We often think of epiphany in terms of surge: there’s a leap to an expansive insight, beauty is truth, truth beauty, and we’ll never be the same. But there are also epiphanies that collapse, realizations akin to admitting the tires are flat, or losing air, and any sparks come from the scraping rims. I think of the arch, acidic ending of Pound’s “The Garden.” The poem observes a woman in the park. “She would like someone to speak to her,” Pound writes, “and is almost afraid that I / will commit that indiscretion.”
That last phrase both asserts and swallows its knowledge; it enlarges perspective, perhaps, as epiphany often does, but it leaves the poem with nowhere to go except onward with its realization. Never again the same? Or doomed to be too much the same? This tone is hard to hit; the line is thin between tense wisdom and stylized tiredness. Yet Hayan Charara’s latest collection, These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit, includes many poems that flicker from bitter to wistful, from sour to serene, often with remarkable compression and a middle-aged sense that epiphany may come too late to matter, as in “Self-Portrait in Retrospect,” the book’s first poem:
Young, I thought anger and shame
would in their own time
go away. God,
I was so beautiful then.
“Young / We loved each other and were ignorant,” concludes Yeats’s “After Long Silence.” In Charara’s poem, the realization isn’t about change — we had youth’s stupid rosiness, now we’re wise — but about steadiness, the failure to change: we are still angry, still shameful, with fewer illusions about becoming otherwise. The speaker is more what he was. The book’s series of “Unresolved Haiku” highlight similar realizations. They don’t resist closure — that is, their lack of resolution doesn’t keep things open — but they show unsolvable cases, closed or made irrelevant by time. For example, does the ghost of the poet’s mother have unfinished business? Perhaps, but “either way, / she’s not coming back.” In “How It Happened,” we learn little about how it happened:
Little by little,
and then all of a sudden,
the marriage collapsed.
Or: we learn everything we need to know about how it happened. The marriage ended. There’s no longer a point in explaining why, or how. Revelation, in such poems, emphasizes limits; Charara’s assertions also efface. “I had profound thoughts,” he writes in “Self-Portrait After the Funeral.” “And by the morning I knew / for sure / they were not.”
The humor of such moments, as in Charara’s previous collections, including 2016’s Something Sinister, jolts from deadpan to pensive to dry. There are sometimes dark punchlines that rewire a stately set-up. “My father never asked me / why I gave up / becoming a doctor / to be a poet,” begins “The Day Phil Levine Died.” It concludes with a bang:
He could’ve said a lot
that I might have
listened to:
poems won’t pay bills,
and the companies hiring
don’t give a shit
about all the poems
written in English,
or Arabic,
or any language.
He’d never read
a poem of mine,
and didn’t bother
to ask if anyone
in the world thought
they were any good.
He might’ve
pointed out how poor
and destitute
so many poets died.
But he did none of this.
I told him
I was going to be a poet,
regardless of failure,
and he put a gun to my head
and said, “No.”
“Regardless of failure” could be a caption for many of the pieces—not as a boast, but with droll knowingness. One needs to regard failure closely before disregarding it, after all, not in triumph but to go on. “Last year, I failed / to describe / a spider,” one poems notes. In another, a beetle “stuck on its back” is left “alone / for the ants to devour,” but “the ants did not come.” In “The Day Phil Levine Died,” the failure is also the father’s; the poem proves it. Charara’s crafting of this dramatized moment, in answer to the father’s dramatics, reminds me of his remarks from an interview I conducted with him in 2018:
“I lived in a violent home, where at any moment chaos often erupted, where an uneventful moment could easily, inexplicably, suddenly turn into one dominated by fear, anxiety, and terror. One consequence of living with someone who brings chaos to nearly every aspect of your life is to exert control — any kind possible — over the few areas that aren’t (yet) chaotic. That’s what I did. I found a number of ways to ‘escape’ the violence and, more significantly, to control (even if it was mostly imaginary) the unpredictability and uncertainty of my father’s world. Poetry was one of those escapes—not because it allowed for catharsis or was therapeutic, but because I could impose control onto a poem in ways that I could not on my own life. Today, decades later, this survival mechanism is evident (to me, at least) in the way I control the imagery in my poems, the language, and obviously also what I reveal or obscure.”
