Prodigal Poems, Or Unexpected Gifts and Earnest Shipwrecks
In the face of uncertainty, poetry freely offered brought gifts far beyond professional recognition, and united loved ones and strangers across insurmountable distance.
By Ralph James Savarese
Imagine writing poetry to get something: a job, tenure, renown. You tell yourself that the writing is pure even if the effects of its dissemination are not. What the poem does for you materially matters not a whit to the call of truth and beauty. You can be on the make, you insist, and make at the same time. After all, your CV is a kind of second soul.
When the pandemic hit and people started dying in my mother’s assisted living facility—first one, then five, then ten, then twenty—I started posting poems on my Facebook page. Poems that I’d just drafted: unrevised, unpublished in any professional sense, yet completely urgent. Quite literally of the moment, like this one called “Slow Break”:
The hardwoods
of the nursing home
softly suggest
basketball
(their yellowish shine
like the undertaker’s
polyurethane).
“Assisted Living,” we say,
as if the workers
were point guards
selflessly passing,
and the residents, scorers.
My mother, on her walker,
goes in for a layup.
No granny shots for her,
no air balls.
But the game’s turned
darker now: it’s half-
time in Aleppo.
The referee wears
a hazmat suit—
he can’t keep up
with the players.
One runs screaming
from the court;
another mumbles
to the dead
who are much more
obedient, arranging
themselves like firewood,
like ready-meals
in the freezer.
220 miles
above the earth,
an astronaut clings
to a robotic arm,
collecting space trash,
delivering pills
to the stars.
When I dial,
an orbiting spider
sends out cellular
filaments, a sonic
thread connecting us.
“I’m coming to get
you,” I say.
The referee calls
traveling.
Every morning, overcome with worry, I would scribble a poem, send it like a SpaceX rocket up into the heavens, and watch it land, a few minutes later, through my friends’ comments on Facebook. This expedited message-in-a-bottle allowed me to feel as if I were doing something for my mother: honoring her terror and loneliness. Sixteen hundred miles away from her in Iowa, I was keeping vigil, along with hundreds of people she had never met, at her digital bedside. At times, she was so scared—her facility had set up a morgue in the parking lot; it looked like a wedding tent—that she asked to listen in on the classes I was teaching by Zoom. The students would smile when my lectures put her to sleep and she began to snore. And they would grimace when they heard sirens or the wailing of a resident on her hall.
I didn’t care about the quality of the poems I was posting—I really didn’t. The circumstances called for something other than expert judgment and ruthless self-consciousness. That kind of art is terribly belated, not only after the fact but also after the faith. I needed to be like a bird who was unaware of its own flapping, aloft on a current it couldn’t see, at every moment about to fall, barely composing. Said another way, I wanted to be in the fact of my mother’s ongoing peril, for she could be taken from me any day. Aesthetics weren’t beside the point—I have been writing for forty years and have absorbed many things that I no longer have to think about—but I wouldn’t allow them to slow down the process of a daily response. Who cares if what I posted didn’t impress. Who cares if what I posted was, at times, mediocre? My friend, the writer Stephen Kuusisto, likes to quote his former teacher Marvin Bell on the matter of questionable poetry: “No one is hurt by a bad poem.” And no one is hurt by a bad or fumbling prayer. It’s the practice that counts, the continuous posture.
The platform couldn’t be crasser, and there was, of course, no peer review. Yet what did I care?
Annie Dillard, who was my first creative writing teacher, says in The Writing Life, “Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. … Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.” You open your safe and find your mother, her memory.
I had grown tired of the relentless professionalization of art-making and was moved by the number of people who now responded to my poems for her in a heartfelt way. So many more than had read my books or work in journals. As superficial as it sounds, “likes” and “loves” drove me forward. I posted poems like a man on fire with creativity. I was the very definition of “prodigal”: “wastefully extravagant,” “spending my own resources freely and recklessly.” Of course, they weren’t my own resources; they were the Holy Spirit’s or whatever you prefer to call that genesis fountain. But I get ahead of myself.
Would Annie approve of Facebook? Would my colleagues? Would my dean? The platform couldn’t be crasser, and there was, of course, no peer review. Yet what did I care? A full professor, I had run the promotional gauntlet. My next rank? Emeritus, which is to say forgotten. And after that? Deceased. Please don’t tell me that death, through Jesus Christ, is a sort of endowed professorship. I want to be an amateur again, my pride sucked out of me like water out of a flooded basement.
