Poem of the Week | April 30, 2018

A Discourse on the Method

 
“Because aside from the stars I know nothing in the world but fire which produces light,  I studied how to make everything belonging to the nature of fire very clearly  understandable.”                     –Descartes, Discourse on the Method (1637)
 
How I fed it, wad after wad,
toilet paper in the drizzling dark,
 
the week I went out
into the hundred mile wilderness
 
to become a man. It didn’t take
(the fire, I mean), each offering
 
puffing up damply
in smoke, the roll growing thinner
 
& thinner, & already (again)
the sharp need to shit.
 
Fire can introduce different colors
& diverse other qualities into different bodies,
 
but beside my body, my buddy
Chris watched me not-make fire;
 
Chris who I dragged along
on this spirit-quest without thinking
 
that sharing a one-man tent might
look, on the outside, a little bit
 
like seduction; Chris, who wasn’t gay,
but who wasn’t not gay, either,
 
when he’d had enough to drink,
but here, without beer,
 
was our dead end. The markers we thought
we were following, the trail that
 
melts some bodies & hardens others,
consumes them almost completely,
 
the pines all stacked like fetches in a quiver
the night the mice drummed down
 
our sleeping bags to feast
on my half-eaten Cliff Bar
 
with their weird alien hands,
as admirable as anything
 
that occurs in nature. Isn’t this,
after all, what I wanted?
 
To be miserable & drenched with it?
To come back, transmuted from cinders
 
into glass & cut irrevocably,
solely by the violence of my actions?
 
To not see, even momentarily, who,
or what, I wasn’t? But this poem
 
isn’t about fire, how it sometimes has heat
without light & sometimes light
 
without heat, but rather how the rain,
thickening, snuffed mine out
 
into scores of ashy scratches,
& even these dissolved completely.
 
 

Author’s Note:

In 2008 I received a grant to hike the 100-Mile Wilderness and write poems about the experience. I never finished the hike. After a dry summer, it down-poured nonstop the week I set out on the trail. I was twenty-years-old at the time, a rule-follower, and respected too reverently the Appalachian Trail’s guidelines concerning the use of gasoline. To my chagrin, over the entire five days (because I only made it five days), I watched as hiker after hiker squirted gasoline into an empty tuna can, dropped a lit match in it, and cooked their freeze-dried dinner in a matter of minutes. Meanwhile I’d attempt futilely to construct a fire using my best Boy Scout skills, building a teepee of twigs and damp bark. Eventually, desperation lead me to use what little toilet paper I brought with me as kindling. Eventually, desperation lead me to eat my freeze-dried packaged dinners dry.
 
I’ve been trying to write a poem for the better part of the past decade about how this trip, this inability to construct a fire, intersected with a troubled coming out and a complicated self-image. Each summer my religious family lived in their off-the-grid cabin in the woods, and I spent my whole childhood watching my father build fires out of nothing. I felt like a failure in myriad ways during that hike, and I’ve been trying to write this failure into a poem ever since. It was not until I encountered Descartes’s “A Discourse of a Method” where he describes—in painstaking detail—the nature of light, particularly the different properties of fire, that I found a gateway into this poem. The way I incorporate a source text is inspired after Kathryn Neurnberger’s “The Symbolic Head (1883) as When Was the Last Time?,” the opening poem from her visionary book The End of Pink.