Orphans At Height (July Fourth)
A poem about courage, inspired by America's birthday
Fireworks are bragging poinsettias in the sky.
We’ve got a cigarette, maybe we light it soon.
We sit loosely on this concrete exclamation,
The city a doodle board of light far down below.
All those grand resolves, dreams as haplessly
Bold as blind kittens, that need us back.
But not yet. One cigarette. We are orphans
Of the past up here and the future too.
I’m on the Silver Lake rooftops with you.
Only the snark of leather as you swing
Your boots, and a moment now and then
When I go shoot off my mouth, afraid that
In silence it will show. My hands are saying it
Now, the way they’re holding out flame
Unprepared for the claim the wind makes
On everything this close to the sky.
I should have thought it through.
But I’m on the Silver Lake rooftops with you.
I light you up, and now we’re streaming beige,
Passing between each other’s fingers
The awoken countdown of the cigarette,
Our time together shrinking with every exhale.
But here below the crust of the moon, I know:
That is always true. Our time beats out
In breaths wherever we are, and it could be
A thousand left or only these few before they're
Gone, these Silver Lake rooftops with you.
With the fireworks unblossoming to gray, I should
Say it. I’ve been so happy to be your friend.
Wasting bubble tea those café nights, talking
Without urgency, faces rouged by the lot taillights.
Hearing you speak of lovers, I have smiled with
Unburdened joy. But I can’t do that anymore.
The one who’s been your shoulder for so long
Wants now to be the arms that fold you in.
Here on the Silver Lake rooftops with you.
To love you would be a new youth, a life
Of immaculate truth, but how to begin?
Do I grandstand and gesticulate? Do I –?
You tap off ash with aristocratic precision.
Too soon, the cigarette is done. We are
Still for one moment more, and now it's
This same sickly afterglow: chance ignored.
Safety, so easy and unbearable.
Whoever has just one cigarette left?
Happy Fourth, you say. And I smile, yeah, you too.
I’m here on the Silver Lake rooftops with you.
- ZMB
Notes from Zoe Marie Bel
When I was younger and living in overall calmer times, I had mixed feelings about Jane Austen.
I enjoyed Austen's novels on the whole, even if I read them more to admire their architecture than to live inside them. (I mean, a recurring plot point in Austen is a young woman walking in the rain and then ending up bed-ridden with a vicious cold for days. This might be high-octane somewhere, but personally? I need it grittier than, ya know, rain.)
The main issue I had with Austen is what her work omits. Every form of art is photographic in one sense: there are things the artist has chosen to keep out of frame. With Jane Austen, who was writing from 1787 through 1817, an incredibly turbulent time in British, Continental European and American history, what is excluded from frame is: pretty much all of that turbulence. The only indication in Austen that there were wars afoot at the time are the hot soldiers who pass through the neighborhood. The presence of these soldiers fizzes up the village gossips, sets bookish big sisters moralizing about constancy to their horny siblings, and leads, inevitably, to a young woman walking in the rain. All the same, the broader context to the soldiers is not mentioned.
If you aren't too familiar with transatlantic or European events in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Austen's work would in no way enlighten you. There were serious, potentially cataclysmic things going down in the world: Britain's international relationships were experiencing violent recalibration, and further afield long-established political systems (like feudalism) were being radically overthrown by the downtrodden. In fact, you might nominate this particular period of Western history as one of the most sociopolitically interesting of all time. Jane Austen appears not to give a hoot. She writes about pianoforte, a fortune of five thousand pounds a year, and wet bonnets.
This was my younger self's position, at least. I now have mixed feelings about my mixed feelings. For a start, judging Austen by what she didn't write would only be fair if she'd been free to write about anything under the sun. And, of course, she absolutely wasn't. A woman writing about soldiers in any way beyond how pretty they looked in their dress jackets would have set publishers howling with derision. What can creatures who get dayslong head-colds from walking in the rain know about war? (Evidence that Austen could only write about certain things comes in 1814, when the most political of her novels, 'Mansfield Park', was published. The novel took on, albeit indirectly, the hot-button topics of slavery and abolition. It was totally ignored by reviewers. Not one review! A stay-in-lane silence, if ever there was one.)
Another reason I've become more sympathetic to Austen's highly selective storyworlds is something I've noted as a female writer myself. When you write female-centered stories like Austen's, you may notice your work is considered inherently less "serious" than male-centered writing. Write about a screaming baby waking you up at 3am, and it's "contemporary fiction". Write about a screaming ballistic missile doing the same, and it's a Great American Novel. Even though I myself am more inclined to write the missile thing, I find the double-standard very annoying. Who decides what is "serious" in life and in literature, anyhow? Isn't it entirely subjective? After all, the stuff of courtship and marriage in the eighteenth century was deadly serious to those women who had few other avenues to financial stability, adventure and enlargement of their worlds beyond their childhood homes. Was it more or less serious than the French Revolution? Yes.
Which brings me to America. As you may have noticed, America is going through some things. Some folks are estastic at the present political climate, and the changes it promises to bring. Other folks are not. As I considered what tone to bring to my July Fourth poem this year, I came to recognize another value in work written during turbulent times that focusses instead on a few souls who are busy living despite it all. The value of such work is that it is entirely correct about people. Those screaming missiles I mentioned? People fall in love below the arcs of them. They gossip, crave, aspire, laugh, and fumble toward fluency in a new responsibility, determination, or love. They even write stories about hot soldiers.
And, in fact, that truth of humanity - the continuation of our inner lives amid sociopolitical uncertainty and fear - is as important and, yes, as serious as anything that might be captured in a full-frontal war novel. It reminds us that humanity prevails. Humanity keeps on and is not deformed. This is true no matter how much the political landscape (and with it, inevitably, our sense of the future) lurches one way then another. Someplace out there, always, someone is falling in love and agonizing over how to express it. If anything, the difference the uncertainty of the times makes is: vacillation looks foolish. If you're not sure what tomorrow looks like, do the good thing today. Do the loving thing now.
'E Pluribus Unum' is among the principles I most admire about America. 'One out of many.' United even though rambunctiously diverse. On this, America's 249th birthday, and in the midst of much upheaval, I think it worth highlighting the inevitability of continuation in our inner lives, where we live the most. We can still gossip, crave, aspire, laugh, and fumble toward fluency in a new responsibility, determination, or love. To keep on and not be deformed might just be the most serious and important thing we can do.
Happy Birthday, America, with all of my love.
Want to reproduce this poem somewhere else?
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