Wake Me by Michelle LaVigne PhD
An Ode to Thomas Lynch
Standing in a bookstore yesterday, I imagined for every volume on the shelves, the singular author and all the hours of solitude and silence that were necessary for the creation of such tomes. Bookstores are the reliquary of working days and tireless years; of lives lived in quiet corners of the world spent scribbling and tapping at keys, believing day after day that it’s possible to make something out of nothing.
Looking at the rows of new hardbacks, I pulled from a high shelf a book of essays by Thomas Lynch, beloved bard and Milford muse. I had heard him read his work from a walnut veneered podium in a suburban library years ago, and was struck by a cadence so melodious, a wit so charming, a voice so humble but sure, that I fell under his spell and have yet to be delivered. Next to book covers splashed in colors of tropical fruit, his is sedate, an understated suit for The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be. It is lighter and more bawdy reading than you might imagine, full of gritty mirth and philosophic jigs, amidst the reverent toing and froing.
His essay, Tract, opens with lines from William Carlos William, the poet/doctor, who like Lynch, a poet/undertaker dared to be two things instead of one upsetting many who think that one’s work should fit neatly in just one blank space. In a few pages, Lynch, the poet, the father, the undertaker, the boss, sets down the instruction for his funeral, how he’d like things to go in the end. He prescribes the exact month, with a sly wink, the most bitter by Midwestern standards, I’d rather it be February…I want a mess made in the snow so it looks wounded, forced open, an unwilling participant. Forgo the tent. Stand openly in the weather.
And a few paragraphs in he writes the single most delightful sentence an Irish undertaker could write: Wake me. I smiled when I read it. I put it on the list of titles for poems I have not written and it reminds me of why I so love Thomas Lynch and his beautiful words. Because they give birth to ideas, because his words inspire my words, because in the genealogy of creation, this begets that, and he begets something in me. It’s an alchemical pairing, our minds commingle for a moment, suspended above time. It is a sacred coupling, inspiration.
In The Way We Are, Lynch examines the thirsty ways of three generations, as son, self, and father. For one so used to death, he is forced to endure the slow heartache of watching his son attempt to destroy himself ounce by ounce. An unspeakable agony that Lynch manages to put words around, in his brave and unflinching way: Why can’t he be a boy again, safe from these perils and disasters? Lately I’m always on the brink of breaking…His thirst puts him utterly beyond my protection but never outside the loop of my love. In everything he writes, there is a charged tension between absolutes: life and death, faith and futility, understanding and acceptance.
Lynch’s subjects and meditations are varied, indeed he is always on the brink of something: a jazzy scat of associations that dash here and there, making astute connections at surprising junctures, jumping nimbly from Milford to Montaigne, from dogs to dogma, from farts to arts. Lynch’s words will make you think and smile and weep. He will waltz you from cradle to grave and back again. He will, if you allow it, rouse you from the stupor of a life lived on autopilot and mindless scrolling into a garden fertile and lush with possibilities. He will, if you succumb to his mesmerizing lilt, have you whispering and wanting those two words that make the world come alive if only we dare to stop sleepwalking and pay attention: Wake me. Wake me. Yes, indeed.
