I began writing “Letter to Capitol Hill” the year I moved from Washington, D. C. to Austin, Texas, when I was missing a friend terribly. We had had dinner our last night in D.C., and when it came time to say good-bye, he expressed a somber finality that I immediately teased him about. I would be back. We would continue to take our walks around Capitol Hill, the southeast neighborhood he lived in, and we would continue to talk about books and the strangeness of being a person. We would grow old together. I was sure of it.
That was the promise of the poem. An epistle, it was a way to keep talking to my friend, but I also wanted to stage our future for him, when we would still be wandering around our city. In the poem, I recount one of the first walks we took together. We were with my family and two other friends, and Lincoln Park was blocks away. “There’s the craziest statue of Lincoln you’ve got to see.” As we approached it, I could see that he was right. On a plinth stands a stern-looking Lincoln, his hand suspended over the head of an enslaved person as if to stop him from getting up off his knees. The statue commemorates Emancipation, and yet, the tone is off, neither celebratory nor triumphant. Lincoln looks god-like, authoritarian; crouched on his hands and knees, the enslaved person has no choice but to submit to that imperious stone hand. We laughed gently, uncomfortably, and then we grew quiet.
I’m interested in the relationship between power and powerlessness, dynamics that I believe exist even in the most mundane experiences. But two friends walking to a statue of a former president is not mundane—not the friendship, nor the walk, nor the statue. As one draft became another, I kept returning to the question that begins Yeats’s “No Second Troy”: “Why should I blame her that she filled my days / with misery, or that she would of late / have taught to ignorant men most violent ways”? These lines arise in my mind whenever I despair the human conflicts at home and abroad that make every hour feel like an emergency. Years later, after the 2016 election, after the Capitol had been stormed, the memory of that early walk replayed in my mind like a premonition of power’s malignancy. I was not alone in thinking this way; my friend knew what was wrong with the statue then, knew that walking together in D.C. was always a vexed conversation with history. He knew, too, that I was fascinated by “No Second Troy” because it wasn’t only a love poem but a testament to Yeats’s own misreading.
It was never Helen’s fault, the war, but maybe our pursuit of beauty, power, and pleasure is, and Helen is simply the easy name we give to that pursuit. On our walks, in our conversations, the topic habitually turned to literature. My friend and I were both English professors, and books, we believed, could explain everything, human error in particular. Looking at the statue of Emancipation, we both knew that history had been misread and misrepresented. In the poem, I don’t name the president, but I indulge in the misreading:
We did not want to get closer,
but I remember the row of their hands
praising or, had we not
known history, pleading
for one fair word from another
stone-faced tyrant.
In truth, I misremembered the statue, I misrepresent it; in my poem, there is more than one enslaved person at Lincoln’s knees. But this is not the only reason I could not get the draft right. I wanted to capture the feeling of two friends wandering in a city, the ebb and flow of their conversation. Most of all, I wanted the poem to do what letters do: bridge a distance in geography and in time: the future, the past, Washington, D.C., Texas, the thaw that makes some late winter days feel like spring. And the distance between our own words and the words we read to ourselves and to each other. In a subsequent draft, I dropped in lines from “For Grace, After a Party.” To my mind, O’Hara’s is the consummate friendship poem. Two friends wake up the day after a party, hungover with anxiety, ambivalence, and too much booze, and their tenderness for each other, the sheer gravy of familiarity, overrides all. I wanted an ashtray suddenly there. I wanted scrambled eggs.
I still want these things, and I look at the drafts now and remember how badly I wanted to write my way back to my friend and our city. As I fiddled around, it became clear that the poem was an offering. I wanted to show my friend that we would always find our way back to each other. After all, we were true friends. There was a darkness in his light I recognized. We could laugh at the statue together and then alternately brood and marvel over the absurdity, the shame.
At the root of “absurd” sits the Latin word “surdus,” meaning “deaf” or “mute.” We associate absurdity with the ridiculous, so illogical it’s laughable, but etymology nudges the absurd towards the inability to hear, voicelessness, both of which were once considered signs of unreason. There is something absurd about writing and rewriting a poem, as there is something absurd about history and mere living. My friend and I shared a desire to know, to understand, but we knew these were absurd desires—extravagant, spectacular desires. Nevertheless, I wanted to get the poem right. I wanted my friend to open the book—I had signed a contract and suddenly there was a publication date, a deadline—and find the poem and know that we would grow old together, “two wizened codgers hobbling / down Constitution Avenue.” In my mind, even now, putting this in the poem made it true, regardless of its other errors.
