a close-reading of noelle kocot's  to  go  home

​The following poem originally appeared in  Noelle Kocot's recent collection Soul in Space

The will to make something beautiful
Out of nothing—two stars in the fury

Of the Big Bang. Nothing separates
From anything, the light breaks on

The keyboard, the anthills grow bigger,
The flowers open and open. I say,

Touch me, or let me touch you, in a
Garden filled with daylilies. The sun

Will also set, we will become specks
Like that in the dusk, crying to go home.

Noelle Kocot is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Phantom Pains of Madness (Wave Books, May 2016), Soul in Space (Wave Books, 2013), The Bigger World (Wave Books, 2011), and a book of translations of some of the poems of Tristan Corbière, Poet by Default (Wave Books, 2011). Her previous works include the discography Damon's Room, (Wave Books Pamphlet Series, 2010), Sunny Wednesday (Wave Books, 2009) and Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems (Wave Books, 2006). She is also the author of 4 and The Raving Fortune (both from Four Way Books). Her poems have been anthologized in Best American Poetry in 2001, 2012, and 2013. She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, The Fund for Poetry, the American Poetry Review, and a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation, and she has taught at the University of Texas New Writers' Project. She is the current Poet Laureate of Pemberton Borough, New Jersey.

close-reading

by Guest Contributor Thomas Snarsky

​"The will to make something beautiful
Out of nothing"

Noelle Kocot’s poem “To Go Home” first appeared in her 2013 book Soul in Space. The book was named after the Randall Jarrell poem “Seele Im Raum”, and it shares that poem’s oblique spirituality, its struggle to figure the human soul in verse. Soul in Space was one of the first contemporary collections I ever read cover-to-cover when I first started writing poems in college. It is a book I return to for comfort—and a kind of guidance—when I feel disoriented or oddly alone, like the speaker in Jarrell’s eponymous poem. Kocot’s book glows with the generous spirit that “To Go Home”’s ars-poetica-esque opening lines articulate wonderfully: the first line speaks the poet’s desire to form the beautiful, and the irruption of the second line reminds us of the void she must work within, a kind of precondition for all art.

This impulse named, the poem can really begin.

"two stars in the fury

Of the Big Bang."

Kocot is a brilliant poet of the lyric beloved, and the poem’s use of couplets (plus its willingness to stretch its syntax across them) reminds us of the lyric’s dynamic of pairing before it is made explicit in this starry (star-crossed?) image. Context suggests these “two stars” could be “something” and “nothing”, respectively, but they could also be the souls of Kocot herself and of her late husband, the composer and pianist Damon Tomblin. Tomblin’s presence is ubiquitous in Soul in Space, and the ambiguity of the Big Bang in these lines—an unimaginably abrupt and violent event, but one which literally gave rise to the entire universe and time itself—puts quite succinctly the immense difficulty of loving those who have passed on from us, and loving them so intensely that our sense of time is fundamentally transformed in and by their absence.

"Nothing separates
From anything, the light breaks on"

In these next lines, Kocot’s “Something” and “nothing” become “Nothing” and “anything”; with this little transfiguration, some distance (cf. “separates”) is established. And yet “the light breaks on”, continuously, uninterrupted. Living with the fact of separation from the beloved—a stand-in for separation in general, the unfortunate fact of how often we fail to realize our fundamental interconnectedness—gives rise to the poem’s most vital questions. What is it like to have to live without the beloved? How does the reader accomplish the miracle of reading from one couplet to the next, leaping over the stanza break like it is somehow not a radical rupture akin to the speaker’s feeling of separation? And how can the poet suture time back together when its scission—in the form of the beloved’s death—has already happened?

"The keyboard, the anthills grow bigger,
The flowers open and open."

This succession of images is breathtaking. The entire world anticipates the speaker’s response to these questions. We see and feel the warmth, the growth, the possibility, the subtle “o” music crescendoing into the wondrous beginning sounds in the repetition of “open”. I like the ambiguity, too, of “keyboard”: is the site of the breaking of light the kind of place where this poem could have been typed, or is it instead an instrument, as-yet unmusicked? And what will happen when the speaker touches either of these possibilities, reaching out and intervening on the distance between them?

"I say,

Touch me, or let me touch you, in a
Garden filled with daylilies."

Another leap across the stanza break into second-person address culminates in the most intimate moment of the whole poem. The poem’s dualism continues in the disjunction—“Touch me, or let me touch you”—since the speaker doesn’t care who touches who, as long as there is touch and the distance is crossed over. And of course there has been touch before—this moment longs to return to the time when the beloved was alive and could touch or be touched, a physical act of poiesis so powerful it has miraculously transmuted the light of day from the prior stanza into daylilies. To go back to the pure past of the “Garden” is in some sense the final dream of the poem—but the speaker is hesitant, and has framed this ultimate aspiration within her own subjectivity, an “I say” dangling above it. Why is the dream suspended so?

"The sun

Will also set, we will become specks
Like that in the dusk"

​The speaker hesitates, I think, because she worries that the distance between the lover and her beloved will be resolved in a different way. To move forward in the poem is also to move the eye downward, Orphically, towards the bottom of the page—a kind of o(ra)cular sunset. The sunset is light becoming dark, the point of contact between Manichaean Light and Darkness the poem has declaimed all along; to celebrate, we enter the first person plural for the first time. But the fear is that this “we” is aspirational—we know how the Orphic tale ends, and if we are specks we are small and therefore subject to its logic, our only comfort the word dusk (so close to dust, to which our “we” shall return), in all its warm sonority.

"crying to go home."

The poem’s conclusion recapitulates the repeated “o” sounds from the middle stanza, and like the “o” sounds in “open and open”, they end a clause stretched across two couplets. It is hard not to see in this the Orphic work of longing down (or up) toward where the beloved is, the only “home” the speaker could ever really go so far as to cry out for.
To me the poem ends on a note of radical hope; the speaker isn’t naïve enough to believe she has arrived at some “home” with her beloved. Instead the poem’s victory is its “we”, its conviction that the beloved—in whatever state (of being or non-) that they might be at the time of the poem’s articulation—wants, too, to be home with the speaker, and that no distance can efface that shared desire. This is the hope of the lyric: to love, and be loved, even if from afar.

​Tom Snarsky teaches mathematics at Malden High School. He lives in Chelsea, Massachusetts (among stacks of books and ungraded papers) with his fiancée Kristi and their two cat children, Niles and Daphne.