The series we call Open Question(s) offers opportunties to either ponder or be prompted, or both. Use these ideas for bathtub meditations or journal writings, or a little of each. Special gratitude goes to those who would like to leave thoughts and reactions in the comment section—as that kind of interactivity greatly helps develop this “place” as a connected web of like-minded people, and it helps others find their way here, too.
I’ve been wanting to widen the scope of grief here to include, in an overt way, the kinds of grief that come not just from the end of life but the many deaths we suffer due to loss of a perceived future, loss of a known self, loss of belief, and so much more.
I hadn’t necessary imagined real estate playing into that, but Zillow, the Brendan Joyce poem I’m sharing here today isn’t really about the real estate app. To my ears, it’s about runaway capitalism and the fake world being built all over and on top of the real one. The poem could be about home, but it’s not about houses.
It’s definitely about the inner longing that grief can connect us to. The desire, the hunger, the will, maybe even the hidden intention.
We don’t always think of longing as a positive thing—but anyone’s who has felt a lack of longing knows that that absence is essentially an identical quadruplet with grief, sorrow, and depression. When you know what you want, you know what you can aim for and grow towards. I’ve heard from so many people in the past three years that they just don’t know what they want, and that kind of hunger can be so much more empty, so much more isolating, so much more gray and foreboding than the hunger that can at least identify and name what would satisfy it.
Anyway: Here’s Brendan’s Joyce’s1 Zillow:
Zillow
Wish these were real cigarettes. Wish that
the long clock never found us. Wish Church
& Clinton never got razed & re-written. Wish
the bath house was still on the corner. Wish
that summer you climbed to the top of the
tree next to your house hadn’t stopped.
Wish the tree hadn’t stopped. Wish
the house they built on the lot hadn’t
taken the tree. Wish I wasn’t on Zillow
looking at how much your mom’s house costs.
Wish it didn’t cost. Wish that summer hadn’t
cost. Wish these were real cigarettes,
wish this was a real letter, wish the long clock
of torn down trees & appreciating real estate
prices never found us.
So what I’m wondering is:
With particular respect for whatever grief you are now holding, what do you find yourself wishing for? Begin and continue (nurture, tend to, have patience with) a list that includes the seemingly incidental, small things you want and the larger, perhaps existential desires you hold. Refer to how Brendan connects “real cigarettes” to this longing for trees and endless summer and a more peaceable, generative landscape. What’s your version of real cigarettes?
What’s your relationship with wishing these days? Are there sentences in your head that begin with, “I just wish I could…” and if so, how do they end? What would it mean to write down those desires, to make them incarnate, and to take time and space to understand all the animus and fuel and feeling and force that are tucked and folded inside them?
Okay but, what if you really got those proverbial fairy tale three wishes? Again, with respect to the grief and sorrow you hold, what specific things would you ask for? If you take time and space to take the question seriously, you might compile a large list and then whittle it down to what it is you truly long for. And then: What do those longed for essentials tell you about who you are and what you need? Do they help you turn a corner? Do they help you turn a different direction? Can they, in some way, help you keep on keeping on, from right where you are—right now?
Images by @Butterfinn and Miguel Dominguez via Unsplash; photo illustrations by me.
Brendan Joyce is a person without much of an internet presence. His poems exist here and there as does Grieveland, the press he co-runs with a friend, which “offers the highest royalty percentage of any small press in the United States.”