Cry, baby, cry, make your mother sad

Yesterday I read two things that made me cry. The first was an old Sunday New York Times Modern Love column by a woman who loved to listen to the Beatles with her 5-year-old daughter, until one day the daughter very suddenly died from strep and now her mother feels like she has to escape the Beatles whenever she hears them. I first read that column a year ago, and I distinctly remember being in my room in Medford and crying so hard I gave myself a headache.

Last night my mom and I had a rousing discussion about which Modern Love column was the saddest ever. I voted for "Now I Need a Place to Hide Away," but my mom voted for "My Husband Survived; the Man I Married Didn't," whose author has, for six years, been going to visit her husband at the facility where he now lives after being hit by a car and suffering a traumatic brain injury that completely altered his personality.

The best Modern Love columns are the ones that make me bawl for hours.

The second thing was this poem by W.S. Merwin. I have been on a W.S. Merwin kick lately. Well, to be fair, I have been on a W.S. Merwin kick since we read The Vixen in Contemporary Poetry sophomore year, but until now I have never gone out and purchased the selected works of W.S. Merwin.

It might be gimmicky that it's really most effective when you know (a) the title and (b) the date it was written. But sometimes I like gimmicky. (See Kenneth Koch's New Addresses.)

To the Words

September 17, 2001

When it happens you are not there

O you beyond numbers
beyond recollection
passed on from breath to breath
given again
from day to day from age
to age
charged with knowledge
knowing nothing

indifferent elders
indispensable and sleepless

keepers of our names
before ever we came
to be called by them

you that were
formed to begin with
you that were cried out
you that were spoken
to begin with
to say what could not be said

ancient precious
and helpless ones

say it