After Seamus wrote those opening lines, a curious yet ordinary thing happened: the poem seized up on him and shut itself away.
Those lines had come with a shape and a sound, and he felt that if he could just wedge the poem open, he might manage to scoop the rest out. He sat at his desk for many hours at a time, waiting for the poem to open and reveal itself to him again, but nothing came. The opening lines had seemed to be the end of a long period of silence in his writing. But instead, they had been only an illusion, or some other form of silence.
Still, he could not bring himself to consign it to the compost heap. Something in it still felt alive, and whatever it was would not let him go. So he went to class and he went to work. The snow fell and melted and fell. Ice coated the roads. In the mountain west, ancient trees burned, and in the South, cold killed the grid and people went without food or power or water.
Thinking that it would provoke the new poem out of him, Seamus gathered his Alsatian nun poems. Reading the poems back over, he thought there might be something in them—or, at least, in his original urge to write them. In his first year, his classmates hadn’t liked his poems at all. They had mocked him and called him a colonizer and a Catholic sympathizer and apologist for the horrors of empire. Where were the drone strikes? Where were the anticapitalist critiques? Was it enough to write after old forms if they had nothing to offer the atomized world of today? Where did race enter into it? Where was the indictment of whiteness? But maybe just letting his classmates have all the say was a way of being afraid.
All of that had made Seamus feel trapped, stuck deep in the dark thicket of the poetry program. But there was a world out there. Bert had burned it into his face. And maybe, maybe, all this grad school shit was just pretend. If he couldn’t believe in his poems. If he couldn’t believe enough to get through this doubt. This fear. Then he was not a poet. There had to be something out there outside all of this, and he had to believe it.
What he needed was some sign that he might emerge from graduate school into that larger, outer world.
Submission. That was what they called it when you sent your work out. When you put your neck on the block and awaited the cold clarity of the blade. You had to believe in the eternal. What came next, after they lopped your head off and hoisted it high in celebration. You had to believe that, in that moment, you became something greater, grander, larger. Submission required belief.
He gathered up the Alsatian nun poems and emailed them to a reader he knew at The Paris Review. When he clicked send, he wanted to throw up and retract the email. But he could not figure out how to call it back. It was totally delusional. He had sent poems to The Paris Review throughout undergrad, but he’d never even received so much as a form rejection. Still, he thought, maybe by sending the poems, he could at least stir something loose. Get some juice going. Instead, it just made him miserable. Now, not only was he unable to write, but he was checking his email every ten minutes.
Week after week, he sat in the seminar room, looking out over the treetops down by the river or watching eagles cut down and snap up distracted ravens. Inside, his classmates talked over poems about their grandmothers picking cotton or the silver mines of Utah. Linda workshopped a poem about an abortion. Ingrid and Garza sat on either side of her, gripping her hands as she told the story behind the poem.
“I was alone. That’s what I remember most, lying on the bed, my feet up, and I never felt so fucking lonely. And for a minute, like, I really thought, am I about to get rid of the only person in the world who will love me?”
Seamus looked around the room. Their eyes were all red-rimmed, even Oliver’s. Linda’s writing wasn’t bad. It was fine. Good sometimes, even, in flashes. But it wasn’t poetry, and he couldn’t bring himself to say that Linda was an essayist more than she was a poet. That her poems were, in the words of a fictional Robert Lowell in an Elizabeth Bishop biopic, “observations broken into lines.” There was no shame in that. It took a certain skill to write good sentences, to make good observations. She had that, at least. It was not a minor gift. The faculty of observation. But she lacked a poetic intelligence.
Yet she had learned—somewhere, here, probably—that a poetic intelligence could be elided with certain tactics. There was a word: Tactics. Emotion. Feeling. Her piece had a lot of feeling and it corresponded to something painful and true in her life. But that did not make it poetry. Autobiography was not sufficient.
Seamus sat with his arms folded, looking at the white sky and the black branches shifting against it.
“You have something to say?” Linda snorted. “You wanna tell me my abortion is fake?”
“I’ve never met your abortion,” Seamus said, but then, growing more serious, “I guess I just don’t feel there’s much in it.”
“Wow.”
“No, I’m being serious, for once,” Seamus said. “It’s not a diss, or whatever. I’m not coming for you.”
“Coming is probably a big problem for you,” Ingrid said.
The professor cleared his throat. “Please.”
“Forget it,” Seamus said.
“I want to hear it.”
“Don’t put yourself through it for him,” Ingrid murmured.
“Yeah, white men have no business talking about our bodies,” Noli added.
“Well, I’ll just cover my eyes so I can’t perceive you.” Seamus did cover his eyes then, but no one laughed. He dropped his hands. “I’m just saying that this is very moving. It’s very, very moving. But what is it other than that? Is this a poem? It’s functionally equivalent to, what, like, a slasher movie? A children’s story?”
“Oh wow, fuck you,” Linda said.
“I can’t believe this,” Helen said.
“I’m not trying to be inflammatory,” Seamus said.
