Heart's Needle

 I've reached that time in the fall semester when the invisible thread connecting me to my nephew and niece starts to pull. It's been too long since I've seen them. I even get paranoid and sad. How much have they changed in the interval? Do they even remember me? I tell myself it's only been a few months. But months make up whole percentage points of their existence to date. 

I hope my thoughts can somehow reach them across the invisible lines of connection. I remind myself of the words of Basil Bunting's heartbreaking poem, written to the son he never met: "Unseen is not unknown..." he said. But then he had to confess, in the stanza's closing lines, such consolations amounted only to "Words late, lost, dumb."

W.D. Snodgrass compared an absent child—separated, in his case, by divorce—to a "heart's needle." And I picture that needle attached to a thread, stretched taut across the American continent, from Rhode Island to Iowa. The pull of it, and the stab of that needle, gets stronger with each day of separation.

That's how it feels. But I'm only an uncle, "with no rights in the matter," as Theodore Roethke would put it. And the separation has only been for two months. Whatever I'm going through is just a minuscule fraction of the pain a parent must feel who is forced to live apart from their child. 

Then I think about the fact that our government inflicted that pain willfully, needlessly, on thousands of parents, through a policy of deliberate family separation, for which our society has never atoned. I think about the fact that some children who were separated under the "zero tolerance" policy could not even recognize the faces of their mother or father when they were reunited; or the fact that some are still separated to this day...

And my pain collapses into a mote, compared to the beam of what they had to endure. I am humbled and overwhelmed by that pain. One can only sink to one's knees in the face of it—that force of parental love; that star's gravity; that plasmic fusion of unfathomable power—and then, one sees the full hideousness of our government trying to sever it. The unutterable cruelty of taking those scissors of policy to try to cut the thread of the heart's needle...

By an eerie synchronicity, just as I was writing this post, my sister called me on the phone in a bleak mood. She had just learned a bit more about the personal lives of her students. More than one, she found out, had had a child taken away from them by DCF. "Talk about heart's needle," as Joan Didion writes in Play It As It Lays, in a reference to Snodgrass's poem...

Often, these young parents lost their children because of issues that were more the product of poverty than of deliberate neglect. 

Since the government pays for children to be taken care of in foster homes already, my sister pointed out—maybe we could just give that money to the biological parents instead? And fewer kids would be taken from their homes because of poverty? Since the taxpayers are contributing this much already, why not use the money to keep families together? 

In this gloomy morning, reflecting on these things, I thought back too to something that happened this summer. A time, minor enough in itself, when I committed a small unfairness against my nephew. Contributing to my sense of sadness is the fact that this was the last time I saw him. I wrote a poem of my own about it, and I leave it here. Consider it my effort to expiate my share in the world's injustice. 

A Memory from This Summer

My little nephew was

Refusing to get dressed

My sister and I

Had already tried

Every trick in the book

“Let’s make it a race”

“Bet you can’t do it in under twenty seconds!”

“You say when to start the countdown!”

We shouldn’t have left the initiative to him

“I will never say that!”

He declared

But the airline would brook

No further delay

So

We started counting anyway

“One…

“Two….”

“No!” my nephew said

His voice choked with tears

“I didn’t say that” he said

Wise beyond his years

“Three…” we said

“I didn’t say that!” he roared

And hurled himself

Against my crouching form

I grew righteous

“We don’t use violence” I said

But I guess

We do use lies

The putrid bandage shading Themis's eyes

My nephew was right

We had changed the rules

And he had only resorted to force

When the legal system took him for a fool

It still tears me up inside

I guess I’ll never live down

And see no reason to elide

That raw flex of judicial power

That exercise

Of the right of size

The Adult’s ultimate veto

That moment I knew

Within me too

Is a little Justice Alito