The Word That Comes Back

There is a kind of poem that turns on a single word — a word so ordinary it might have gone unnoticed the first time it was spoken. Marie Howe does this in “What the Living Do,” where the word is lovely. Frank O’Hara does it in “The Day Lady Died,” where the word is practically. What these poems know is that recurrence, in the domestic register, is how grief actually behaves. You do not remember your father in oratorical Latin. You remember him because he used to say copacetic before every long car ride, and now the word arrives in a hospital room forty years later and nearly finishes you.

Repetition, in the received schoolroom account, is a rhetorical device. In the household economy of a real family, it is closer to a sacrament. A word repeated by one person over decades becomes an occupied territory. It becomes a way of saying, without ever saying it, that everything is not fine and that the person saying it cannot afford to admit so. Which is why, when the word comes back — from the doorway of the family kitchen into the doorway of a hospital room — it does more work than any twenty new words would do. The old word arrives with its whole history intact.

We will note, since it belongs to this press and we can, that our own James F. Mulhern has written such a poem. It is called “Copacetic,” and it appeared in Academy of the Heart and Mind in February 2020. It begins with a child’s word game —

The word of the day is copacetic.

— and it ends, after a hospital scene the poem earns and does not overexplain, with a line that we have watched him revise across drafts:

When I wake, I find that he has gone.

An earlier draft read At dawn, he was gone. The revision is small and enormous. It moves the moment of loss off any objective, Easter-morning stage and places it inside the speaker’s own waking, where the empty tomb has been relocated into the private morning of a grieving man. We admire the poem for many things — the doorway rhymed against the doorway, the blue bathrobe, the restraint of the ending — but the revision is the tell. Restraint of that kind is not a temperament. It is a decision, made and remade, sentence by sentence.

What we take from all this, for our own reading and writing, is a small rule that has served us well: when a word comes back, ask why. Ask what it was doing the first time, and what work has been added to it in the interval. Ask whether you, as the writer, are the one bringing the word back — or whether the word has come back on its own, from the underground water table of a family, and asked you to make room for it.

The poems that last, we think, are the ones where the writer had the humility to make room.

— The Editors