TRANSCRIPT

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

My friend Lorrie is a fiction writer, and she is very funny. I said as much to her, at a favorite pan-Asian restaurant among a group of coworkers. I confessed rather proudly, “I am reading your corpus.” Not missing a beat, Lorrie said, “You’re reading my corpse?” A fitting pun. 

We typically talk about an author’s collected works only after they die or no longer continue to write. Corpus is Latin for body. It is the root for many words including corporeal, corporation, esprit de corps, habeas corpus, et cetera. The zingers kept coming like that all night.

The next morning, I contemplated how words convey an author’s demeanor, the texture of their unique thoughts. In this way, poems and stories, both fictional and personal, encased in books over time emerge collectively as a portrait of the author. This presence of a self on the page is as real as the person’s presence on earth. As writers, we invite scrutiny; we put ourselves in the position of being read by readers. And yet, as much as a poem renders us hyper visible, we also know language imprisons. We run the risk of being misread.

Today’s poem explores the situation of writing ourselves out of fixed meanings that confine us to labels, to disempowering social and political realities.

To Be Longing
by Elizabeth Willis

Secrecy creates members and outsiders.

Revelation turns belonging into law.

If you are a member, what do you belong to. You belong to us but
you have to say so.

You have to turn your life into a book.

You have to make an effigy of your days.

When you write it down, you give it a body, and the body takes
your name.

A letter may stand in for a name that can’t be said or a face that
can’t be seen. A space to carry all its meaning in what isn’t said.

Bound by syntax, a word may yet contain boundlessness.

Even god  is a word.

A gap in the text to show how distance can tear anything apart.

Put a fence around this feeling. A story takes shape fitfully, in 
episodes. 

The eye that sees you is larger than the sun.

Dear reader. 

She’s looking for a way between the words. To make of this chaos
a forest, of the forest a house, and of this house a book. 

If the word is law, is it a question or a statement.

It sneaks into the bedroom as the church climbs through the
window. 

A word is being written in a Book of Creation. A body taken by
the thigh is given the name of a nation.

A word like wife  or marriage will linger in a courtroom, its
legislation sending you to hell or to heaven.

It will draw an imaginary line between domestic and civic worlds.
It will build a fence around the meadow of an American dream.

A word like brother  or sister can rearrange the world.

Everything can be translated into yes and no, darkness and light. 
Like Adam, every writer falls.

“Word” is saving a file called “To Be.”

Raw. Infinitive. Query. A signal into space.

I want to survive. I want to outlast it.

“To Be Longing” by Elizabeth Willis from LIONTAMING IN AMERICA © 2024 Elizabeth Willis. Used by permission of New Directions Press.