"The Hereafter"

I know I've written about this before on another blog. Yeah, I'm copy-pasting parts of it. But I want to address it again, because a) it's still my favorite poem, b) I'm heading back to JHU for a reading Friday night and I'm getting all nostalgic about the place that introduced me to my favorite poem and poet, and c) I've finally read the poem in the context of the larger work it's drawn from, and that gave me a totally different perspective on it than that which I had when I first read it, unaware that it came from something larger.

So, for not the first time, but hopefully for the better, here is "The Hereafter" by Andrew Hudgins:

Some people as they die grow fierce, afraid.
They see a bright light, offer frantic prayers,
and try to climb them, like Jacob’s ladder, up
to heaven. Others, never wavering,
inhabit heaven years before they die,
so certain of their grace they can describe,
down to the gingerbread around the eaves,
the cottage God has saved for them. For hours
they’ll talk of how the willow will not weep,
the flowering Judas not betray. They’ll talk
of how they’ll finally learn to play the flute
and speak good French.

Still others know they’ll rot                                                

and their flesh turn to earth, which will become
live oaks, spreading their leaves in August light.
The green cathedral glow that shines through them
will light grandchildren playing hide-and-seek
inside the grove. My next-door neighbor says
he’s glad the buzzards will at last give wings
to those of us who’ve envied swifts as they
swoop, twist, and race through tight mosquito runs.

And some—my brother’s one—anticipate
the grave as if it were a chair pulled up
before a fire on winter nights. His ghost,
he thinks, will slouch into the velvet cushion,
a bourbon and branch water in its hand.
I’ve even met a man who says the soul
will come back in another skin—the way
a renter moves from house to house. Myself,
I’d like to come back as my father’s hound.
Or something fast: a deer, a rust-red fox.

For so long I have thought of us as nails
God drives into the oak floor of this world,
it’s hard to comprehend the hammer turned
to claw me out. I’m joking, mostly. I love
the possibilities—not one or two
but all of them. So if I had to choose,
pick only one and let the others go,
my death would be less strange, less rich, less like
a dizzying swig of fine rotgut. I roll
the busthead, slow, across my tongue and taste
the copper coils, the mockingbird that died
from fumes and plunged, wings spread, into the mash.
And underneath it all, just barely there,
I find the scorched-nut hint of corn that grew
in fields I walked, flourished beneath a sun
that warmed my skin, swaying in a changing wind
that tousled, stung, caressed, and toppled me.

The poem is, in short, about the possibilities of death. Though it addresses the many different experiences of death, the poem emphasizes the impossibility of envisioning or comprehending death completely because we are accustomed, perhaps out of sheer necessity in order to keep on living, to view ourselves as permanent fixtures, and our lives as permanent backdrops for our beings. Even so, it examines the multitude of different visions people have (if from this limited perspective) of not only life after death, but of the experience of death itself.

Hudgins explores these different ways that people view death towards more than just the end of exploring how they view the grave. He explores them because the way people experience their deaths while alive says something about their experience of living. Some live lives in fear, constantly looking to the end result and never living in the present. Some live fully in the future and pay no mind to their shortcomings or hardships in present life, because of the promise of the future. Some view themselves as part of something larger, and find a kind of peace in that. Some see life as a long haul, and then finally a slow, quiet release from the push and pull of it. Some see life as a cycle, a circle, not a straight line.

Throughout it all, the poem takes a pointedly undogmatic view of death. The narrator views death not as an absolute, objective experience or tangible thing that exists with certain properties and occurs in certain ways, but embraces all views of death, as each has a different thing to offer. He loves all of them. By using the word “love,” he puts a positive, or at least tender, overtone on the concept of death, as if one’s death is an expression of one’s person. By loving each concept of death, you love each person, and vice-versa: by loving each person, you love and appreciate the beauty inherent in whatever form their vision of death takes, because it is an extension of themselves.