“Perhaps . . .” The professor trailed off.
“Great, yep,” Seamus said. He was already getting up and taking his bag with him.
Another day on the bridge with Oliver then, another early class.
“We can’t keep getting tossed out,” Oliver said. “It’s really fucking with me, Seamus.”
“I wasn’t even trying that time. They’re so tingly.”
“It’s not like you gave them a compelling reason to read you in a generous light.”
Seamus sighed. He didn’t have it in him to spar with Oliver, too. He leaned on the rails. The river was totally frozen, dusted with snow. His eyes teared from the wind.
“Whoa, you must be depressed if you’re not taking the bait. What’s the deal?”
“Man, I am so blocked. I am so totally fucking blocked. I had. Like, a few weeks ago, I had this. Poem. Just. Sitting right there. You know? Like, I had it. And I lost it. And. It’s gone on me.”
“The worst.”
“Yeah. The worst.”
“But it’s not like you’ve been trying, though, right?”
“What?”
“You haven’t submitted for like a year, Seamus. I mean. Is this really different from that?”
Seamus did not know how to answer immediately. In one sense, yes, it was different. In another, more broadly speaking, no, it was not. He had not written. He had tried to write, yes, but hadn’t really written anything alive in so long. But he’d touched something. He stuck his hand over the river. He’d been so close.
“It’s different,” he said. “This time it is.”
“Then,” Oliver said, rocking forward over the edge of the bridge, “no choice but to go after it.”
Oliver righted himself and jogged to the end of the bridge. Seamus followed, slowly, feeling the bridge sway beneath them. At the riverbank, Oliver climbed down onto the river and stood with his arms stretched high above his head. He inhaled and yelled as loud as he could.
The river was empty except for them. Cold. The air was close. In the silence, Oliver’s yell doubled upon itself and became a battalion of yelling voices. He motioned for Seamus to join him, and Seamus climbed carefully down over the rocks and the frozen mud. He stood on the ice. It felt dense under him. Heavy. Yet he could also feel Oliver’s weight through the ice. It groaned under them. Overhead, eagles wheeling, skirting the tops of North Hall and beyond. The dorms with their gleaming glass fronts. And back across the river on the other side, the houses and frats. What peace.
Oliver panted from his yelling. His lips were chapped and red. He slid over to Seamus and gripped his shoulders.
“Get after it.”
“It’s a poem, not a deer.”
“Poems and deer, man. Same shit.”
“Now you sound like me.”
“Then you’ve taught me well,” Oliver said. He hugged Seamus. The warmth of it, the strength in his arms, made Seamus want to cry. It was so much the opposite of how it had been with Bert in the woods that night.
No. Do not think of it.
Seamus turned as he did whenever Bert came back to him. He turned from the thought and redacted it from his memory. No. Not that.
“Now let it out. And get back to work.”
“No. I’m not doing that.”
“I won’t let you go until you do,” Oliver said. He went to put Seamus in a headlock, and Seamus yelled loudly directly into his face. Seamus’s throat was raw at the end of it. But he did feel good after it. There were footsteps on the bridge. Two people peeked their heads over.
“What the fuck was that?” one of them said.
“Mind your business,” Seamus called up.
A few months after the thing with Bert in the woods, Seamus had gone to a party with Stafford, the painter, whom he knew only because Stafford stole paper from the poet office in the liberal arts building. Stafford taught a gen ed art appreciation class, and sometimes they talked about art. Sometimes they talked about music. Sometimes they just fucked. But Stafford had asked him to go to a dancer party, superior because poets were not usually involved.
On the way over, Seamus mentioned that The Paris Review had taken a poem of his—one of his poems about the Alsatian nuns during the Thirty Years’ War. At the party, Stafford kept telling people about it, which embarrassed him but also made him feel good. Proud, like he’d achieved something in his art—though there was nothing more mortifying than feeling proud of publishing a poem. It said something about how needy you were. How hungry. But that publication was the first real, true thing he had done with his poetry. It made the silence of the new poem stranger, more curious and brutal.
There, in the haze of booze and weed smoke, talking to dancers, giving them a hard time, he’d glimpsed a familiar figure out of the corner of his eye: Bert. A jolt of recognition in the flaking scar on his face, pus-green at the middle, dark angry red at the edges. From the burn. Bert.
Seamus swayed, his vision going swimmy. Stafford took his arm and brought him outside to catch his breath, and when he asked what was up, Seamus thought he might have just imagined it. That Bert wasn’t there after all and he was just making it all up in his mind.
He had not been able to write since then. The poem had gone silent on him. Somehow, the poem and Bert had gotten all mixed up together. Sometimes, still, when he rode home from the hospice on his bike, he thought he could hear the truck following along behind him, invisible, but there, coasting right up to him. He dreamed of Bert. He woke with the taste of Bert in his mouth. He could still smell him.
That night outside of the dancer party, he had told Stafford it was nothing.
