Violence/Ordinary

Image: Moonscape from Wix

Almost every day, I hear the married couple a few houses down shouting at each other. Sometimes they seem to be shouting at someone else too-- I know who it is but leave them that much privacy as I write. And every day as I hear them, I wonder why one of them does not leave. Their misery and anger seem to grow every day and feed each other. Sometimes, I hear shouts from a different house. There is one where a man yells at a dog, a child, his wife. His is the only voice from that house that cuts through the evening and reaches my ears. Then there's another house, right next door and there, the eruptions are less frequent now, the members of the house having grown old. And of course, there is the house where I sit and write this in. How can some form of violence not be a part of human relationships, I wonder.

The first evening when I heard them fight, I was anxious and wondered if and how to intervene. Would a phone call suffice to be an interruption and a moment of change? Or would I be yelled at directly, the noise amplified manifold as they yelled at me through the receiver? What is the right thing to do when you hear people go on being unhappy, sticking to their ways, doing the same things every day, wasting precious breath, health, time?

Most evenings when I hear them fight, I am reminded of the late Eavan Bolands' poem "Domestic Violence." It's a personal favourite that has stayed with me, lines appearing here and there as if cues to help make sense of the poem, myself, the world.

*

1.

It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk Pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans. Pleased to meet you meat to please you said the butcher's sign in the window in the village.

Everything changed the year that we got married.

And after that we moved out to the suburbs.

How young we were, how ignorant, how ready

to think the only history was our own.

And there was a couple who quarreled into the night,

Their voices high, sharp:

nothing is ever entirely

right in the lives of those who love each other.

2.

In that season suddenly our island

Broke out its old sores for all to see.

We saw them too.

We stood there wondering how

the salt horizons and the Dublin hills,

the rivers, table mountains, Viking marshes

we thought we knew

had been made to shiver

into our ancient twelve by fifteen television

which gave them back as gray and grayer tears

and killings, killings, killings,

then moonlight-colored funerals:

nothing we said not then, not later, fathomed what it is is wrong in the lives of those who hate each other.

3.

And if the provenance of memory is only that—remember, not atone— and if I can be safe in the weak spring light in that kitchen, then

why is there another kitchen, spring light always darkening in it and a woman whispering to a man over and over what else could we have done?

4.

We failed our moment or our moment failed us. The times were grand in size and we were small. Why do I write that when I don't believe it?

We lived our lives, were happy, stayed as one.

Children were born and raised here

and are gone,

including ours.

As for that couple did we ever

find out who they were

and did we want to?

I think we know. I think we always knew.

*

What makes up our lives apart from an excruciatingly large amount of little moments? These little moments are too big for us to look at except perhaps with distance. Imagine fighting with your friend, your partner, your lover. In that moment is the culmination of everything that has brought you to life, till that particular point, all the things you have done, all the things that have been done to you, all the words you have read, the music you have heard, everything you have hated and loved that has shaped you. And of course, the same goes for the person you are fighting with. And perhaps the place you stand in too has its own history between the two of you, its own history before the two of you. But you cannot see any of that. All you are in that moment is the anger and hatred and jealousy that you cannot escape out of to your bigger self, the self that sees and distances if required, but always loves as the "who" and the "what" change.

In contrast to Eavan Boland's "Domestic Violence," I am also reminded of Mary Szybist's "To you again." It too is a portrait of domestic intimacy, love, just not shattered or strained in the same way. It is coated with ordinariness, the kind of ordinariness that I, perhaps like many others, have been privy to, the kind of ordinariness that holds and sometimes hides all the love that we feel for each other. When I hear the couples fighting, some days I wish I could escape from the first poem into the warmth of the second one. And thanks to the poet, I can. I do.

*

Again this morning my eyes woke up too close

to your eyes,

their almost green orbs

too heavy-lidded to really look back.

To wake up next to you

is ordinary. I do not even need to look at you

to see you. But I do look. So when you come to me

in your opulent sadness, I see you do not want me

to unbutton you so I cannot do the one thing

I can do. Now it is almost one a.m. I am still at my desk

and you are upstairs at your desk a staircase away from me. Already it is years

of you a staircase away from me. To be near you

and not near you is ordinary.

You are ordinary.

Still, how many afternoons have I spent peeling blue paint from

our porch steps, peering above hedgerows, the few parked cars for the first

glimpse of you. How many hours under the overgrown, pink Camillas, thinking

the color was wrong for you, thinking you'd appear

after my next blink.

Soon you'll come down the stairs to tell me something. And I'll say,

okay. Okay. I'll say it like that, say it just like

that, I'll go on being your never-enough.

It's not the best in you I long for. It's when you're noteless,

numb at the ends of my fingers, all is all. I say it is.

*