TRANSCRIPT

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

I was one of those kids mothers wanted their sons to make friends with. To their knowledge, I never got in trouble, I completed my homework, I showed respect to parents, teachers, and coaches alike. Despite my protests, my mother beamed proudly and said yes — even though these playdates left me bruised. One: I didn’t like being a walking model for adolescent behavior and two: no one wants a goody two-shoes foisted upon them. 

Setting an example was burdensome, which is why I think basketball royalty Charles Barkley advised sports fans to not look up to him, especially children. In his opinion, children should look to their parents and community members. In principle, I agreed.

But sometimes we are chosen, and learn to accept the responsibility of being paragons of decency and wisdom. Given the challenges we face on the daily, it is human for us to seek out those who seem to have it figured out, be they mentors or people who we think of in the face of some crisis. When faced with any crucial decision, my friend Salvatore frequently utters, “What would such and such do?”

However, what happens when even our role models lose clarity, when the world is bereft of understanding? Today’s poem presents such a figure who knows whatever grasp we have on life, it is impermanent. We are returned back to the mysteries.  

Gertrude: In the Rooms
by Kate Daniels

Sometimes I still think of Gertrude
and all her privacies, of the tenuous
sheen of her thin gray hair,
and the sculptural, elegant way
she piled it high up on her head. 
                                                Even now
typing these simple words, vividly
she returns, conjuring the images
that made her real, transcending
the withered anonymities of elderly
citizens one passes in the street
without even noticing a whole life
is walking by…

                                   Gertrude’s
agony seemed different from ours.
Older. Well-thumbed. Polite
And buckled to her person
Like a well-fitting garment. Ours?
Untamed, sharp-edged and shouting.
Hungry infant, railing in a crib. Not
noiseless and ancient like hers.
Nor glamorous as a hologram
Of anguish, flickering and glittering
with broken fragments of
captured light which lit her up
inside her grief and made her 
glow…

                 Surely she could not 
be as fragile as she looked,
carrying that weight. We craved
the object lesson of her tragedy
thinking it would teach us how
to transcend our sobbing,
corporeal essences that grieved
us so, and held us back as we
kept on searching for the sure
way out: the red door marked exit
that Gertrude (we assumed)
had passed through long before.

If you’re lucky, she once said
elliptically and apropos of nothing
specific, It will bring you to your knees,
speaking so softly we could barely
even hear her, her legs crossed at the ankles
arranged off center, cotillion style
of the debutante she once had been.
Her vein-swollen, bony hand
gestured midpoint of her chest
as if something still lodged there
that had never broken free.

The rest of us felt shocked then—or I did
anyway—perceiving the torment
still living inside her that we thought 
she had conquered. The mystery was how
someone insignificant and ordinary
as Gertrude had redistributed 
that weight, and reoriented
the magnetic poles that for us
always defaulted to agony.

She had been our hero, 
icon of a victory that could 
one day be ours if we learned
to live as Gertrude lived: elegant
and stoical, silencing our constant
clamoring for relief. But now
here she was: testifying to victory
or defeat? We could not tell, and that
Fucked us up. Oracular and 
Eternal was what we’d
thought she was. In possession
of the answer. Instead, 
her image and her words—
It will bring you to your knees
turned us back into ourselves, 
where the suffering was, 
and the mystery, and offered
no answer but the hard shock
of our knees knocking against
the earth, and the prickling burn
of blood breaking its barrier of skin
and starting to flow. 

"Gertrude: In the Rooms" by Kate Daniels. Used by permission of the poet.