That was the winter of Bert. Lingering. Squinting in at Seamus out of every darkened windowpane and from every corner. Sometimes at the hospice, during dinner service, he could hear Bert’s loud laugh carry back into the kitchen. And each time, he excused himself to go down into the mudroom, where he locked himself in the bathroom and waited until the residents were back in their rooms and visiting hours were over.
Spring semester was thesis semester, and because no other professor would have him, Seamus was once again in seminar with the professor. Along with his classmates, as they shared an adviser. He considered this both bad luck and also bad decision making on the part of the administration. But he could get by. He knew how to get by. At the end of their first meeting, the professor asked to see Seamus outside.
“This is your last semester,” he said.
“Yeah, don’t threaten me with a good time. No, I know.”
“Thesis semester.”
“Yes. I know.”
“You haven’t participated in over a year, Seamus. I can’t . . . You can’t. It’s not. You have to submit.”
“This some kind of kink thing?” Seamus laughed. They were in the hall. His classmates were passing them, eyeing them up.
“No. It’s not.”
I don’t know why you just don’t write,” Stafford said. They were lying on the floor, catching their breath.
“Right, like it’s so simple,” Seamus said. Stafford had just come on his stomach. It cooled in a pearly puddle, seeped into his navel. Stafford lit a cigarette and Seamus motioned to the window over his desk. Stafford stood up to open the window, his knees and ankle bones popping. He had a languorous stride. Seamus wiped the semen from his stomach with the corner of his bedsheet.
“I just don’t think anything is achieved by making things harder for yourself, that’s all.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t have a pack of witches breathing down your neck.” Seamus rolled over and put his face in the pillow. Stafford sat on his desk, puffing smoke out the window. The cool air felt good. Stirred up the sour smell of his dishes and his soiled blankets. He had to find a better way to live. Meaning his apartment, but also, perhaps, poetry. He couldn’t go around with his guts hanging out, feeling sick and miserable, trying to push at something that wouldn’t give.
“Maybe you’re just not a poet,” Stafford said. He flicked ashes through the window. Seamus turned to look at him.
“That’s kind of a fucked-up thing to say, no?”
“I just mean. We get so hung up on these labels, like poet, painter, dancer, grad student—it’s all because we’re godless faggots and our world has no central organizing theme anymore.”
“That almost scans,” Seamus said.
“Almost? Fuck you.” Stafford grinned. “No, I’m serious. It’s very Marxist. Total collapse of values. All that remains is labor and capital.”
Stafford with his compact body and platinum-blond hair. His strong neck and shoulders, turning nonchalantly to flick ashes out the window. There was a trapezoid of light on his shoulder, some bright fragment torn from a greater plane.
“Maybe so. But poetry,” Seamus said. He lay on his back and put his hands behind his head. “Poetry. That’s worth staking your life on. My life, anyway.”
Stafford drew on the cigarette and watched him. The angle of light changed. The trapezoid faded. They were in a different attitude then.
“Well,” Stafford said, joining Seamus on the floor again. “If it’s worth it to you. Just blow up whatever’s in your way.”
Seamus took the cigarette from him and drew on it himself. He could taste Stafford in the filter. Stafford watched him, waiting for him to exhale. He held his breath.
Seamus tried not to think of Bert.
He tried to think of his mother and his father. He tried to think of his grandparents. He tried to think of Mr. Fulton. Eunice and Lena. He tried to think of the women in that first kitchen in Rhode Island. Michigan in the summer. Watching his father do Shakespeare at the summer festivals. He ran through the litany of things he wanted to say in the poem, and what he wanted it to do. He thought of Beth’s bad poem. So many months in the rearview now. It seemed irrelevant, now that he had decided upon this course of action. But he needed to write. That was all there was to it. He needed to write. To be writing.
The problem was that he had all these ideas about what writing meant. And what if he wrote and it turned out that he was nothing.
Would that surprise him terribly, to be nothing?
Was that quite so shocking?
No.
He had learned that lesson.
He thought of Oliver on the river before break. The volume of his yelling. That’s what he needed. Just to let it go. Let it out. He opened his notebook to the opening lines again. He had repeated and scratched through and repeated the lines dozens of times across dozens of pages, going through many notebooks.
He set them down again, just once more, as if to remind himself:
How vast your works, O Gorgon Head—
the night, the century, the quiet, the cry.