Though he looks on each view of death with tenderness and wonder, he admits that he must, at some point, “choose, pick only one and let the others go.” His death must be his own experience, and the way he experiences it will be an expression of his life and his particular person. Thusly, he envisions himself experiencing his death almost as a collection of the sensations he has felt in life.

This is where the experience of the poem becomes 100x more intense and poignant in context than it is on its own. By the time you get to this poem, reading it context, you've already lived and breathed this life right along with the narrator. It's part of a larger work called After the Lost War: A Narrative, a book-length collection of poems detailing the life of Sidney Lanier, a mostly-forgotten 19th century poet and Civil War veteran. A biography in verse, if you will. Though it's less biography and more like "biographical fiction," if such a genre exists. Little is known about the actual details of the life of Sidney Lanier, so the anecdotes the book gives--from the wonder at being lost in the tall marsh grasses as a child, completely disoriented yet walking onward, following the insects, somehow never afraid of being lost; to burying the bodies left strewn on the field after a battle; to laying in the last stages of his life beneath his wife, who crawls atop him and makes passionate, heartwrenching love to his ailing body that can no longer reciprocate the physicality of their love, can no longer dwell in that intimate space with her, can no longer comfort her, both of them grieving what has already begun but which cannot be brought to conclusion in manner that is in either of their control--striking and captivating as they are, have to be assumed to be fiction.

But that's another aspect of the work that sets it apart from other works of long-form, narrative verse like Brad Leithauser's Darlington's Fall, James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover, or Derek Walcott's Omeros (or even my own long-form work, though I'm not comparing it to these greats by any means): After the Lost War does not give an account of Lanier's life in an unbroken narrative, with stanzas and chapters covering all the transitions from one moment in his life to the next, though it is still narrative poetry. Rather, its poems are a collection of singular stories and anecdotes. It presents them to you much as someone might tell them to you on a porch, on an evening slow to fade to twilight, while smoking and sipping lemonade, or bourbon, recalling the most striking moments in their life, all the little narratives that often don't assemble themselves into a neat arc, but form the uneven, undulating symphony of arcs of which a life is composed.

Just the way that Hudgins's narrator postulates that he'd like to experience his dying.

The whole concept of experiencing death as a collection of sensations you’ve had in life I love in itself. I have many flashbulb image memories from my childhood that I am not clear where they came from, or why I remember them, but their moods and emotions are so strong as to have hovered over me all my life. But beyond the general concept, it is this final image that resonates most with me. Part of the reason I have really come to love this poem more and more, year after year, is that not only is it amazingly written (in iambic pentameter, a meter after my own heart) with stirring, moving imagery, but that final image continues to haunt me time after time.

Not only is this because it’s a great image, but it’s one that reminds me strongly of an image from my own life. The image I have is one that, if I were to experience death as Hudgins's Lanier does, as a collection of those sensations from our lives that have bored themselves into our souls, this would be one of them. It was on the day Dan, Patrick, and I drove from Nashville to Lynchburg, Tennessee to see the Jack Daniels distillery. We drove for an hour and a half each way, through the midlands of Tennessee, which are flat, rural, mostly grassland, and extremely hot. I remember us setting out on the road to Lynchburg, getting off the interstate and onto the smaller highway that seemed to empty more and more as it got deeper into the midlands.

But what stayed with me the most was the drive back. It was 104 degrees that day, with no shade. The smells of the distillery were still with me; I could still feel the fumes of sour ferment swooping across my face and colliding with my sinuses as we were allowed the chance to open the giant oak barrels and peer in. We were driving around a corner after a long stretch of straight land, overgrown grasses on all sides of us, with a little white wooden church to the left of us. The air seemed swollen and the heat seemed to hang over everything like a mosquito net, and I was in the backseat in a state of half-consciousness, halfway to sleep but still catching glimpses of the midlands out the window as we drove through it.

And I can’t explain why, but that image, like the ones in Hudgins’s poem, “warmed my skin, swaying in a changing wind/that tousled, stung, caressed, and toppled me.”