the leaf pile you raked but if you
want to jump in? I’ll rake it for you. Miss you
standing looking out at the river with your rake
in your hand. Miss you in your puffy blue jacket.
They’re hip now. I can bring you a new one
if you’ll only come by. Know I told you
it was okay to go. Know I told you
it was okay to leave me. Why’d you believe me?
You always believed me. Wish you would
come back so we could talk about truth.
Miss you. Wish you would walk through my
door. Stare out from the mirror. Come through
the pipes.

* * * * * *

Again, I would read it out loud to hear your own voice say these things. And thoroughly break your own heart. Why else read poetry?

So the big gesture Calvocoressi is going to make us notice is the way she chops off sentence parts, especially the subjects (I) and auxiliary verbs that indicate tense or mood (would). She beheads her sentences, peels her verbs.

This is direct speech, but truncated, like a text message or a note -- an utterance simultaneously direct and at a slight remove from the person being addressed.

Isn't that first line incredible?

Do not care if you just arrive in your skeleton.

I imagine someone so decentred by loss that they can't speak from "I" but only from the emotion itself. To say "I" is to say "I-without-you" and this is impossible -- the whole address is to the you.

In fact the form of this first statement blurs from the declarative into the imperative -- "Do not care" could be an instruction, "don't (you) worry if you arrive in your skeleton --

In your skeleton! --

I do not think that's what the speaker means, but I like the way the verb collapses the I/you -- whose verb is this? -- and that slight priming may come in handy later.

In a similar way,

Love to feed you

relies on the previous fragments

Would love to take a walk with you.... / Would love to make you shrimp saganaki.

--to make us, the readers, assume the "would" in "love to feed you," (We assume the speaker means "I would love to feed you.")

But!

Dropping the auxiliary verb also allows this love to remain in the present tense: I still do love to feed you, even though truly I can't. Yet I do.

The tender alliteration of "little roasted tomatoes." The whole sound of "little roasted tomatoes / covered in pepper and nutmeg." I feel like I'm chewing as I say it.

"Bring the ghost dog," is sweet, but "you can tell me about the after" is perfect -- not afterlife, not afterworld -- no promise of continuance. You may have gone into oblivion. Come back and tell me all about it.

Wish you.

Oh god.

This could be stuttering, a failure to complete a thought because of pain -- "Wish you. Wish you would come back" -- but "wish you" is also a whole thought in the way "miss you" is.

(Have you wished someone? Me, I have wished several yous in my time.)

Don’t even need to bring your skin sack. I’ll know / you.

What I really care about here is the infinite tenderness -- the skin sack that parallels the skeleton, the contempt for any worries about the body and decay -- the material is immaterial. I'll know you.

Oh god.

But there is something else I notice:

Don’t even need to bring your skin sack. I’ll know / you.

Hey, the "I" comes back into grammar once the moment of facing you again is imagined. If you come back, I can come back. "You can tell me" -- and suddenly there is a me again.

I'm / bigger now. Greyer.

We many of us thicken as we get older, but "bigger" is so purely descriptive, so neutral. A tree gets bigger, a city. Things just grow. It sounds like the speaker may have become monumental, more than human. A stone.

Know I told you / it was okay to go. Know I told you / it was okay to leave me. Why’d you believe me?

Look at that -- the I-less speaker ("know", not "I know") can yet speak about the I of the past ("I told you," not "told you") -- maybe because in that past the you was still -- just -- alive.

(Or, just to allow the counter-argument, maybe because "[I] know told you" would truncate the sentence past useful ambiguity into incoherence. English only allows certain kinds of interference.)

The wish to rewrite the message: I said it was okay to go (that is the thing you say), but now I want to say something else. I want in our long entanglement the space to change my mind. I want to send a text saying "Don't want you to go. Not okay."

The little tender rhyme there (leave/believe) like a fragment of song sung at a graveside or while crying and washing the dishes.

The ending. What can I say about the ending? Oh, maybe this:

Miss you. Wish you would walk through my
door. Stare out from the mirror. Come through
the pipes.

So yes, the refrain of "miss you," with the assumed "I," and then here's that "would" again, so that we carry both of those over, assume that what's being said is "[I] [wish you would] stare out from the mirror."

But -- that imperative, that order from way back -- "do not care" -- isn't that imperative now fully activated, though it wasn't before? Isn't this ending also an invocation, a summoning, a cry?

Stare out from the mirror.

Come through the pipes.

{rf}

PS. "Come through the door" is a human action; "stare out from the mirror" a ghostly thing; "come through the pipes" -- monstrous, or elemental? I'm not sure.

PPS I don't know about the leaves and the blue jacket. What do you think?

PPPS I didn't even get to enjambment.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

tei

oh my god this was amazing.

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

radiantfracture

Thank you! It's such a stunning poem.

I see I didn't say the most obvious thing, which is that there are words missing and there is a person missing and surely this is not a coincidence.

cmcmck

New to me so thanks for this one!

You're welcome!

shewhomust

Thanks for sharing this one.

Thanks also for your comments, which I found helpful. even / especially the ones I disagreed with (read aloud by all means, because that's always valuable with poetry; but when I hear my voice saying these things I start to edit, because these are not the things my voice wants to say to the person I miss and want to walk with...)

I made a mental shift at 'i'm / bigger now', because up to then there are various people the poem could be addressing, but that says 'you knew me as a child' - a chold who jumped in your carefully raked leaf piles, but also you knew me as someone asult enough to say 'it's OK to leave me', so it's a parent or grandparent, someone who will always see that child in you...

Sorry, didn't mean to go on. The poem made me do it.

Edited Date: 2022-12-10 12:51 pm (UTC)

when I hear my voice saying these things I start to edit

That is very interesting. I think I see what you mean, even though that wasn't my own first response.

I got to "skeleton" and was in a sort of fantasy space, rather than in conversation with my own specific griefs, but I like your idea of one's own unsent or unsendable messages in dialogue with the poem's.

I made a mental shift at 'i'm / bigger now',

That makes a lot of sense -- because I am the sort of grown person who jumps in leaf piles, I hadn't sent the speaker back in time that far, but your reading adds up.

Sorry, didn't mean to go on

Laughing. Please do go on, always! I love conversations about poetry.

ursula

To me the puffy blue jacket gives us a snapshot of the speaker in adolescence, embarrassed by their loved one's style choices--it's a very efficient way of combining all these different times.

That makes sense!

You make me think about the shifts in labour in the poem -- from jumping in the leaves to raking the leaves, from being cooked for to cooking for someone -- which all feels like it supports your reading.