Seamus worked on the poem for three days leading up to the deadline to submit for the next seminar. He blasted away at the poem, writing first long lines and then short lines, huge stanzas, then one great column. He tried prose poetry. He tried a sonnet, but it wouldn’t give. He tried wrapping it up in a sestina, thinking that it would force the poem open like scrambling a Rubik’s Cube, but it remained illegible to him. He wrote on the computer and on a pad. He tried ink and graphite. He drew it. He wrote it. He dreamed it. He ate bits of his drafts, thinking this would help, somehow. But his stomach hurt, and he couldn’t shit. He drank coffee cold and stale. He drank whiskey. He smoked in the snow outside that had come at last, after threatening for days. His back grew sore. His legs grew numb. His fingertips were singed from striking his lighter. He had cigarette butts in his pockets. He masturbated furiously until his underwear were stiff with semen. His cock grew raw and chafed. He stared at it for long periods of time, thinking that he might have caught something from Bert. He wrote long emails to his teachers at Brown and to Mr. Fulton, whom he later found out had died two years before. He found this out because he also looked up various people from his life on the internet and searched out their obituaries. He looked at time-lapse videos of plants blooming. He sketched a layout for a small garden in his front yard. He looked up the prices of tropical plants. He reread Othello. He read the first five pages of Proust. He masturbated more. When he came, his body seized up, and for a moment he thought he’d snap in half. He wiped his semen on his mattress. He wiped his semen on his chest hair, where it grew hard and opalescent like the interior of a clam. He called Oliver, but Oliver did not answer. He sent text messages to Oliver, but Oliver did not answer. He sent a picture of himself naked to Oliver, but Oliver did not answer. And then he sent another text after the nude pictures: just kidding man pick up.
He texted Stafford. He texted Hartjes. They talked in the fragments of gay men: hey, hey, sup, u, nothing, hard, tired, good day, morning, hey, sup, nothing, writing, cool, u, nothing, lunch, good, working, writing, sup, you. There were moments when being gay made Seamus feel less than literate, but also, he liked the anticipatory heat of it. What it might lead to. In this case, nothing. They just texted each other a few pictures of their dicks, their bodies, said, so hard, want you so bad. And, once, panting, he and Hartjes jerked off on FaceTime, telling each other scenarios in which they were touching, stroking each other. What made Seamus hardest was when Hartjes said, I can feel you. You’re so warm when you’re clenched up around me. I can feel you—it felt so personal. So pure and good. When Seamus came, he was embarrassed. After the FaceTime, they didn’t text anymore.
But all of this was writing, too. All of this, those three days, was writing. Even the not writing. Even the jerking off to avoid thinking about writing. About the impossibility of the writing. Trying to hammer out a shape for the poem. For the feeling. For the thing he’d come through that night. Bert. The truck in the street following him home. Hartjes outside the parking garage. The curious loneliness of his life. His parents. His father. He tried to write a poem that was all of it, and yet bore no sign of any of it. Because that was a true poem. Something that had no sign of what had made it. That was what mattered to him. The invisibility of the thing that had gone into it. It was not cowardice. It was not fear. It was intention. It was purpose. It was the thing he wanted most. To hide. To see but be unseen.
It was three days, but finally the poem came. He emailed it to his classmates in the middle of the night, and the next morning he deposited a copy in the front office. After he had turned in the poem he walked home and stood on the bridge. A loose snow had fallen in the night, and the world, that morning, had a damp, woolen quality to it.
The sky was heavy and low to the ground, and the air was thick and cold on his cheeks. The green water of the river was sluggish and smooth as it flowed under the bridge. His face was stiff from the cold, and also from not having bathed. He could smell himself, powerfully, the scent of musk and the odor of having stayed in his flesh too long.
When he got home, Oliver was on his stoop waiting for him, his hands tucked deep inside his dark coat. He looked up to see Seamus.
“Yo,” Oliver said.
“Hey,” Seamus said, feeling shy, feeling nervous because of the text messages, because of the naked pictures, because of the desperation, which now felt like the worst kind of confession.
“So, that was unexpected, huh?” Oliver said.
“I’m sorry about those pics, man.”
Oliver blinked, and a look of confusion fell across his face. Seamus exhaled through his nose, and his breath was a white cloud. He could feel the film across his teeth.
“What?” Oliver asked. “Oh, no. I meant the poem. It’s fucking great.”
“Oh, fuck,” Seamus said. “Oh, fuck.” He crouched to the ground and put his hands through his greasy hair. “Oh, fuck.”
Oliver came to him and crouched down beside him. He put a hand on Seamus’s shoulder. “Are you all right?”
“No,” Seamus said. “Fuck.”
It was strange in a way. He had forgotten, in the span of time it took to walk back to his apartment, that submitting the poem to seminar meant that other people would read it. They would know. This had been a part of the plan, but in his writing, he had lost sight of it. He wanted to make himself small. He wanted to make himself tiny and invisible. He shivered. The poem was too much about him. It was too much about Bert and the woods and his parents and his grandparents and too much about how it hurt not to be wanted in the way you wanted to be wanted. Too much about the things he had balled up and discarded. It was base and crass and there was too much of his flesh and bone in it. He hated the poem, but hated more that he had liked the poem. How it had outmaneuvered him. You were supposed to be in control of your poetry. Its workings. But he couldn’t control anything. And he hated that.
“Seamus, man. That poem was fantastic. You don’t have anything to worry about, what’s wrong with you?”
He couldn’t say it, he knew. Not to Oliver. He wavered on his feet in his crouch. He shivered. The world grew indistinct. The cold was in his mouth. He wet his lips.
What could he say? He laughed hoarsely.
