What time is it where you are?

Oct 6

3 min read

I made it to Yogyakarta safe and sound and then proceeded to sleep for twelve hours.

Now it is 4:00 in the morning, and I have lost all concept of time.

I have been trying to write a short blog post each day about the poem appearing in the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project, but somewhere between Jakarta, Yogyakarta, airplanes, hotels, and twelve hours of sleep, I managed to lose track of the sequence.

Yesterday’s poem was “Tap a Vein.” I wrote it because Beverly asked me to write a poem about whatever I happened to be thinking about at that moment.

I happened to be thinking about an inkwell.

That became the doorway into a poem about writing, grief, friendship, and the way poetry can keep moving even when the poet cannot.

Today’s poem on the Tupelo Press site is “At the Bar.”

I wrote it while sitting alone at a sushi bar in Jakarta.

The poem begins with me thinking about Harlem:

I think of Harlem’s street noiseas I sit alone in a sushi bar in Jakartaobserving little beyond my own thoughts.

I enjoy eating alone sometimes. There is something meditative about sitting at a bar, listening to instrumental music, watching someone prepare food, and having nowhere in particular to be except exactly where you are.

At first, I thought that might be the poem.

A woman from Harlem sits alone at a sushi bar in Jakarta. She watches the chef slice tuna. The knife moves. The fish falls apart beneath it.

Then the chef started talking to me.

He asked how I liked the sushi. I told him it was good and joked that, as a Californian, I maintain high standards when it comes to sushi.

He told me he had once lived in California.

And then the poem changed.

He had been a permanent resident of the United States, but he returned to Indonesia to take care of his dying mother. He stayed too long and was no longer allowed to return.

Suddenly this was no longer simply a poem about sitting alone in a sushi restaurant.

It became a poem about borders. Immigration. Family obligation. The choices we make when someone we love is dying. The strange bureaucratic consequences that can follow an act of devotion.

It also became a poem about what a poet does with someone else’s story.

There is a moment in “At the Bar” when I write:

There should be more beyond this.a deeper meaning, a greater truth.

I think that is one of the most important moments in the poem.

Writers are always looking for meaning. We encounter a person, a conversation, a moment, and some part of us begins searching for metaphor, significance, a larger truth.

But sometimes another person’s life does not arrive with a convenient lesson attached to it.

I had no solution for him.

I could not change immigration policy.

I could not restore what he had lost.

I could listen.

And then, of course, I could write about it.

That becomes uncomfortable near the end of the poem. He gave me his card so I could contact him in the future, but the speaker admits:

knowing me,I will forget about it and move on to the next poem.

Those lines are not particularly flattering.

That is one reason I kept them.

There is something unsettling about the relationship between writers and the people we encounter. We collect moments. We collect conversations. We collect grief, gestures, overheard sentences, faces, and histories.

Something happens to another human being, and somewhere in the writer’s mind another question appears:

Is there a poem here?

I do not know whether that is exploitation, witness, memory, or simply part of what writers do.

Probably some combination of all four.

The poem ends where it began, with Harlem.

Sitting thousands of miles away made me think about the people in my own neighborhood whom I have not seen in more than a year.

Travel does that.

You fly halfway around the world and suddenly think about home.

You meet a stranger and think about the people you already know.

You listen to someone describe what he lost by staying beside his dying mother, and for a moment the distances in your own life become visible.

Then the sushi arrives.

The knife keeps moving.