The “survival mechanism” of poetic and rhetorical control, in the new collection, also attends to politics and conflict outside of the family. We’re shown the father’s way of handling these conflicts — or the feeling produced by his presence — in poems such as “1979.” The narrator, age seven, and his father are stopped at a red light, and “a guy crossing the street looked / at the Buick, then at us, flipped / us the middle finger” before shouting a slur (Charara is Arab American; his parents were Lebanese immigrants). The poet is ambivalent: “I can’t remember / if, then and there, what the guy said / made any difference to me.” But his father is not: “before the light turned green, my father floored the pedal / and ran him over.”
Is there catharsis in this imagined violence? I read the poem to a friend, and they laughed at the end, and then covered their mouth. Charara’s own mullings of identity and its politics can make similar gestures. In “Personal Political Poem,” the narrator runs out of gas outside of a police station in Detroit. The cops tell him to keep walking; he meets an “Arab gas station attendant — the name embroidered on his shirt — / said Sam,” who may be an old acquaintance, or just a talker:
He said
he went to high school with the mayor
who was the kind of guy
who would jab his finger
at your chest and say,
“You don’t look like a Sam.”
There was something better
out there, he said. He knew
there was. For him. For me.
I told him it was true
he did not look like a Sam.
The narrator listens, and responds with a jab that rejoins. There’s pessimism in the wit, perhaps — the poet doesn’t simply agree that there’s something better out there — but also warmth. That’s true in a companion piece, “Terrorism.” After giving a poetry reading, the narrator is confronted by a young man (who may be Sam’s brother) who says the poet used inappropriate words. The narrator listens and goads:
Which, I asked.
He was getting flustered.
I wanted him to say
“pussy” and “chickenshit.”
He said I should not use words
like that in front of women.
By “women,” he meant
Arab and Muslim women.
Maybe he meant
all women.
The young man goes on to say the poems are “indecent” and “immoral” and that the poet should be ashamed. He’s “a terrible Muslim.” As in Charara’s earlier work, such as the virtuosic consideration of language in “Usage,” each plain phrase slices several ways: “terrible,” calls to “terrorism,” for example. And the call to be “ashamed” might remind a reader that this isn’t a poet who has shed “anger and shame”; he is ashamed, though not for the reasons the young man wants. The poem concludes with restraint and a touching sense that the charges we make against one another, those flares of position, should be seen in a wider, harder context, as also happens in other of the book’s stand-out pieces, such as “The Prize” and the masterful work of meditation and collage, “Fugue.” What the poet doesn’t say is also part of the scene:
“Go fuck yourself”
is what I wanted to say,
but maybe he was right—
I smiled, thanked him
for listening, and told him
I loved his brother.
“Please, will you say
I said hello.”
This is a kiss and a kiss-off, rhetorically mean in the sense of one who’s a “mean cook.” Throughout These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit, Charara generously considers the conflicted epiphanies that swivel between satire and reflection: there’s an annoying seatmate on a plane, who’s also one’s guide to grief; there’s mourning for another’s loss, while feeling grateful that it’s not one’s own; there’s a spider the poet tells his child is “beautiful” and “astonishing,” and then crushes when she’s asleep. “I think this is right / but also hard,” Charara writes in “Self-Portrait with Dog, Possum, Newspaper, and Shovel.” He’s describing killing a possum that his dog injured “as a game.” Charara’s poems note the “games” that hurt us — of politics, family, poetry — and attempt the right, hard responses.
[Published by Milkweed Editions on April 12, 2022, 112 pages, $15.99 paperback]