“Yeah, it was whatever. Thanks.” He stood up, his knees popping. “I did it at the last minute.”
“Really?” Oliver asked. “It felt worked to me. It was great.” Oliver’s hand was on his wrist. Seamus felt warm.
“You want to come up?” Seamus asked.
“Yeah,” Oliver said. “I do.”
When Seamus emerged from the shower, Oliver was sitting next to the window in the knockoff Eames chair he’d pulled over from the desk. He was spinning a pencil on his fingers. He’d taken off his coat, and he wore a green flannel shirt and gray sweatpants. He had crossed his legs and resembled a professor.
Seamus was warm from the water. His hair was wet. He sat on his mattress. Oliver moved to sit next to him. They kissed with uncertainty at first. His hand found Oliver’s furry stomach and then slid down into the front of his pants where he was half hard. Their kiss grew more certain, like a slowly darkening bit of fabric. Oliver lay down on the mattress and pulled Seamus on top of him. He pulled away Seamus’s towel, and then Seamus pushed down Oliver’s pants, and then they were naked. The room was damp and cold. The light through the window was pale and shallow. It was like something strange and unknowable. They jerked each other off at an erratic pace. Oliver couldn’t stay hard. He kept saying sorry, kept looking away from Seamus’s cock. Seamus was hard, but his cock was sore. When he came on Oliver’s thigh, he felt something hot and stinging race through him. Oliver gripped Seamus. He bucked his hips. His eyes were wild and desperate. He kept saying, under his breath, Please, please, please, and Seamus gripped him tighter and pumped Oliver in his fist. At the last moment, Seamus bent down and took Oliver into his mouth. He tasted fresh and clean like new snow. Then the slick salt of his semen. Oliver let out a lowing, grateful sound.
Bert was in the room with them. Just months ago, in this exact posture—this exact configuration of submission—he had let Bert use his mouth. He had let Bert use him. He had wanted to be used. To be run over the edge of someone else’s want to sharpen it. But Oliver didn’t grip the back of his head and fuck his mouth. Instead, he stroked the shell of Seamus’s ear and whispered Please and begged for mercy. It was the opposite of being with Bert. Of that moment in the dark in the woods in the cold. Seamus looked up and saw Oliver’s face contort in pleasure. Like he’d been touched by some distant, divine force. It was the premonition from the bridge those months ago. Hurt and want and need and pleasure, all at once. He sank deeper on Oliver’s dick until he felt it at the back of his throat and opened and tried to swallow Oliver whole. Not just this part of him, not just this moment. But all of him and all he had ever been and all that he would ever be. As payment. He wanted to totally nullify Oliver. To pay him back for coming here and being genuine in response to a poem. A fucking poem.
But Bert was in the room, and Seamus was on his knees, and Oliver was in his mouth—it was all wrong and all right and all fucked up. Oliver moaned, and he came in Seamus’s mouth, and Seamus swallowed and thought to himself, Amen.
After, they lay next to each other on the mattress. The room was very still. It was late afternoon. Seamus made Oliver some bisque, which he ate quickly. The light turned blue, and they touched each other again, and Oliver this time wrapped his legs around Seamus’s waist and asked him to recite his poem when he entered him.
Seamus was too embarrassed at that. Looking down at Oliver, splayed out on this soiled and sullen mattress, he couldn’t bring himself to recite his own poem. Instead, he laughed nervously and said, Shut up.
Sex with Oliver was not something that Seamus had known he wanted exactly. Sex with Oliver had not seemed like a possibility. In their first year, Oliver had gone around with several girls in the program and in the art history program, where he often took classes. Oliver appeared steadfastly heterosexual. And yet now they’d had their mouths and hands all over each other. He’d been inside of Oliver, the dank, dark corridor of his body. They had smeared and slathered each other in spit and semen and sweat, and other, darker fluids. His back ached from where Oliver had dug his heels hard. Oliver hid his face behind his arm. The snow was falling again.
“I didn’t know you could write a poem like that,” Oliver was saying sleepily. “I had no idea.”
“Stop talking about it,” Seamus said. “It was cheap, anyway.”
“It wasn’t,” Oliver said, and then again more quietly than Seamus thought was possible, “It wasn’t.”
“What’s this about anyway?” Seamus asked. “Did you come over here to seduce me?”
“No—I don’t think so anyway. It wasn’t like that. I just wanted to say how much I’d liked the poem. I guess.”
“You fuck everyone with a poem you like?”
“No,” Oliver said. “It wasn’t that. I don’t know. You looked so sad before, I guess. Outside. I couldn’t help it.”
“God,” Seamus said. “Pity sex.”
“I’m sorry,” Oliver said. “No, it wasn’t pity.”
“It sounds literally like pity.” Seamus sat up. He was angry. He knocked Oliver’s bowl over, and the spoon clattered around in it loudly. The floor creaked.
“I wasn’t pitying you. I just said you seemed so sad before.”
“This is pity. Great, thank you,” Seamus said. He pulled on a long shirt and stepped into dirty underwear.