A number of Facebook friends who are poets sent me private messages claiming that it was tacky to be posting unpublished poems, that I was too good to be doing this, that journal publication authenticated the excellence of a work. “You’re embarrassing yourself,” a guy in his fifties said—I hardly knew him. “Use Facebook to brag, not to publish.” (He had just won a Guggenheim.) Who was more desperate—these unasked-for counselors or me? If I kept posting poems about my mother’s predicament, then the virus, I believed, wouldn’t get her. Magical thinking, yes, but no more magical than writing a poem every day.
God, I will state unequivocally, doesn’t care about tacky. Even the parts of creation that seem furthest from him do not lack his imprint. … The grace that’s run… from its maker circles back, infuses everything. Did my mother get COVID? Yes. Did it kill her? No. She contracted it at the very end of the pandemic while in hospice dying of something else. Her decline was precipitous—so precipitous that I couldn’t get to Boston in time to be with her. As the nurse in her facility held the phone close to her face and I told her again and again how much I loved her, she opened her eyes, swam up from the bottom of her morphine sea, and whispered, “Love you, too.” She was dead a few hours later. Much as it pained me to witness the conclusion of her life at such a distance, it seemed appropriate for how our relationship had been conducted in its final stages: far away and yet strangely up close. Which is how I think of the paradox of God, that ultimate Zoom technology.
Love, I shouldn’t have to explain, is prodigal, and God might very well be autistic.
My mother had given me one last gift: a new way to think about my writing. Write to write, pray to pray. Ask for nothing but the doing. The rest is vanity. Two years after my mother died, a stranger taught me this lesson again. This time the vehicle was a digital publication on a website called Poem-A-Day run by the Academy of American Poets. The deafblind poet John Lee Clark, who was in charge of the month of July in 2023, had solicited a poem from me, and I had sent him one about my adopted son, DJ, who is autistic—it, too, had been written in a flash:
The Bearing Edge
For DJ
My son starts every conversation
with the statement “I love you, Dad.”
“I love you, Dad. What’s for dinner tonight?”
“I love you, Dad. Is it supposed to rain?”
“I love you, Dad. Can we go for a walk?”
“I love you, Dad, but you really have to chill.”
He’s like the guy who wears a bow tie
to the bar and to the beach.
He’s a dandy of affection, at once
rolling up his pennies and spending them
on ice cream. He’ll wear this phrase
to heaven (he’s already been to hell—
what he calls fostercareless). If
Orpheus had a lyre, then he has a bearing
edge. He will not drum without it:
“I love you, Dad.”
He moves forward by glancing back,
and no one is ever lost.
The sky sells cotton candy;
the trees, shade.
Love—it’s a kind of leash, invisible,
expanding, and I’m his big, happy dog.
My wife and I adopted DJ in 1998 when he was six. He had been horrifically abused—first, by his birth mother, and then, by a much older foster brother. The former had tried to drown him in the bath; the latter had physically and sexually assaulted him. Doctors said he was “profoundly retarded”—one used the term “unreachable”—but in my time volunteering as his “big brother” we had grown very close. Although he couldn’t speak and although he was formidably skittish, he had reached out to me in all sorts of ways. I had taught him his first linguistic act: the American Sign Language sign for “more,” which he thought meant “tickle.” “More, more, more, more!” he had signed, giggling—to the extent that I had come to think of his adorable face as an injunction of sorts: he wanted—no, he needed—more of everything.
Not two months after he came to live with us, we included DJ in a regular school. We taught him how to read and to use a text-to-voice synthesizer. I’ve told this story in a memoir called Reasonable People, which ends with a chapter by DJ titled “It’s My Story.” Promoting the book, we appeared together on Anderson Cooper 360, where DJ, in response to a question by the neurologist Sanjay Gupta, “Should autism be treated?,” typed, “Yes, treated with respect.” That little quip from early 2008 went around the world, giving voice to the burgeoning neurodiversity movement. DJ would go on to star in, write, and coproduce the Peabody Award winning documentary Deej, which follows his inclusion journey to Oberlin College. He was the first nonspeaking autistic student in the U.S. to be accepted by a “highly selective” institution, and he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a double major in 2017.
“The Bearing Edge” looks back on our miraculous journey as a family. Can hope be pulled alive from an icy river? Can a coroner coronate? You bet she can, though it requires a force very much like an electrical current. Every wire knows when the power is on. As in the story of the Apostle Thomas, eyes should be superfluous and light, a magnificent afterthought. Again and again, my son said—he still says—“I love you, Dad.” Intent on pathologizing autism, psychologists speak pejoratively of “perseveration”—as if one could persevere too long in something. Leave it to the experts to make of ritual a problem. Love, I shouldn’t have to explain, is prodigal, and God might very well be autistic. “I love you, Ralph. I love you, DJ. I love you, Emily” ad infinitum.
