Say tomorrow doesn't come.
So begins “The Conditional” by Ada Limón, a poem constructed entirely of the speculated presence of contingent events. Suspended on a liminal limb of time, whirling backward and forward, the possible and the poetic announce themselves interchangeably:
Say the moon becomes an icy pit. Say the sweet-gum tree is petrified. Say the sun's a foul black tire fire. Say the owl's eyes are pinpricks.
What intrigues me about this poem’s title is that it implies and implicates the existence of certain conditions, variables upon which the poem’s suppositions rely.
As the piece moves along, its lines begin to open little portals to alternate realities, forcing the reader to concentrate equally on what has happened and what might have happened instead. Limón points as much to the future as to the past, weaving a rich tapestry of experience.
Say we never meet her. Never him. Say we spend our last moments staring at each other, hands knotted together, clutching the dog, watching the sky burn.
I’m also taken by the fact that this section, while apocalyptic, is never hopeless. The companionship cultivated in life is sustained up until the very moment of death.
Then, in the poem’s final turn, the word “say” recontextualizes itself, meaning “to utter words” rather than “to suppose.” In context of the prior meaning, these lines glow with suggestive power.
Say, It doesn't matter. Say, That would be enough. Say you'd still want this: us alive, right here, feeling lucky.
Using a similar instructive technique, Ocean Vuong’s “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” starts with this stanza:
Tell me it was for the hunger & nothing less. For hunger is to give the body what it knows it cannot keep. That this amber light whittled down by another war is all that pins my hand to your chest.
The speaker manufactures closure in a way, asking for an explanation that lines up with his understanding. He controls the scene, casting hunger and war as the instigators. Inventing a body— a hand, a chest, reasonably involved.
Like Limón’s poem, we are witnessing a series of suppositions made facts in the world of the text, an agency imbued into the poems’ respective speakers to portray reality as it is, or could have been.
Adrienne Rich’s brilliant piece “Origins and History of Consciousness” tells us that “No one lives in this room / without confronting the whiteness of the wall / behind the poems.” That whiteness is, naturally, a page. The negative space against which language burgeons.
But also, the whiteness is a representation of reality. Behind the poems, feeding and informing and molding them, is something real: emotion or wish or circumstance. In a poem, however, the poet, by way of their speaker, can alter the basis of reality as little or as much as they desire. Control of the scene falls into the poet’s all-powerful hands.
In a later section of “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” the speaker regains his own power of communication.
I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven.
Speaking the idea makes it real. The wrongness is apparent, albeit obscured, and the forgiveness that follows it is essentially a fabrication, an unverified sentiment slipped over the aftermath like a balm.
Then, it’s back to the instruction of saying. This time, concepts and colors float in a mass of remembered elements; a stanza flowing over with texture and light.
Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade. Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn. Say autumn despite the green in your eyes. Beauty despite daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn mounting in your throat. My thrashing beneath you like a sparrow stunned with falling.
And then, one of my favorite stanzas, turning sound over on the tongue in wild affirmation, despite. Words to mend the hurt and close the whole holy chapter, regardless of what else may need to be examined.
Say amen. Say amend. Say yes. Say yes anyway.
The conditional “if” can not only rewrite a finished story, but edit it as it is told. “You’re So Paranoid” by Franny Choi illustrates a brutal scene frozen in time, indisputable.
A wall of cops moves like a wall of water on a barge no beauty. A wall of iron swallows the woman who falls to the ground and keeps falling. There’s a video. The picture stays intact (again).
Choi awakens dozens of associations even in these first lines. The all-too-familiar image of a wall of cops descending on a crowd, caught on camera. The implicit and tragic knowledge that being immortalized on tape is not evidence enough for certain crimes to be punished.
Although the details of the story are yet to be disclosed, an image immediately springs to mind. We have seen this before and mourned it, over and over, disbelieving yet painfully unsurprised.
If I say the woman dragged by her hair. If I compare it.
Throughout the poem, the “if” points to conditions that the reader can immediately surmise. No incident exists in isolation, especially in the digital age. If the speaker says “woman dragged by her hair,” the reader can superimpose a face there. A face seen on television or social media, a face seen on the pavement at a protest, even their own face.
Use of “if” statements also serves, in my opinion, to balance the rapid pace of the poem.
I follow the border patrol agent through the airport thinking fast thoughts bloodfast blood hound steps he buys a burrito. If I say he stood alive in line and my friends are afraid to leave their bathrooms my friends who I love and love and.
The panicked blurt of “fast thoughts bloodfast blood hound steps” is slowed by “if I say he stood alive in line.” It’s as if the reality of the moment shakes the speaker from her fearful internal monologue, only to spiral into it again at the thought of “my friends who I love and love and.”
(If I say a wall of men standing on my friends’ necks.) (If I describe it.)
Use of parentheses places a heightened quietude over the conditionals. The speaker sets these phrases apart from the rest of the poem using both words and symbols, expressing her own trauma in an almost whispered voice. And still, a kind of tragedy so well-documented does not need to be restated in order to be viscerally felt and understood. She spares us the description but not the weight of it, not the mortal fear.
Then, a return to imagination and agency.
The cop speaks and I call a plum into his mouth it doesn’t shut him up. The cop kneels in the grass below my friends, my friends crowned with August and salt. My marigold my wave. They laugh like a branch laughs. They make machines for singing.
Even in the space of a poem where such possibilities bloom, the power the speaker wields in her constructed universe is not enough to fully overcome the real dangers of the world. Laughter and singing eventually overtake the stubborn presence of the police, but they are still totally present. Echoes of what-if and alternate endings cannot undo their supreme rule.
If I say a palm in the small of the back. If I say sun-warmed glass. If I say sun-glass breaking open the gate
Power returns to the speaker’s voice at the very end of the poem, introducing calm closeness in a moment free of violence. The “if” still moves the action, but it’s warmer now, protected.
Even the “breaking” in the final line doesn’t strike me as entirely frightening. After the imagery of sunlight and “a palm in the small of the back,” it seems that the gate could be representative of some haven or heaven. It’s a brilliantly bittersweet end. Still uncertain, yet hopeful.
Thank you for reading. I hope you’re well.
<3 Bee