Oliver was sitting up on the mattress now, too, with the thin sheet pulled across his legs. His body was soft and pale. He almost glowed. Seamus cleared his throat.
“You maybe should shower or like, I don’t know, leave.”
“Seamus,” he said.
“Oliver,” Seamus mocked. A loose, grainy heat was building up inside of him. Pity, he thought, pity, what was worse than pity.
Oliver sighed. He stood up, towering briefly over Seamus. He dressed himself and then, at the end, turned back to glance at Seamus one last time.
“I loved your poem,” he said. “I thought it was brave.”
Seamus shut the door in his face.
Bravery had nothing to do with poetry, Seamus thought. He dropped Oliver’s bowl in the sink, where it split apart with a dull clank. He washed each part with slow, angry caution, thinking, Fuck him, fuck him, fuck him, he doesn’t know anything.
At the seminar, he took his usual seat next to Oliver, who would not look at him. He kept trying to get Oliver’s attention, but every time their eyes met, Oliver just looked away. Linda sat next to him and gave him a vague, appraising smile that he resented slightly. Helen sat next to Linda and didn’t look at him either. Someone had put on a pot of coffee, and the small room filled with the smell of cheap, bitter beans.
They were all in their coats and scarves, sweaters and sweatpants, everyone slightly flush-faced and damp—from snow, from exertion, from sweat—and he could smell their soap and beneath their soap, the heat of their animal bodies. Ingrid came in with the professor. Her hair was luminous in the winter light. They were laughing quietly, and his hand was on her back like he was leading a horse. The professor’s voice was low and raspy. He took his seat in the circle ahead of Seamus, and for a moment there was eye contact between the two of them. Seamus felt like all the slack had been pulled from the space between them and their eye contact was a taut cord connecting them. The professor hummed cheerily.
“This week’s packet was quite the strong one,” he said, looking around at them with sheepish pride. “It’s an honor to read your work.”
This was his Liturgy of the Word, the way he began each week, to settle the nerves. Seamus felt ashamed at how relieved he felt to hear it. He dug his thumb into the side of his thigh and pressed hard, though he could not feel it except in the joint of his thumb, which bent back and threatened to snap.
“And some new faces in the packet, as well,” he said, which made Seamus’s neck hot. Oliver coughed quietly.
“Well, how shall we begin? A reading, maybe—”
“Excuse me,” Helen said. The professor blinked dully, then gave a slow nod. “Some of us were talking before, and . . . we don’t feel like it’s fair?”
“What’s not fair?” the professor asked, and the room began to shift uncomfortably, a murmur rose.
“Um, like, it’s not fair that we have to read poems that are clearly mean-spirited and, like, that degrade our work?”
Seamus watched the play of expressions across people’s faces: some with eyes wide with surprise, some with keen grins, some with the thrill of spectating. Others were looking at him with what looked like more than the usual disgust. He was accustomed to people not liking him, thinking him mean or petty or superior. He was accustomed to having people roll their eyes at him, but he hadn’t even spoken yet. Seamus was more and more certain as the silence went on that people were looking at him. Oliver was drawing a series of concentric circles in his notebook.
“Would you please elaborate, Helen?” the professor said, but she shook her head stiffly.
“I don’t want to give the piece any more of my time, frankly. It’s unfair. I just wanted to speak up.”
“Well, who is it?” Seamus asked sharply. “Say it.”
“Don’t speak to me,” she said. “You don’t get to speak to me.”
“I think we should calm down a little,” Oliver said.
“Don’t call her hysterical,” Linda said.
“I didn’t. I just think we should calm down is all,” Oliver said.
“We are calm,” Linda said.
Oliver looked from side to side, and seeing that he was also being watched sharply, he grew quiet.
“What is this mean-spirited poem?” Seamus said. “And, actually, I guess, a better question is, are we just here to read things that make us feel good? That seems silly.”
“I’m not saying anything else about it,” Helen said. She shook her head.
“Okay, everyone. Well. Let’s take a moment to reflect here, shall we?”
Beth was sitting quietly next to the professor. Her knuckles were clenched so hard you could almost make out the striations in the bones from across the room. Seamus understood immediately.
“I didn’t write this poem about you, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Seamus said.
“Don’t talk to her,” Ingrid said. “You don’t get to talk to her.”
“I’m sorry. What is this? I don’t get to talk?”
“You can. Just not to people you’ve been violent toward,” Garza said serenely.
“My poem isn’t about her. Or her poem. It’s not about any of you,” he said. “I don’t do social work.”
Oliver flinched.
“Social work,” Ingrid said with a careful nod. “All right then.”
“Everyone, we are losing track of why we are here: to witness,” the professor said, but Seamus was shaking. He stood up and set his annotated packet on the chair behind him.
“Yes, social work,” he said. “Yes.”
“And yet, somehow, Seamus, we’re . . . in the same seminar? What does that make you?”
“Bored,” he said sharply. “Fucking bored out of my mind.”
“I suggest you de-escalate your tone,” Linda said.
