Another Poem to Love, Attempt 1

"One More Attempt at Disaster Preparedness" by Jeannine Hall Gailey

I’ve been feeling my age of late, or trying to unfeel it perhaps. My gym app has a “feature” that tells me my biological age, which is of course much higher than my calendar age because for a great many years (read most of my life) I didn’t go to the gym. I don’t remember precisely when I admitted to myself that I had entered middle-age, though it was probably in my mid-thirties when my oldest child was near adulthood and I measured the length of hangovers in days rather than hours. But now I’m facing the other side of that, the range between middle-aged and old, and that’s a far harder line to recognize and it’s not because my eyesight is worse now.

Middle-age is a weird concept to me because it requires us to imagine a mid-point in a timeline where we don’t know, can’t know the boundaries. There’s a song from my childhood, a country song that according to all the internet searching I’ve tried is by a guy named Kent Finlay, though finding details has been a challenge. The chorus goes “If I’d have known I was gonna live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.” It’s a boogie-woogie country jam of a song, which makes me think his tongue is deep in his cheek when he sings in the pre-chorus “if I had it to do again, I’d slow it down in my younger days.”

The more common take on this subject I think is the doomed to death at an early age version, the near-nihilistic idea that the world won’t be here, or at least I won’t be here when I’m grown, so what does it matter what I do now. There are a bunch of songs I could point to with dozens of root causes for that feeling, but frankly, growing up in the 80’s was enough to infuse a good portion of this country with it. Our parents and grandparents had come though 35 years of near-constant war and yet the reaction of many to it was America! Fuck yeah! More nukes! Star Wars! (the imaginary missile defense system, not the movies) Better dead than red! And that’s if you were white and suburban. If you were black or brown, then while you’re living in that atmosphere, you’re also dealing with the continued blowback to the civil rights era, white flight, poverty, police violence and the drug war. It’s kind of remarkable that anyone came out of that period thinking they would make it to old age.

Because I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, I was trained to look at all that stuff as evidence that we were living in the End Times, and that Armageddon was going to come any day and usher in God’s Kingdom on earth, which we would transform into a paradise after all the wicked were wiped out and we were given eternal life. In a perverse way, that meant the worse things got for everyone else, the better for me, for us. Even if I died in this life, so long as I was faithful I would be resurrected into that eternal life paradise.

Also, it meant middle-age wasn’t really a thing to me, because what is the middle of a life that’s never going to end.

The way I saw the world and my place in it changed radically when I left the church in my mid-20’s, and a big part of it had to do with this idea of how much time I might have left in this life, assuming I lived to the median life-span of a white male in the US. I’ll admit, some of the hard feelings I still have against the church have to do with the questions of what other lives might have been open to me if I’d felt the immediacy of mortality all along.

Which is why maybe I chose this poem to talk about for my first one in this new project. This poem, “One More Attempt at Disaster Preparedness,” is from Jeannine Hall Gailey’s new book Flare, Corona soon out from BOA Editions (preorder your copy now). It first appeared in American Poetry Journal in 2017, though I only read it for the first time recently. I’ve known Jeannine in the internet sense for over a decade now—I published her in The Rumpus and taught her poems and books in creative writing classes multiple times—and I’ve always enjoyed and respected her poems, but this latest book hits harder for me than previous ones and it’s because of the way Jeannine is confronting her mortality in it, which is making me think of my own.

Jeannine has multiple sclerosis and when you read this book, you’ll also see multiple references to her childhood in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the site chosen for developing materials for the Manhattan Project. There are a lot of places you can read about how the US government took over the area and how “careful” they were with the dangerous things they were doing but suffice to say, some of the locals got caught in it and weren’t always told in a timely manner.

But this poem is about disaster preparedness, as the title tells us, and more. The opening lines are pretty clear about that:

Because it’s got to be more than water bottles and batteries,

an escape plan and a full tank of gas.

It’s also what to do when you get the diagnosis you might not survive (lines 1-3)

And that’s where I catch my breath, because I’ve lived those first lines. I grew up in Louisiana close enough to the Gulf that I heard the stories the adults swapped about Camille and Betsy, the stories I’d later have about Elena and Katrina and Wilma. During Andrew, I went in to work at a grocery warehouse to ship out water and bleach and other supplies to stores in Florida and by the time I got home after an 18 hour shift we were buckling down the house for what was left of the storm to hit us.

I feel lucky in some ways though. I’ve only heard the eerie calm of the eye one time, which is enough for this life.

But a “diagnosis you might not survive” is a whole other kind of disaster, one you can’t prepare for. There’s no tracking map, no satellite imagery, and most of all no place to run if you decide to try. The thing about hurricanes, for those of you who’ve never lived in the zone for them, is that they’re hard to run from. Geography limits your options and if it’s a bad storm, you aren’t the only one on the road trying to get anywhere else. And that’s assuming you’ve got the resources to get out of town in the first place. But even then you know your options.

Will you know what fight or flight will even involve? (line 6)

This is what’s terrifying, not the lack of options, but not knowing what the options are, or if they even exist.

While you watch the flu map take down children, despite vaccines,

beneficial bacteria missing or altered gene misstep—

or three hurricanes at once bear down on your coast,

or wildfires near your hospital, your neighborhood—

all disasters become less abstract, more personal. (lines 12-16)

It was almost 3 years ago exactly that I came home from teaching heading into spring break having been told by my university president that we were going to do two weeks online and then see if we could come back to in-person classes, but I knew better. I didn’t know how long we’d be teaching from home but I knew it would at least be until the end of the semester. This year already 10% of my students have missed time thanks to Covid-19, and one of my sections is online. We’ve all seen these disasters become less abstract, more personal.

It’s the way Jeannine closes this poem, though, that catches my heart. Just look at the way she widens the lens here to encompass the vastness of the universe.

You may or may not survive

no matter how prepared you are—the stardust that whirls around us,

the solar flares that interrupt our radio waves, one body more or less

making such a small impact. Your own little sun dimming,

your horizon, tipping towards darkness, disappears.

It’s the “may” that does me in if I’m being honest. It’s a lie and she knows it but she still wants us to hope in something. None of us will survive, even if the tech bros pushing the singularity manage to create their own version of the afterlife. We all tip toward darkness. The only question is when.

I hope I’m still in the middle stages of my life. Wikipedia tells me that I am for about another half-decade give or take. I’d question their math but there’s a reason my degrees are in English and not Chemistry (which was my first major way back when). I don’t know how I’ll react if I ever have that kind of a conversation with my doctor, but I’m going to spend some more time in conversation with this poem and the rest of them in this book.

Thanks for sticking with me for this long. I hope you find value in these pieces and like them enough to share them around. And seriously, check out Jeannine's new book. There’s lots more in there to love.