Edward Hirsch’s elegy to his son is a poem deserving of longevity.
By ROBERT HIRSCHFIELDUpdated: NOVEMBER 29, 2015 17:56Edward Hirsch(photo credit: MICHAEL LIONSTAR / WIKIMEDIA)Why did the sun rise this morningIt’s not naturalI don’t want to see the lightIt’s not time to close the casketOr say Kaddish for my sonI’ve already buried two fathersWith a mother to comeIsn’t that enough Lord who wants usTo exalt and sanctify himThe Jewish poet who writes an elegy to his son carries in his belly King David’s lament for Absalom (“O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom”).
His words are the tribal continuum of those. The most recent reframing of David’s lament is by Edward Hirsch, a soulful New York secularist and one of America’s most prominent poets.In August 2011, his adopted son Gabriel, age 22, epileptic, with a history of mental illness, died of a drug overdose among strangers in Jersey City, New Jersey. Hirsch began navigating his grief with words, when herding words across pages became possible again.His book-length poem is radically different from any of his other poems, not only in its size and uniform threeline stanza length, but in the way it is stripped bare of his normal lyricism, the equivalent of stripping the literary garment of its verbal loveliness. A humility before precious things that vanish.Laurie loosened his necktieAnd opened his top buttonSo I could breathe easierHis face was waxenAnd slightly shinyHis skin gray and paperyWhy were there black marksAround his eyesAlready a little sunkenHis nose slightly deformedA scab where his lip had bledDuring the seizure(“Laurie” – full name Lauren Watel – is Hirsch’s partner.) Death, as readers of Hirsch’s poetry know, is a subject with which he is often in communion. The death of fellow poets, the death of Jewish villages in Poland, the realization of our one day at a time diminishment. One is tempted to say that many of the poems in his previous eight volumes seem like rehearsals for this poem. If anything can possibly be a rehearsal for this poem.In the work “In Memoriam Paul Celan” for his poet ancestor and Holocaust survivor, who drowned himself in the River Seine in 1970, Hirsch waters his elegy with language so stunning it leaves you breathless.Syllable by syllable, clawed and handled,the words have united in grief.It is the ghostly hour of lamentation,the void’s turn, mournful and absolute.Lay these words on the dead man’s lipslike burning tongs, a tongue of flame.A scouring eagle wheels and shrieks.Let God pray to us for this man.“Gabriel,” in contrast, is a work of selfeffacement.(It was longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award.) Hirsch writes from the shadows as his son roars off the page, a thunderbolt of rage, songs, love, wounds, wounding confrontations, wild trampings in all directions.Like a spear hurtling through darknessHe was always in such a hurryTo find a target to stop himThe poet, in his grief, would call his mother, his sisters, Gabriel’s friends, to get them to tell him stories of his son. Stories in many cases he hadn’t heard before. By becoming a historian of Gabriel’s life, trawling for facts as a stranger might, he robed himself in the known to tackle the unknown, the unknowable.For every father is a stranger before his son’s death. Even Issa, the late 18th and early 19th century Japanese haiku poet and Zen master, who held emptiness and impermanence as core beliefs, lived to see three of his sons die in infancy.Hirsch remembers Issa in his poem, and includes his most famous work:The world of dewIs the world of dewAnd yet and yet Hirsch’s penchant for outreach (he’s been a tireless supporter of fellow poets embedded worldwide in the fevered nooks and crannies of poetry) compels him to loop stanzas around the dead shoulders of assorted mourners. German poet Friedrich Rucker, he informs us, wrote 425 poems after the deaths of two of his children from scarlet fever within 16 days of each other in the early 1930s. Five of those poems were scored by Gustav Mahler in his work “Kindertotenlieder”; the composer too had a daughter who died of scarlet fever.French poet Stephane Mallarme, Hirsch writes, lost his eight-year-old son Anatole to rheumatic fever. He too was left in fragments. The poet employs no segue between the fragmented Mallarme and Gabriel’s regular visits to his office for money.You only drop by when you want your moneyI said but he protested it’s not like that dadHe didn’t like to think of himself that wayI was usually working at the computerWhen he strolled inDad you’re the sort of personWho needs to work a lotI am the sort of personWho needs a lot of down time Just as life flows abruptly into death, an unexplained passage, Hirsch’s stanzas flow abruptly into one another without punctuation (his clarity is such that one is unbothered by the absence of commas, periods, colons). It’s almost as if the poet wants his book to be read as prayer, not literature, without the customary grid of punctuation that has nothing to do with the experience of losing a young son.Hirsch in his poem touches upon the fragmented nature of Gabriel’s Jewish identity. He had tattooed on one of his arms the Japanese word for music, and on the other the “Jewish star.”The poet recalls from Leviticus the prohibition against making gashes in one’s flesh, but noting something tribal had taken root/And he labeled himself a Jew. Gabriel’s Judaism consisted of the familiar mix of rejection and attraction.Averse to prayer, to the prayer-heavy High Holy Days, he was drawn to the earthier, more engaging rituals of Passover: the four cups of wine, the hunt for the afikomen.There is a Jewish teaching moment when Gabriel returns from an Evangelical funeral service for a friend, where mourners express their grief by speaking in tongues.Jews stand up to the AlmightyI told him but mostly we just skippedOut of services and headed to the playground Gabriel’s disappearance and death cosmically coincided with the arrival of Hurricane Irene in New York. Repeated calls to his apartment were answered by his electronic voice: “This is Gabriel. Leave a message.”This book is that message. Rarely has a young son’s life been remembered by his poet father in such obsessive detail.The desire to leave out nothing throws an ardent, hopeless light on Hirsch’s longing.He can be as unsparing in illuminating the scabs in Gabriel’s character as he is in marveling at his comet-like life.Social workers he did not likeMen in tight leggings feministsDo you even know what a feminist isLaurie asked him He did notLike hairy-armed lesbians kissingOn the street in NorthamptonAll right all right that’s enough nowI said it was hard to calm him downWritten in a lower register than Allan Ginsberg’s “Kaddish” (1961), “Gabriel” is a poem deserving of “Kaddish’s” longevity. Hirsch stands unclothed and wounded before the reader, inviting him to recite his quiet prayer for the dead, for the living.