NaPoWriMo Day 14: Answering the Unanswerable

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “Outbreaks” by Kitchen McKeown

• Prompt

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

What are some questions you find yourself asking lately? If you ask them often, they’re likely unanswerable. Me, I find myself asking what I’ll have for dinner today—a question which is, yes, unanswerable. But then I also wonder what I’m doing with my life, which is equally unanswerable.

Spend 8-10 minutes just thinking of those questions you’re asking. You might not even be asking them directly, they’re simply lingering in the ways you spend your time, in what you pay attention to in your life. Make a list; don’t strive for answers just yet.

Poem: “Outbreaks” by Kitchen McKeown

i search for god but the sun is a penny.
looper moths form halos beneath the streetlamps.
summer’s ghostly curtains. check the weather.
haze. i search for god but the moon is gone.
i search for comfort, and the eels come.
they cross my meadow every twilight,
up to seven feet in length, traversing
mountain napes with open eager mouths.
the fires heaved them from the rivers,
now they curve themselves across
the precipice of life, toward black oceans.
haunted yellow eyes. looper moths
become a gentle cloud. i become an eel,
then rethink it. i cough. reveal a wet moth.
some gray little heart. it’s all hazy now.
pale as sunbleached wood, i go forth.
in a slant of moonlight, i search for comfort.
the neon 24-hour fried chicken sign
gleams behind the pines.
i crawl in the moss. it is easy to find god.
she is a cluster of eels beneath my palms.
i ask of her, am i doing any of this life right?
and she, with her many mouths,
says nothing.

What I’m struck by, whenever I read this poem, is the endless sense of transformation. It contains a sense of smallness and mundanity reinterpreted by metaphor, and the overabundance of the spiritual in the ordinary. The poem’s quest for god is asymptotic: god eludes the speaker by way of transformation, and says nothing when the poem finds divinity. Yet the poem meets something bigger than itself, and so do we readers.

It’s almost like god is a hole that can’t be filled in this poem, and the speaker has to keep transforming themselves to find god. I’m also struck by this poem’s relationship to identity: the speaker, a lowercase “i”, becomes an eel, trying to transform towards god, and god simply transforms away. Meanwhile, the poem is populated with moths and streetlamps, pine trees and neon signs.

What does any of it mean?

There are two transformations happening in this piece, the transformation of the speaker and the transformation of divinity/comfort, both moving through metaphor at a rate faster than we can keep up with. It’s as though the poem orbits an empty center with a heavy gravitational pull, an asymptote whose journey is its destination. We never hear god speak, just as we never settle on a concrete sense of self or of place, but that doesn’t mean the journey hasn’t been worth it.

Also, why eels? They’re not exactly comforting to look at. Personally, whenever I see potentially-electric river snakes sliming around with their gaping mouths, I think, among other things, “this is not comforting to look at.” There’s a certain irony to this particular image, but the eels also feel relevant to this search for god and self, which constantly loops and folds and twists and curves like eels’ bodies do. The eels themselves feel like agents of god: angels, in a way, or else guideposts towards what the speaker is looking for. Imbued with a certain strange holiness, these eels cluster beneath the speaker’s palm to become god, which results in this wonderful final movement:

i crawl in the moss. it is easy to find god.
she is a cluster of eels beneath my palms.
i ask of her, am i doing any of this life right?
and she, with her many mouths,
says nothing.

The poem never answers the speaker’s questions, but, in a way, the evolution of the question is the answer. I’ll leave you with Rainer Maria Rilke’s take on the whole conundrum:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Prompt

Take at least one of the questions you wrote down in your freewrite. Search for the answer or answers in your poem. Allow yourself multiple answers, answers that contradict each other, or answers as equally impossible as the questions. Let the poem guide you to answers through your use of devices like imagery and metaphor. 

Remember to be playful, and to open yourself to possibility in the work.