“Everyone—” the professor said.
“Or what? You’ll have me expelled for violence?”
“Wow, is this what we are doing? Mocking survivors?”
“What?” Seamus said, whirling around. It was Beth speaking then. The edges of his vision had gone dark, and his eyes throbbed.
“Mocking survivors. Is that what we’re doing? You say violence like you don’t believe it exists.”
“Of course violence exists,” he said.
“No, that’s not exactly what I mean. I just mean, you say it like you think it’s some objective state and not . . . deeply personal and subjective.”
“Something is either violent or it’s not,” he said, though he knew that this was untrue. He just hated to lose an argument. Beth’s eyes grew wide. He could see this was costing her something, but it was also costing him something, and it was unfair. To her, to him, to everyone, and everything, it was all unfair.
“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” she said quietly, and the room grew still and silent.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” he asked.
“Your poem,” she said, and she took it out from her notebook and unfolded it. She read the whole thing to him and to the group, and as she read it, he felt numb. His ears filled with a loud drone that dampened her voice.
How vast your works, O Gorgon Head—
the night, the century, the quiet, the cry.
A solemn altar waits, the old God knows,
how meager our repast, the small, the grand.
Have you seen her waiting? Expecting?
No, look there, beside the river on sheets of ice,
she gives way, as time, as light, everything closed.
I knew her once—long ago now, don’t ask
for then I would have to tell you it all,
and this is no gift, only hush.
The night, the century, the quiet, the cry—
at last, she answers, speaks:
“It’s just a poem,” he said when she was done, but she shook her head.
“It’s not,” she said. “It’s not just a poem. I’m sorry for what happened to you.”
“This is insanity,” Seamus said with a loud laugh. “Nothing happened to me.”
The professor had his finger pressed to his lips, and he was nodding as if he were listening to Beth’s reading on delay.
“Let’s discuss the poem, shall we? Not the person. The poem. Seamus, your seat, please.”
Seamus lowered himself into his chair. Ingrid took out her notes. Oliver slid his foot against the back inside of Seamus’s foot. It was a comforting gesture, but Seamus was too far away from himself to accept it. He grunted.
“It’s obviously about unprocessed trauma,” Noli said. “How it gets buried under traditional notions of masculinity and male pride. But is that new? Interesting?”
“I mean, the white male speaker of the poem is not sympathetic, and maybe that’s what it’s trying to do? I guess? Bend our sympathies?”
Seamus felt himself leave his body as they pulled apart the poem. A wet chill stuck to his lower back, and he realized that he was sweating. He watched Beth across the circle from him, watched her watch him, her expression placid and giving.
Ingrid said, “But do we believe him? Do we believe his pain? Is it real?”
“I mean, isn’t that kind of like, rape culture?” Linda asked.
“That’s an interesting critique,” Ingrid said, nodding.
“The speaker clearly is struggling with their gender and sexuality, and how like, a body is signified by trauma and like, how that trauma encodes in the self—but like, how our society decodes and reads that trauma is in direct tension with the identity of the speaker. So, it’s like, the trauma has, like, thwarted his masculinity.”
“Astute,” Helen said. Someone snapped and grunted in assent.
“And what to make of the form,” the professor said. “A curious, almost classical form, yet it’s clearly free verse. I admit, the scansion was . . . elementary. Almost as if a child wrote it.”
“The innocence,” Beth said. Seamus felt something acrid and warm at the base of his tongue.
“I wanted,” he said.
“Seamus? Do you have a question?” the professor asked.
“No,” Seamus said.
“Okay, let’s redirect a little. Who do we believe the she is here?”
“Obviously his mother. There’s clearly something damaged there, right?” someone said. “I mean, she’s barely a body. She’s some kind of maternal cipher.”
“Maternal Cipher is my drag name,” Noli said.
Linda laughed. Then Beth laughed. They all laughed, except for Oliver, who was still drawing circles. Seamus had not read any of the other poems in the packet. He had been too preoccupied with himself. He breathed out through his nose.
“Okay, okay,” the professor said, laughing a little himself. “Maternal Cipher. The title?”
“An homage,” Beth said bitterly.
“I think it’s doing a lot of work, this title,” the professor said. “The Gorgon, you know, is a woman who has the power to turn people to stone with just a gaze. And here, in this poem, there is a mysterious woman who is a keeper of some secret, right? And the speaker is recollecting an encounter with this . . . entity. Which seems to end in petrification. What do we make of it?”
“I think you’re reaching, prof,” Linda said.
“I think the poem strains toward meaning,” Ingrid said. “I think the poem is trying very hard to grasp at something, but the title, I think, is ultimately just . . . empty intellectualism.”
“I think it’s like pop art,” Helen said. “Right? Like, it plays with context. It plays with genre. It’s meta. It references. I think it sticks.”
“I don’t,” Ingrid said.
