Close Reads is an essays column exploring a specific page, paragraph, or sentence from a book, film, piece of music, or other media. This essay focuses on a section of the poem “To The Mulberry Tree” from Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude.
and seeing me seeing
into the terrible future
she put softly one hand on my chin
and the other in my hair
turning my head away from what wreckage
waited in there
and back into the leaves,
which too I will do to you,
Ross Gay’s alliterative turn away “from what wreckage / waited in there” is the coolest move. A no look pass to a cutting wingman who doesn’t just soar, but ascends with all of us on his back. The teenage girl turning the boy’s gaze back “into the leaves” is my favorite poetic trick. But, no, that’s wrong. It is not a trick. Trick implies deception. Trick denotes a game played on reality. This is trick’s opposite. A genuine, organic insight not gaming reality but revealing the possibility of a different reality. A reality away from eons of exiles, away from Edens forever lost, away not from tragedy, but from the tragic disposition of so much great art to concretize the tragic at the expense of all else. Instead, Gay permits us to (re)turn back, whenever we so choose, to the garden—here, specifically, the leaves and fruit of the mulberry tree—from which we are often warned a cherubim and flaming sword now protect against our return. “To the Mulberry Tree” offers a different read on human frailty—our fallenness and brokenness—and it extends an invitation to forever transcend linearity through a poetic moment—now in us and, therefore, out of time—back to “lips and fingers blushed purple, / the faint sugar ghosting our mouths.”
Although it is not the final turn or image of the poem, I get chills when the teenage girl with the glasses and the “terrible future” gently turns the child that will become the poem’s speaker away from “what wreckage / waited in there” and “back into the leaves” of the mulberry tree because I have been taught that there is no turning away from “wreckage;” that, in fact, great or, at least, serious art is always a turn to the “wreckage.” So when I read first of her realizing what the child is figuring out—“seeing [him] seeing / into [her] terrible future”—and then reacting not with shame or embarrassment, but gentleness—“she put softly one hand on [his] chin”—and care—“turning [his] head away”—I am shocked and heartened.
But it is when Gay, breaking the fourth wall (which, yes, he does often and does well), turns us—“which too I will do to you”—like that child “back into the leaves,” that I am not only shocked and heartened, but baptized in the possibility of a different poetic reality. A reality that doesn’t ignore or try to rewind the tragic in some attempted erasure, some prelapsarian trick—here, yes, I mean trick—but, instead, opens the possibility that the tragedy of a story, of a life, even of a moment, need not singularly define that moment. How easy it would be to make that girl into “what wreckage / waited in there.” How easy it would be to make that girl into the details under the tree—“a filthy blanket / and a pack of cigarettes / and tinfoil wrappers crumpled and shimmering / and the frayed remnants of a rope.” How easy it would be to make that girl into just another Eve. And for those, like me, who use literature as a filter, as a lens from which to try and understand what the hell it might mean to be human in this world, not making her into those details—into that “wreckage”—but, instead, giving her both insight and the most gentle and caring of actions is somewhat miraculous.
The ascending of the boy’s gaze from “beneath the tree”—where that “terrible future lies”—to “back into the leaves” is a poetic transcendence that reminds me in a different way of how I felt reading the Juliana Spahr line: “immersed in a pain that has an analogy only to the intensity of pleasure.” Spahr’s line from a poem in the collection this connection of everyone with lungs is about the fracturing of those grieving death by “human hands”—it imagines the pit of pain at the peak of pleasure. But the poem is also about air—the collected “space between the hands”—that through our breathing connects all of us: the killers and the killed and the grieving. I feel a similar mimetic ascension in Gay’s delineation of the upward turn “back into the leaves”—how much different that is than “back to picking berries” or some other grounded iteration. In that rise, I hear the same rebellion against dichotomous thinking. Gay is writing about how we break and are broken, but also about how it is in our very brokenness that we can find earthly transcendence or ascension in the caring we give and get from other broken folks—even caring we get from those who continue (or whose memories continue) to break us.
Let us not forget, that Gay first introduces the taste of the mulberry—a fruit that he goes to great lengths in this poem to defend from those “numbskulls” who call it “insipid”—in the most disturbing, hilarious way. The poem opens with the speaker barefoot and in his garden, “mouth agape and swooped in a grin” about to eat a gold currant tomato when a bird shits “half in / and half on [his] / sun-warmed chin.” Revolting, yes. But although this “jiggles” the speaker from his “reverie,” it doesn’t stop him from “detect[ing] swirled in the shit / the sweet of the [mulberry].” Now, there are many ways to defend a berry, to get folks to understand how tasty a fruit is, but I have yet to read another that goes to such lengths to disgust in the name of gustatory praise. And I could write so much more about the opening of this poem, but, instead, I want to stay focused on the turn “away from what wreckage / waited in there.”
Wreckage does not disappear. The “terrible future” is always under the tree, just a short line in front (or behind, depending on how you see a poem) from the turn back “into the leaves.” And the “sweet of the thing”—in this poem, anyway—is always going to be “swirled in the shit.” The sacred with the profane. It is here in this emulsion, this mixed and liminal—or as Fred Moten might say “sublime”—space of shit and sweet, that Gay lifts the restrictions that archetypally exile us from the garden; and, instead, shows how innocence is not something to be lost—just like a life is never one act or action or event: no matter how hard this is for us to remember. But luckily, earlier in the poem, during that transitionless transition from the speaker’s present day garden to the flashback, the girl gives us brilliant advice for remembering:
…for jumping
and grabbing at once like this
a soft thing is hard
be gentle
she said…
And, true to the girl’s advice—and his own falling line break—Gay is gentle in the final lines of the poem when he lets us know that there is a “tree now grown inside” us that we can return to when things get hard and “[gather] fruit / for good.” This final line is a rereading, a recalculation of linearity, or really just a reminder that if we are “gentle,” we can travel back to any part of a memory and experience it again because it is always part of us—we are always all parts of our past. And, for me, this explicit invitation for return—this reminder of the never lost—is an invitation also at redemption and forgiveness and care; this intentional swirling of the innocent and the broken is a gift as gentle and caring as the girl’s turning of the boy’s eyes “back into the leaves.” And it is a joy to read.