In the section “About this Poem” that accompanies every work on the Poem-A-Day site, I wrote,
Adoption is often presented as the last resort of a desperate couple. No one would choose to adopt if they could have their own children, and certainly no one would choose a so-called ‘damaged’ child. I wanted to unseat this logic, and I found in my son’s refrain a kind of glorious drumbeat where the horror of the past gives way to the promise of the future. When I remembered the term for the rim of a drum’s shell, ‘the bearing edge,’ I knew that I had a pun I could work with.
Let the beat of love, in this all too fallen world, be our bearing edge. Can you hear the many drummers drumming?
Is there any suffering that can’t be redeemed?
As soon as the poem was posted, I began to receive messages from people around the globe. One touching message after another. As with the response to the Facebook poems I had posted for my mother, I was floored. Could a poet really be like Whitman’s “noiseless, patient spider,” “launch[ing] forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself / … Till the bridge [it] will need be ‘form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, / Till the gossamer thread [it] fling[s] catch somewhere”? Once again, it seemed he could. And then, fourteen months later, after the euphoria of connection had subsided and I had received some very grim medical news, I found in my mailbox at the college where I teach a package whose return address read “Lisbon.” “Whom do I know in Lisbon?” I asked aloud. “No one,” I answered.
When I opened the package, I saw a work of art on tissue paper: layer upon layer of beautiful calligraphy. It looked like an archeological dig: instead of fossilized bones, fossilized language. If you’ll allow me this flourish, the words seemed with their many hoops and spirals to be dancing. I had no idea what this was or why it had been sent to me. I couldn’t find a card. Nor could I figure out what the text said.
For an entire day, I was stumped. But then I rummaged through the packaging again and discovered a tiny piece of paper with a web address: cheirographon.net. (The word means “handwriting” or “a handwritten acknowledgement of a debt.”) So, I fed the address to Chrome, and up popped this message:
My package has reached you and brought you here.
I encountered your poem as a reader hoping for practical consequences. For Phrases that might change perceptions and relationships or insinuate themselves into conversations. For wordplay, rhythm, and successive images. For reflections on morals and politics.
Inasmuch as I paint, I also came with ink and gouache. I took your poem as a quarry, foreseeing a painted form prefigured in the lengths of the lines, the whorls and shafts of the letters. And when it was finished, I posted the result to you like a note in a bottle. Should it bring you a moment’s smile, I am glad. If not, discard it, fold it away, light a fire. It belongs to you now.
Reading the message, I felt like Moses seeing flames of fire from within a bush: my package has reached you and brought you here. Surely, this is how God would speak to us if he spoke. And like Moses, surely, we’d be perplexed by his instructions. It was embarrassing not to have recognized my own poem as the medium for this man’s handiwork! I had been moving through the day too quickly, as is typical of me, and wanted every task completed, every problem solved, every mystery dispelled.
Foreseeing a painted form prefigured in the lengths of the lines, the whorls and shafts of the letters. According to the dictionary, “to prefigure” means “to show, suggest, or announce by an antecedent type, image or likeness”; “to picture or imagine beforehand.” In the context of Christianity, it means the foreshadowing of people, places, and events from the New Testament in the Old. Looking back, you look forward. Time folds in on itself. The sister arts of painting and poetry unite. Without even knowing it, I had written an ekphrastic poem!
What is more, without even knowing it, I had saved myself by saving my son. I, too, suffered abuse as a child—at the fists of my father—and the agony of it left me swearing I’d never have children. Yet have one I did. To find in the cheirographon a metaphor, love painted the pain that paradoxically prefigured it. As in pentimento, the past won’t be hidden; what I saw in this calligraphy was the tumult of my own evolving faith. (In Italian, “pentimento” means “to repent or change your mind.”) Is there any suffering that can’t be redeemed?
The message continued:
I cannot recall when I began to paint words. I previously favoured images, but gradually these drifted away as I was attracted to the marks of language. I lingered over shop signs, online archives of the handwritten records of English parishes and courts, penmanship manuals, griffonage and graffiti. I collected books on Chinese and Islamic calligraphers, digital files of Spanish and Italian legal documents, rubbings of engraved stones and examples of hurufiyya. Occasionally, I wrote about street artists and the shifting historical and social place of Chinese calligraphy. I collected inks, pigments, papers, and brushes.
What is a life, I asked myself, but an earnest shipwreck?
