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Today's poem is by Kathryn Nuernberger

It's Like She Loves Us and Like She Hates Us
        Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there's a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can't help people knowing about you.
                                                                                                —Diane Arbus

Sometimes I feel like that Diane Arbus portrait
of a woman with curlers in her hair and a cigarette
in her well-manicured hand staring too long
at the camera. Sometimes I feel like every character
I meet is an allegory of myself. John fell
from a ladder in his barn and broke his lawn mower
with his body but wasn't hurt himself at all.
It was so astonishing he's already posted about it
on Facebook three times. Reading between the lines,
you can tell he's worried maybe he actually died
in that fall. So I mess with him in the comments
and say something to that effect. He wonders if
there's a German word for this feeling. I tell him
there's a German exchange student crashing
at my house right now playing Hot Lava
with my kid. They call it lava in German too.
The German short "a" is so much like ours
it may as well be the same word. I'm worried
that John is really dead and the rest of us with him,
because there's no word for this feeling —
not even in German — and that's how you know.
I've been writing lecture notes this morning,
summarizing Plato's Cave for nineteen-year-olds
who will no doubt conclude getting a little high
is the way out. I assume this because that's what I did.
I have to remind myself I am not everybody.
Everybody in the cave is chained and suffering.
I have an animation to show them that retells the story
in clay, like a Gumby episode, except every still
frame echoes that government report on torture
released last month that is just one more example
of our denials as a society and complicity as a nation,
bolstered by the fact that photographic evidence
was censored and only later released through leaks.
I've read that torturers come to like their work and any
of us could, because we don't have a way to understand
another person's pain and we really want to understand
each other. My notes also include Susan Sontag,
who said fifty years ago in her essay on Plato
and photography, "Enough with the pictures already."
She was thinking of Dachau and thinking of Arbus.
The pictures, she said, feel like they're breaking
something inside ourselves we might have liked to keep.
I'd like to remember what picture I was looking at
when I was sober enough to realize there is no light
but this light. Maybe I just looked out the window,
as I did this morning, and saw my neighbor on his
mower, smoothing his lawn into that grassy plane
he likes so well. I felt a little closer to him, like he's
one of those portraits Sontag was talking about,
his face so hardened it's repelling at first, which is
why Sontag derides them so forcefully. I've found,
though, if you can make yourself hold on, all the faces
Diane Arbus made of people preparing to turn on
their show become so vulnerably human you start to fall
in love a little with the relentlessness of gazes. Even
the ones that are pathetic. Even the ones that are
pitiable. Even the ones that terrify for how much
they look like you. John, I think being dead suits me.



Copyright © 2020 Kathryn Nuernberger All rights reserved
from Rue
BOA Editions
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission

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