Confession: on my way to my library office this morning, I drove my daughter’s old apartment. I don’t know why or what I was expecting to see. There was an irrational part of my brain hoping to spy her car still parked in the driveway, I suppose. Maybe I was ghost hunting.
Sharon Olds writes about what lurks beneath the surface of everyday life . . .
The Underlife
by: Sharon Olds
Waiting for the subway, looking down
into the pit where the train rides,
I see a section of grey rail de-
tach itself, and move along the packed
silt. It is the first rat I have seen
in years, at first I draw back, but then
I think of my son’s mice and lean forward.
The rat is muscular, ash-grey,
silvery, filth-fluffy. You can see
light through the ears. It moves along the rail, it looks
cautious, domestic, innocent. Back
home, sitting on the bed, I see
a tawny lozenge in the sheet’s pattern
begin to move, and of course it’s a cockroach,
it has lived in all the other great cities
before their razing and after it.
Christ you guys, I address these creatures,
I know about the plates of the earth shifting
over the liquid core, I watched the
bourbon and then the cancer pull my
father under, I know all this. And the
roach and rat turn to me
with the swiveling turn of natural animals, and they
say to me We are not educators,
we come to you from him.
Olds is speaking about all that happens beneath life’s surface. Everything might look clean and bright, but, on closer inspection, you find ants or mouse turds on the kitchen counter. Olds is confronted by a rat and a cockroach in the poem, and both these creatures are messengers from “him”—which I assume is Olds’ recently deceased father.
Nobody likes to think about the “underlife.” Of course, everything or one has an underlife. Sometimes this hidden realm is lovely. Most of the time, however, it isn’t. Instead of angels and rainbows and unicorns, it’s populated by rats and cockroaches and vultures and snakes.
Like Olds, I’m sort of obsessed with the underlife of things. The darkness versus the light. Hunger versus satisfaction. Sorrow versus joy. I think there’s a reason why Dante started with The Inferno—evil is more interesting than goodness.
As I said, I returned to work this morning after having a three-day weekend. There was no underlife to my state of mind. I was sad, distracted, and tired. I got lots of tasks finished, but, every once in a while, my daughter would enter my thoughts, and I had to just stop and breathe. Let the emotion work its way out.
Think about the underlife the next time you visit a cemetery. Every name on a headstone is attached to a once living, breathing person. However, a name rarely provides important details like a lover’s face or child’s favorite toy or mother’s lullaby voice. Those things remain concealed, like a colony of wasps beneath a rotting stump.
At this current moment, my underlife is consumed with nostalgia for a life that has changed drastically over the past ten or so years. As I’ve aged, life hasn’t gotten easier. It’s gotten smaller, harder. When I say smaller, I mean that loss is built-in to the process of time. Mountains get worn down over time. Canyons get carved out. People get sick, move away, die. TV shows get canceled. Books get banned. Democracies fall to wannabe dictators. Kindness becomes a sign of weakness.
All of that has happened in the past decade. Now, I could walk around all day being mad or depressed or anxious over the current state of the world. But I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to double down on everything I hold dear. I’m going to try to be kinder, more supportive. I will laugh more. Read more good books. Write more poetry. Learn more truths. Shout those truths as loud as I can
In the end, I don’t want people to remember me as a bitter, angry old liberal. I want people to say my name with a smile on their faces and in their hearts.
Saint Marty wrote a poem for today about gravestones, based on the following prompt from The
Daily Poet:
Write a comic poem (it may or may not turn serious) about choosing your own or someone else’s grave marker. Situate yourself at a monument store, observing the many sizes, shapes, and designs. Will you choose a headstone festooned with stars and lilies or a plain block of granite? What will be your epitaph? Where would you like to be buried? Consider sharing details about who will visit your grave and what they might feel or say.
Husband…Father…Friend…Poet
by: Martin Achatz
will be my epitaph. Mel Blanc chose
That’s All Folks. Robin Williams
was scattered in San Francisco Bay,
his marker Alcatraz’s rocks studded
with seals and fog and waves.
But really, you can’t sum up a life
with just a few words etched in
polished black granite. Words are
for moments, breaths, morning
glories blazing into beauty then washing
away like sand castles at high tide.
I hope my kids come visit me every
once in a while. I’ll stand beside
them, place an invisible hand on
their shoulders. Maybe they’ll feel
my fingers they way they felt
the kisses I placed on their foreheads
each night as they slept, my lips
riding there until the rapture of dawn.
❤️jt
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