I had been thinking about the materiality of language when I received the cheirographon, but in the domain of sound, not of sight. In fact, I’d published a number of scholarly essays devoted to the topic—essays that linked attunement to the tangible in autism and attunement to the tangible in poems. By “tangible” I meant something your ear can touch. Archibald MacLeish once wrote, “A poem should not mean but be.” Mere semantics, in other words, are the mortician’s trade, the lifeless body on display. If poetry is an art that calls attention to the incidental properties of words—think of alliteration, assonance, consonance, meter, and rhyme—then why do we settle for something so demure when printing a poem in a magazine or book? Why be so transparent and functional with our fonts? Instead of a mule bearing our burden, why not a show horse? Why not the word made flesh on the page? Even if that word is almost unreadable. Sometimes I think God is the closed circle of the letter “p” or “b.”
“I thought, too, about meaning,” the man from Lisbon wrote.
Where does it land? Who receives it? In what economy does it trade—market, memory, or myth? How do objects gather fame or fortune, soothe loss, or disappear into landfill or ash? I am fascinated by acts taken to realize an intuitive necessity, by unexpected gifts and earnest shipwrecks. Of the debris that is the bait of meaning.
I also reflected on decay. How things gradually become strange and opaque. Iconography that no longer moves. The husks of words that are no longer understood by any ear. And how the hollowing out of forms is not only an interest of aesthetics or anthropology but an unsettling glimpse into the future.
What is a life, I asked myself, but an earnest shipwreck? Your very mouth spewing flotsam and jetsam. What is grace but an unexpected—indeed, undeserved and prodigal—gift? The bait of meaning—you cannot fish, as in a poem, without worms or some other allurement. From the trans-temporal perspective of God, your bones are the bait, and his love is the rod.
The man then explained,
I don’t paint every day and sometimes weeks pass quietly. I put poems to one side, collect colour samples, or tear pieces of paper to size. A day comes when I lay out my materials. I paint through a poem, pass from word to word, caress the shoulder or spine of each letter, stop at inter-sections, or play with scale and ungainly embellishment. Trunks and appendages sway and sweep, awkwardly turn or fall flat, tunnel through coils, creating a mycelium of lines. Lengthened tails mark a change of direction or a caesura. Pigments accumulate like luminous, wavering kudzu. Sometimes the words are a dense and irregular rain or they congeal into tangled structures. Elisions and mesostics occur.
Painting is extemporaneous, like strolling, cooking or playing with children who invent the rules as they go. I have my habits, my tics, a kaleidoscope of sources that please or sting me. While there is no going back, successive strokes respond to preceding ones, constantly adjusting the quivering of the page, which soon feels like a climate, a landscape or an anthill, tangling or overwhelming reading.
On the wall of my living room in Iowa City hangs a poem by Seamus Heaney in the poet’s own handwriting. Although I know the poem, “The Haw Lantern,” well, I have trouble making it out, and this trouble renders it all the more glorious. Since hanging it, I’ve filled the room with poetry broadsides, each one using art less to illustrate the poem than to give it a beautiful opacity. How far can we take this principle? A few years ago, a friend read a Japanese translation of one of my prose books, though he didn’t know a word of this language. “I followed the characters,” he explained.
Another friend who is autistic cannot read a book he loves without the words beginning to move on the page—like ants or like tiny bodies stirring in their graves. Which brings me back to my son. One of the first things he typed on a computer, after hearing me read Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” aloud, was “Very great sound. Very great sound.” He understood the poem perfectly—meaning in Thomas, as we traditionally understand it, is always secondary. His poems are like lake-effect snow for the ear. The words rise as mist and then fall as glittering dream.
“Finally, I think about setting objects adrift,” the man concluded his letter, “and how walking away can be productive apathy.” When I sent a note of thanks, he didn’t reply; I shouldn’t have expected him to. Like God speaking to Moses, he all but said, “Do not come any closer.” Perhaps this sort of communique is as close as we can get to the divine—or, rather, an explanation of it. “God is in the details,” wrote architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, which for writers means every shimmering letter and phoneme. But I wouldn’t call his silence—his dispersal and diffusion—apathy. I’d call it mystery.
At the bottom of his website, the man from Lisbon declared in a short bio, “I am not always an optimist, but I am addicted to possibility.” And so is God. “A drawing,” said Paul Klee, “is simply a line going for a walk.” Write to write, pray to pray. Ask for nothing but the doing.
Illustrations by Sarah Clark, from photographs provided by the author.
Ralph James Savarese is the author of three books of prose and four books of poetry. In late 2024, Ice Cube Press brought out his most recent collection, Never Make Them Cry: Classrooms & Coffins. He lives in Iowa City, IA.