A month before the copyedited manuscript is due to the publisher, my friend dies. I am on an early morning walk. It is late winter, and I’m cold, and my phone vibrates in my coat pocket. A name I haven’t seen in years. I answer, and seconds later I am sobbing. Suddenly, unexpectedly, grievously—Daniel is gone. I am alone on the sidewalk, the only person awake in my neighborhood. The phone call ends almost as soon as it began—there are others to call—and I turn where I had not planned to turn because I want to head east. The sun is beginning to rise, and I walk towards it, dumbstruck, believing for a brief moment that Daniel is in that emerging light.
This is an essay on revising a poem that has no value to anyone. I have no advice to give. You cannot keep your friend alive in your poems. You can grieve your friend in poems and find your way back to certain feelings, and so, momentarily, grief might stand side by side with elation and longing. Isn’t there an ashtray suddenly there? I read the poem recently during a classroom visit, a student had requested it, and what I felt as I read was not the return I so wanted when first drafting the poem but a vast and gaping absence blooming inside my body.
Perhaps this is what has remained from first draft to final revision: I miss my friend. He is far from me, he is gone. In the month I had to turn in the manuscript, I decided I could either toss the poem or keep revising. I chose the latter because I am a poet and, naively, I often believe that words matter. And there was something else—was it stubbornness or ruthlessness that I was compelled by a single-minded need to “fix” the poem? Or was it a kind of witchcraft—did I think I could summon him back to life?
In the first draft there is no greeting; the poem simply begins. In subsequent drafts, the addressee is unnamed, so the first line reads, “Dear ________.” It now felt absolutely necessary to name Daniel, though I know he would have been mortified by such exposure. (Daniel would have smirked at the etymological appropriateness of “mortified.”) Revision was a recuperation of sorts; as I pieced together new language, old conversations, other walks, came to mind. Suddenly, the Yeats and O’Hara were not just allusive gestures but reflected the shorthand Daniel and I shared, a way of trading back and forth whatever we were reading. The language of literature was, for better or worse, the meat of our conversations, a fact that now, in his unexpected absence, bothers me. Should we have spoken of the abysses we each held inside ourselves? Were we honest enough with each other?
I don’t know. But revising the poem forged a path through the fresh and unruly grief of losing Daniel. It was a way to spend time with my friend and, like all letters, kept me—keeps me—waiting for a response. His death was a shock, remains a shock. It was instantaneous, unintended, and it was complete as no conversation between friends should ever be. Isn’t friendship our best attempt at utopia? Or paradise? This question is perhaps why I turn, in the end, to a discussion of heaven in the poem, not because Daniel was gone but because those walks were heavenly, how we wandered past monuments and grand institutions and block after block of brick rowhouses. Was it the walking or the talking that made the world, those rambling afternoons, entirely ours?
What do you think, Daniel? It’s winter again. Write back soon.
*
[The earliest version]
Letter to Capitol Hill
The trees are out of leaf
and still
I can’t name their grief,
broken boughs,
tilting habits. They’re old;
I’m new.
I had not expected
such reversal.
By the river
you and I might someday stand
two unfamiliarities, friends parted
by time. Yesterday I looked up
a gray bird in a book
about gray birds, discovering
I’d seen it before.
Yesterday I found two blue gloves,
like those I’d lost long ago,
palm to blue palm
at the edge of our road.
Where am I
is a question I’m trying out
daily, but it does not right
the self, nor find me. Dear Friend,
we circled a park once,
orbiting away from that statue
of a favored president,
at his feet
a row of grateful supplicants.
We did not want to get closer
but let history hiss at our backs,
wishing each man
stood at his own center, wishing
each man stood as a man.
We did not want to get closer,
but I remember the row of their hands
praising or, had we not
known history, pleading
for one far word from another
stone-faced tyrant.
I remember walking with you
and remember
remembering a certain song,
to have taught
most violent ways—who is the teacher,
who the student? I’ve heard everything
and sat in the light of it
and in the dark. In school
we loved to use the word “research”
as if it freed us from complicity,
as if the archive
were not a mirror. I write you
out of time. I write you
after the year’s first storm,
the winter berries frozen
stiff to the thinnest branches.
Please tell Katherine
I read the Catullus
and made her salad. Again I forgot
the dill, but—send love—still
it tasted like home.