Happiness

All right.  Try this,

Then.  Every body

I was given Northern Pike by James Wright as part of a collection of poems about what it means to be happy.  So when I read, “All right.  Try this, then”, I thought, "Oooh, one more sweet little happiness sampling!  Don’t mind if I do!  Maybe this one will suit me perfectly."

Then.  Every body

I know and care for,

And every body

Else is going

To die in a loneliness

I can’t imagine and a pain

I don’t know.  We had

That had to be the most depressing introduction to a happiness poem—or to any poem—that I had ever read.  I stopped to look at “every body”.  Instead of your average “everybody” the opposite of “nobody”, I could imagine something more concrete.  Living, breathing bodies that I could see and hear and touch.  People who may share nothing in common beyond the simple fact of mortality.  And then I was amazed at how much meaning could be packed into that single stroke of a spacebar.

I don’t know.  We had

To go on living.  We

The speaker switched to past tense here: “had” instead of “have”.  And it sounded very predetermined to me.  I thought we must be dealing with some higher laws here and not just the last-minute problem-solving antics of man.

To go on living.  We

Untangled the net, we slit

The body of this fish

Open from the hinge of the tail

To a place beneath the chin

I wish I could sing of.

That was a very vivid description of killing a fish.  I remembered the time I prepared a pig.  The pig had been cooked whole in an underground pit so that the body and skin were intact even after the meat underneath was brown.  I remembered feeling a bit like the speaker—alternatively gloomy and awestruck—as I pulled the head off with my hands.

Because if you add the fish killing description to “We had to go on living”, you get an interesting idea.  Life and death might not be as stark of opposites as we as we are accustomed to thinking.  They refuse to remain separate.  Each pole requires the other to exist.  We who find ourselves alive cannot really isolate ourselves from the experience of death.  And the speaker suggests that the dead also need at least some among us to go on living.

I would just as soon we let

The living go on living.

An old poet whom we believe in

Said the same thing, and so

The speaker seems unhappy with the arrangement.  He doesn’t like to be confronted with both life and death, and wishes they would stay in their separate corners.  (I wondered if the “old poet” to whom he refers is Christ who said, “Let the dead buy their dead” in Luke 9:60.)  My question was: Now how are we going to get from our terrifying life-death mixture to the happiness I was promised at the beginning?

Said the same thing, and so

We paused among the dark cattails and prayed

For the muskrats,

For the ripples below their tails,

For the little movements that we knew the crawdads were making under water

For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman.

We prayed for the game warden’s blindness.

We prayed for the road home.

We ate the fish.

There must be something very beautiful in my body,

I am so happy.

Answer: with a prayer.  I loved that.  I had to wonder if the very beautiful thing inside the speaker’s body was not just a northern pike.  Maybe it was his spirit.  I remembered something that my uncle wrote to me: “In our quietest most deeply reflective moments, when we've quieted the world, and are not taking counsel from fears—and for some this doesn't occur until nearing death, but for most we can be still and there most of us find a quiet voice that says we will be resurrected and live eternally.”

I liked the things for which the speaker prays, too:  Ripples made by both seen (muskrats) and unseen (crawdads) forces; a policeman’s right-hand wrist whose function is to draw a gun—to both take and protect life; the game warden whose job is to oversee the balance between life and death; and the road home, our refuge, where we can simply live.

So yes, this “Northern Pike” bit deserves a place among the best happiness poems.