Seamus narrowed his eyes. He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. He was tired of watching them scrap over his poem. He felt less like he had gotten a trick over on them and more like he had tricked himself into doing something that he regretted. The poem was barely legible to him. He could barely understand it himself. He closed his eyes there briefly and remembered how the lines had come at last, after those three days, how good it had felt, and yet how inscrutable the lines had been. They felt right, but he could not pierce them, and that had felt like a betrayal of the whole project, and yet he’d been so proud of them, sure of them. They had felt right.
But as they tussled over his poem, he understood something he had not understood before. That the more right something felt to him, the less it truly did have to do with how it felt to others. He had been foolishly and childishly trying to convince the world that he was right, when it should have been enough for him to believe it himself. That was the fault of pride.
His stomach was sore. His arms were sore. He leaned back into his chair and he let them go. Their voices grew indistinct. Their chatter dull. Oliver put a hand on his thigh, and Seamus traced the line of the hand up the fingers to the wrist from the wrist to the arm from the arm to the shoulder to his face. Oliver was looking at him. Oliver smiled. Seamus shook his head, shrugged.
“I told you it would be great,” Seamus said, as he turned to look back at his classmates. Linda and Ingrid were hot-faced. Beth looked on the verge of tears. It was the same sight every week.
He had the sense that he was in the middle of some great machine. They each were a widget that could be swapped in and out with hardly any trouble at all. He felt stupid for having cared so much about all this, for having been frustrated with Ingrid or with Beth. It had nothing to do with them or with him. Whether or not he submitted a poem, whether or not he wrote a poem, whether or not he could convince himself that any of this mattered at all, the world would go on. History would go on. They were all inconsequential.
Seamus crossed his legs and felt pins and needles in his feet. There was a faint rattle in his chest when he breathed. It would be all right, he knew. His shoulder ached. He put his thumb into his mouth and bit hard on the gristle at its edge. There was a sharp prick of pain, and then only dull heat. He could feel Oliver’s hand steady on his thigh. No one seemed to care too much about it one way or another.
At the break, Seamus and Oliver went out into the cold to smoke. Oliver didn’t usually smoke, but he was nervous, he said, about his poem. The smoke hung low around them. There were snowdrifts stacked up against the trunk of the cedar tree in the courtyard. Beth and Helen smoked nearby, watched Seamus from a distance.
“I hope it’s all right,” Oliver was saying.
“I bet it’s fine,” Seamus said, then regretted it immediately, as he’d revealed that he hadn’t read the poem yet.
“Yeah,” Oliver said. “You’re right.” But his voice was hurt, and his shoulders sank a little. “It’s just my first time writing about, you know, this stuff.”
“What stuff?” Seamus asked, his brows raising.
“About my mom’s cancer—I . . . we talked about this.”
“We did?” Seamus asked. Somewhere in the history of their friendship, this information glowed like a hot coal. Seamus could sense its heat. He knew it to be true, but the facts were hazy. “God, I’m sorry.”
Oliver was quiet then. His expression closed off, turned cool. Seamus reached for his arm, but Oliver shifted subtly away from him.
“Yeah, anyway. We’ll see how it goes,” Oliver said.
Beth and Helen were walking by them just then, heading back inside. Beth looked at Seamus. She smiled at him, and then, seeming to think better of it, lowered her eyes.
“See you in there,” she said. Helen just grunted. They were bundled in their scarves and coats. Seamus and Oliver were standing in the snow in their sweatshirts.
Oliver saluted them, and then dropped his half-smoked cigarette into the snow at their feet. “We better mosey,” he said.
Seamus could feel the snow seeping into his sneakers. He could feel the whole, firm mass of the cold around him, like standing in the middle of the ocean. He closed his eyes and spread his arms and breathed deep. Smoke and snow and cedar sap, everything so clean and pure and true.
Seamus went into the hall after Oliver, and they kicked the snow off their boots. Their professor had just come back from the bathroom. He put a hand on Seamus’s arm and said, “Great work, Seamus. It’s a good poem.”
“Was it?” Seamus asked. The professor’s expression opened just slightly. Oliver patted Seamus on his lower back and returned to the seminar room. It was Seamus and the professor alone in the hall. Seamus could feel himself dripping cold water on the rug.
“Is that what you need? For someone to tell you that your work is good?”
Seamus flushed.
“I don’t know what I need. I don’t know what I’m doing. I feel like I’m wasting my time,” he said.
“Oh, Seamus,” the professor said, and Seamus looked at him.
“How do you know?” Seamus asked.
“How do you know what?” the professor retorted, his head jostling a little, like it was a game or a riddle.
“How do you know you’re not just wasting your time?”
“If you don’t know the answer to that, then I can’t do anything for you,” the professor said with a chastening laugh.
Seamus felt that he had been slapped on the nose and called childish. The world grew deep and saturated. It felt as if something vast and Godlike had peeled back the veil of his life and peered in at him. He had gone around giving away all his power, seeking certainty, approval. But that’s what children did. Seamus had been a child, selfish and stubborn in his ways.
Oliver peeked his head out of the seminar room.
“Hurry up,” he said. “You’re late.”