Jane Zwart, featured in the new Ocean State Review

Mel calls it heaviness

Subconsciously a parent mouths
the child lector’s part

and rendering apricots
unto babies’

stubbornness, any adult will
gape who aims the spoon.

. . .

I am thinking about the myriad
vicariousness that needs

no consent from us—not just
the urge to recite, to sup

and grow strong but
also the end urges.

. . .

I am thinking about the weight
we unburied feel

after, elsewhere,
the earth forfeits

on its faults’ isometry,
felling cities, pulling

ceilings down. I am thinking
about bulleted lists

of names compiled after
strangers open fire.

. . .

We under whom the ground
has not opened.

we for whose loves the ground
has not been opened.

we do not bear the dead weight
of the dead.

But we carry something
more than worry,

something vicarious.
Mel calls it heaviness.

Jane Zwart on “Mel calls it heaviness“:

Maybe a year ago, I was talking on the phone with one of my closest friends, Mel. Because we are close, when either of us asks how things are with the other, we tell the truth, and in this case, telling the truth led us to talking about weltschmerz, not that either of us called it that. We had been hearing news of earthquakes and shootings, and we talked about the grief that comes from knowing that people in so many places are desperate, that there is a surfeit of war and prejudices and preventable death that runs rampant on earth and that sometimes bowls us over and that sometimes we bracket, holding it at arm’s length from whatever we ourselves need to carry or carry on with. As the title gives away, Mel called it heaviness. And I’m pretty sure she also used the word “vicarious” to describe this particular strain of far-reaching but slenderly-understood sadness.

I’m not sure why the word “vicarious” brings to mind, for me, what it does, but when I hear it, I think first of the way that people taking photos pull the face they want the person on the other side of the camera to pull. Or the way parents try to get their babies to eat baby food by closing their lips around mouthfuls of air. Or how when a kid recites or reads something, if you love that kid and you know the words, you mouth them silently too. 

Writing this now, I suppose both the vicariousness that mimes eating apricot puree and the vicariousness that grieves across a vastness have at least this in common: they are evidence of care. The poem wants us to acknowledge that, I think, but it also wants to acknowledge this: sometimes we know what to do with care and sometimes we don’t.

Jane Zwart’s poems have appeared in Poetry, TriQuarterly, and Threepenny Review, as well as other journals and magazines. She also reviews books, writes the occasional essay, and interviews other writers. She teaches literature and writing at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing.