DAISY BASSEN, FEATURED IN THE OCEAN STATE REVIEW
Nineteen years of mourning correctly?
The recipe for a cairn is stones.
Gather stones. Sort stones.
Pile stones the way petals arrange
Themselves around a center,
Like scrappy hoofers in the 30s
In a Busby Berkeley number,
An animate kaleidoscope. Say it
Ten times fast and then take hold
Of a stone in your hand and forget
Throwing it. Set it down lightly,
Like it matters (even though you are
bored and yes, you
could eat something
a slice of cake, coffee)
The recipe for a sweater is knots.
Except you have to use needles,
Huge ones, too big to make you bleed.
When you pull the wool over your eyes,
You’ll be so warm. You’ll forget
You are alone with stones in your pockets.
Daisy Bassen on “Nineteen years of mourning correctly?”
“Nineteen years of mourning correctly?” is a poem about September 11th that I wrote at my kitchen table on the anniversary in 2020, during the Covid lockdown when the kitchen table had become the default location for writing poetry, conducting home-school, trying to connect with friends and family via Zoom or Google Meet or Facetime. Writing a poem about mourning after many years while people were actively being grief-stricken made me want to move between immediacy and distance, using the central image of stones. I referenced the Jewish tradition of remembering the dead by placing a stone or pebble on the gravestone and that led me to think about cairns. How cairns made me think about the rubble left when the Towers fell. I couldn’t help thinking about how we carry memories with us and how Virginia Woolf ended her life by walking into the water with stones in her pockets. If each of those stones was a memory, was it one she treasured or one she could not bear to live with? This is a poem beginning full of discrete parts that cannot be broken down any further and then it turns to include knots and knitting, the sense of softness that can create warmth, of something organic that is made even more human by touch and work. It’s very much a domestic poem that strives to address the question of grief and the ways we discover to both traverse and contain it. And for me, any kitchen-table poem has to have a certain direct informality, that oblique parenthetical about coffee and cake that is also a way of nurturing both the writer and the reader.
Daisy Bassen is a poet and community child psychiatrist who graduated from Princeton University’s Creative Writing Program and completed her medical training at The University of Rochester and Brown. Her work has been published in Salamander, McSweeney’s, Smartish Pace, Crab Creek Review, Little Patuxent Review, and [PANK] among other journals. She was the winner of the So to Speak 2019 Poetry Contest, the 2019 ILDS White Mice Contest, the 2020 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, and the 2022 Erskine J Poetry Prize. She was nominated for the 2019, 2021, and 2022 Best of the Net Anthology and for a 2019 and 2020 Pushcart Prize. Born and raised in New York, she lives in Rhode Island with her family.