To Catch and Comfort

It has not been the easiest stretch for me lately. I had a tough couple of weeks, mental-health-wise (nothing too terrible! I have supportive friends and family and a therapist I like). I was pulling out of that spell when the alternator in my thirteen-year-old car died. I made an appointment to have it fixed and was feeling back on my shit when illness hit my family. Again, nothing too terrible, but illness is never a good time. So the car being fixed got put on hold for a week. But I’m okay. I’m not too bad at all, really.

And that, to be extremely cliché, is thanks to poetry.

It happened that I read an article in the Washington Post recently about the joys of memorizing poetry. (The article is lightly paywalled; apologies.) It also happened that I had borrowed Appalachian Elegy (2012) by bell hooks from my local library. And so it happened that I decided to pick a poem from that collection to memorize.

None of the poems in this collection are particularly long, and they’re constructed using short, powerful lines with clear imagery. I have a very visual brain, so being able to see what’s going on in the poem is helpful. There were a handful of poems that really struck me, and I narrowed my choices to three: one about a bear (3.), one about dying trees (18.) and one about birds (38.). I chose the birds because it held the most beautiful imagery included the lines:

as though air a net

to catch and comfort

The image of these birds swooping and plummeting and trusting the air the way a trapeze artist trusts a net released the tension in my shoulders. That seemed like a good enough reason to commit it to memory.

I was able to memorize the poem pretty quickly. I had it down in less than an hour. I recited it while I watched Olympics track and field. I recited it to the dog (not to the cats; they have strong bird feelings). I recited it to my ailing family member, who soon could help me remember the lines by making his hands swoop and plummet at the right times. I recited it as I went for a run. I recited it as I fell asleep.

Repeating this poem, whether aloud or silently, reveals poetic craft. The repeated “as though” of lines 5 and 6, and “who can fear” in lines 8 and 10. The consonance of “catch and comfort,” much crisper sounds than you might usually associate with solace. These devices gave me pegs to hang the poem on in my memory, but they also revealed the construction of the poem.

It’s a poem of daring and trusting, of inner knowledge and “infinite possibility.” It is comforting and expansive in so few short lines. I had last read bell hooks in college, and then it was mostly her intersectional feminist theory, which definitely had an influence on my thinking. But this poem has had a more immediate effect on my life, I think, though I know that sounds hyperbolic. I have been so glad to be able to carry this poem around with me for the last several days, to catch and comfort me.

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