The Yes I Found
Parakeets of Brooklyn by Gerry LaFemina
Salutations, bibliophiles.
Today, I’m very excited to bring you Holly Starley.
Holly writes Holly Starley's Rolling Desk, where she writes essays from her van, Ruby, about life on the road (I’m very jealous of her lifestyle), and offers other writers guidance on ushering vision to the page.
In the following essay, Holly describes being ‘stunned’ as she describes reading the poetry collection she’s revisited again and again throughout her life. I’d use the same word to describe how I felt on reading Holly’s piece. Enjoy!
I read voraciously in my youth. But I did so as I did much in my life then—leaving my deeply religious childhood home as a teen, marrying after a five-month courtship, backpacking up the US East Coast solo (strappy heels and hiking boots in tow)—for the love of story and of escape and of the next adventure. Books in the aggregate have everything to do with who I was / am becoming. But I wasn’t one to return to a tome.
Then came Gerry LaFemina’s Parakeets of Brooklyn. I kept reopening the pages. I circled connections, squiggly underlined passages, dropped exclamation points in the margins. While other books stayed only briefly during that seven-month, post-divorce trek, LaFemina’s remained.
I’m not sure how I’d have articulated then what moved me in this collection of poetry and prose poems. I’d likely have pointed to line breaks that, amid exquisite turns of phrase, create unexpected juxtapositions, mirroring the mind’s search for understanding. In “Poem Folded into a Made Bed, Monterey Hotel, California,” otters shed kelp vine belts:
the way a woman’s skirt glissades the length of her legs once pulled below the hips— the pale skin exposed, almost glowing. If there’s a definition of beauty it’s this instant—the first time. The momentary hush of breath like the tidal slide outward. Like a soul departing.
We discover a body in a chair alongside a maid in a motel room. We recall how, earlier, a girl kissed a monkey and her “embarrassment / glowed like the yellow stop lights on the main drag.” So much is here—the propensity of early arousal for both shame and marvel, the iterations of shape and form all around us, how life interminably becomes death, an outward tide that will come back in.
Returning to Parakeets nearly two decades later, I search—among the nascent eroticism of boyhood, the race-tracks and baseball cards, the gritty streets of Brooklyn—for myself. For I, a young woman, wobbly in the aftermath of a friend’s sudden death, the final fizzles of my marriage, and an earlier loss I held private, had clearly found myself here. But where and what specifically did I unearth?
The answer comes in triplicate. A young boy’s “need for a secret place” in “A Poem Written on the Back of a Runaway’s Note” no doubt mirrored desires from own preadolescence. Deep in a poem called “Silver Lake,” I find a devastating line. “I’ve always dreamt of drowning.” In the same stanza, illegally swimming in a reservoir (where other boys have drowned) is, for the narrator, “the truest freedom.” Did I see that line then? Did it gut me like it might have? Wasn’t that the quintessence of my struggling—how unfathomably great the price of freedom could be?
The second self-discovery is so unexpected a “ha” escapes my lips when I come to “The Hymn of Insomniacs & the Lonely”:
Soft growls of diesel engines in lots beside gas stations & beside, too, this motel where we have stopped, too tired to rub love into our bodies, the beds soft & small so we have to sleep like married couples
Like a skilled charmer, the poem’s images pull from the basket of my memory a poem I long ago crafted; it sways in place, tongue flickering, so I can study it, see how I was imitating. I was making a fresh start in Seattle, on the other side of the country from my marriage. I thought then maybe I was a poet. I cleared a space among ubiquitous art projects on the kitchen table of my new apartment. Heady incense wafted from my new roommate’s closed door. I worked those lines over and over, something about the sound of gravel beneath tires, rolling away, paired with the tinkle of ice in a glass.
Soon, it happens again. “Outside I hear the air brakes of another semi / settling in for the night, know that lot lizards are out there.” The narrator is “just another man trying to change / his circumstances.” Before me springs to life another old piece of writing I’d long lost to a hard drive crash. This one I typed, later, on that backpack journey. I remember staring at the window of an NYC brownstone come hostel. The small panes, framed in chipped white paint, were night-black. Maybe a sliver of moon witnessed my attempt to recreate the song of sirens and silence and the swish of tires.
What a joy to recall these early attempts at “becoming a writer.” Here lay the discovery that having the rhythms of writers whose voices I loved in my head was the best school for my craft.
As to the third unearthing, I’ll admit to maybe having buried the lead. A single prose poem among this collection never left me. What I mean is it would return to me over the years—not often but consistently. I would be standing at the sink washing dishes, riding my bike down a lonely coast, lying in the bed at the back of my van, and there “Bath” would be.
This prose poem is near the end of Parakeets, and I was tempted to go straight to it. But I opted for restraint. At last, I flip the page, and there it is—three paragraphs, almost exactly half the page. It’s almost eerie. You know how you’ll be reading something, but your attention keeps being drawn away, so you find yourself reading the same paragraph again and again? It’s like that. The distance isn’t there. A few lines, a handful of stanzas from other pieces are immediately familiar, and I remember adoring them. But with “Bath,” it’s like I read it yesterday.
The narrator imagines a picture that never actually came into existence “on a roll of film lost on the way to the lab: she’s laying in a bathtub water up to the porcelain’s collar; islands of breast and leg & abdomen rising from the suds, the geography of bodies, the cartography of flesh.”
I remember feeling stunned. I would return to it, and again, be stunned. I still am a little but in a softer way. I understand myself better. So, I’m stunned by the beauty, no longer with the sting of what I can only describe as embarrassment, as if I’d been seen in a way I couldn’t see myself.
I was a woman who had been married and divorced. Before that, I had given birth as a teen and lost my infant to adoption. And yet the intimacy in this world of flesh was to me unknown territory, a place I longed to explore more than any other.
Let me show you two bathtubs that must have come to my mind. In a tiny apartment nearly a decade earlier, my swollen belly rose above the water’s edge. I marveled as it took on beautifully misshapen forms. A shoulder pressed upward. A foot or fist flailed toward the world the being growing inside me was about to enter. And I begged her forgiveness for the decision I was about to make.
And then there was the bath drawn for me in kindness, lit candles lining the edge of the tub, overflowing from the counters. We, my then husband and I, hadn’t quite given into the reality that we’d soon part. My reaction, I can’t remember what it was, hurt him. An unintentional hurt again. He turned away. I disrobed behind the shut door, and he was gone when I emerged wrapped in my towel, softened by the heat.
So, it is no wonder I wept when the poem’s narrator, on seeing “her” again in a later bathtub “wishes some understanding of the mysteries of alchemy: he’d make his flesh water, surround her & enter the coves of her pores, lap like a tide into her unconscious, & cleanse them both. The way they’d rise together into the cold air of the bathroom—their souls wet with their emergence into the world.”
My world had been uprooted again and again. Here, in this geography of intimacy was the possibility of absolution, of rebirth. Here, in this collection is a yes/anded richness. Poetry mingles with prose. Lust and reverence merge. Volumes live in moments. And transgressions are transformations, the “murder” of a dove, an “astonishment of feathers”—now a Rosary, “each bead in my fingers hard and small as a beak,” now an unexpected hand to hold “like two wings, folded, at rest.”
Shame, my inability to just be satisfied, had plagued me. But hadn’t I always longed to experience everything, in life, in writing, so much of it forbidden to me, obtained only through recalcitrance? Yes, Parakeets told me, of course. And isn’t that beautiful?
Hadn’t I always believed that, despite all my failings, I would still be worthy of the intimacy I sought? Yes, the collection said, of course.
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Holly, your poetry-making mind dances beautifully with Gerry LaFemina’s. Through your evocation of absorbing his work, I re-experience my discovery of every powt I have treasured.
Such writing, Holly. I feel led to someplace deep and wise. And the poetry! No wonder. Whole worlds. Thank you.