Excerpt from ‘Before I Get to My Desk —

Two years after’

Before getting to my desk this morning I read a poem by the Hungarian Miklós Radnóti, who died in a ditch while performing forced labor during World War II but whose notebook of poems was found upon his exhumation in the raincoat that covered his body. One of his poems reminds me what to do, despite anxiety that feels like a wandering, ambient pain: “pain that wanders around / but you start again as if you had wings.” The notebook nestled in consolation next to his dead body for over a year before it was found.

Before I get to my desk this morning my window has reminded me with its frame of the contrasts of a Mark Rothko painting available in nature’s browns and blues, and my dreams have been filled with the strange creatures that inhabit the canvases of Arshile Gorky, especially those with names like Tracking Down Guiltless Doves. Who, what hunter, tracks down guiltless doves, I think before I can stop myself. Start again as if you had wings, Miklos reminds me.

Before my desk calls, the purple irises have sprung up, lovely weeds that must have something tasteless at their heart, for the deer have left them. And the flowering pear tree that snowed petals down on us all last week as we went from the car to the house to the car to the house, to soccer, to baseball, to band, and back again — that flowering pear readies itself to rain pollen next.

Before I get to my desk a bird of the same type that is dead near our tiny fish pond has visited the dead one’s body. Don’t talk about it, Willem says — all of eleven, the older worried his younger brother will notice, as he notes he must remember his trombone today or miss the performance. Don’t show him. It’s too sad. Later Luke will pass by without seeing.

When Willem shows this level of consideration for his brother, I hold myself back from telling him the story someone told me about poet Robert Desnos saving a whole train car of Jewish persons from the Holocaust, inspiring each of them to recite a poem aloud to him until the guard could no longer see them as the guard had been trained to — as inhuman — but as fulfilling this fundamental human function of reciting words even unto what is surely oblivion. Could they be shot after such an act, though the ditch called to them? These were saved, but Miklos’s widow had a book, not a man, afterwards.

Here is Miklos again: All this could happen! The moon is so round today! / Don’t walk past me, friend. I save these stories for a day Willem can hear them, but when is that day?

Soon, I fear — or worse, the day has already past. In a way I would not have picked for him, another story has already been told to him, one seemingly ahistorical yet closer to home. In the very town in which we live, Sandy Hook, Connecticut, twenty children and six educators are murdered in their classrooms. Writing it has become a kind of practice, but speaking it is still unnatural, to him or anyone, but especially to him. Should I begin to tell him about Desnos, he might ask me what this has to do with that. And what would I say?

Start again as if you had wings. Yes.

How do essays and poems talk to each other over so many answerless silences, and through and past the very events that threaten to (and sometimes do) murder their speakers? Can one art sing to another as I did in my pew those years ago as a child, a call and response rooted in marrow and bone? The essay tells me (from the Latin) to try. The poem says sing, make. What would a trying song be? A making try? Making my days in this stunned and beautiful town, I can’t help but see that we are with and of the arrow that pierces us.

Newtown resident Carol Ann Davis is Director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Fairfield University. Her latest book, “The Nail in the Tree: On Art, Violence, and Childhood” (Tupelo Press, 2020), narrates her experience raising her two sons on the day of the Sandy Hook shootings and during its aftermath.