A few weeks ago, my friend Marianela invited me to write a post on The Mountain Goats for her excellent music newsletter The Immense Wave. We’ve talked in the past about poems, memorization and recitation of poetry, and how it alters and relates to the experience of a poem. So, for this edition of The Monthly Poem, I’ve invited her to recite a poem and write about it. Here, see Marianela’s recitation of Stephen Berg’s “Don’t Forget,” a perfect dream of summer, and her thoughts on it here:
About a year ago, there was a prompt floating around on Twitter that asked people to share a line from a poem that frequently got stuck in their heads. I shared the eponymous line from Stephen Berg’s “Don’t Forget:”
Don’t forget, this is inside us every day.
We want everything, our hands stop too soon,
I’d been reading a lot of Berg at the time. “As the Days Pass and Darken,” a poem about “something” growing “too strong in me” and begging “on the street, / in rooms, everywhere,” was and is a favorite. I’d known it for well over a decade, but some time last year it found me again. I needed it. I was, at the time, about to leave the relationship I’d been in for four years, and then I was leaving it, and then I had left. It took a long time to end; some things just do. They end and end and end and then they’re over. I left less because I didn’t want the thing I had and more so because I wanted something else. I don’t know if I’ll ever get it.
“Don’t Forget” unfolds around those two late-coming lines, everything before it a surreptitious metaphor, everything after a blunt one. I carried with me their beckoning, the way they made me feel charged with impatience with myself, the way they made me ask: what is the everything that I want, when have my hands stopped too soon, why have I forgotten that inside me every day there is a whole world of things I want, and there are really not that many of them, but they are so big, and I want them so badly, that they truly are their own world, they have their own center of gravity.
Desire is at the heart of Berg’s poetry and so, therefore, is fear. Wanting is terrifying. As soon as I want something I also have to deal with the possibility of not getting it. It’s easier to not bother with the whole project of desire at all. It’s easier, so much easier, to give in to fear.
our parents worried we’d fall, and missed us,
but we always got hurt anyway, or we’d sit for hours
sanding the wings of a wood fighterplane until they shined
like metal.
In what world, tell me, would wood ever shine like metal? What a waste of time.
So, what if I dare to want? What then? What if I want so badly, what if I am so sure, what if I know nothing else will do, what if I do everything in my power, what if I want and want and want and still never get it? What if I die without it.
I don’t think Berg answers these questions; I don’t think he means to. He’s less concerned with power — what can I do — than he is with powerlessness in the face of fate. What can’t I do.
Who are we, he asks, when a face whispers and opens to us like a wave? Who are we, in the face of the unpredicted and overwhelming? Who are we when what’s meant for us finally finds us? And who are we to say no, even if we have to cross uncharted waters to get it?
I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been carrying these lines around inside me, or because I’m brave, or because I’m stupid, but I believe I am no one to say no. I surrender to desire. I surrender to my life. I feel myself leaving, and I do.