#78: The Conditional

(a musical adaptation of a poem by Ada Limón)

[music below]

On March 11, 2020 I was going nowhere on a runway at JFK. According to the flight attendants we were being held up by the authorities in Argentina. While we taxied the President had announced that there would be no more international flights entering Argentine airspace. The captain was still hopeful, or trying to sound hopeful. But we were all scrambling for hotel rooms. Finally the word came down. Our plane would be allowed to go. We didn’t know it at the time, but our flight would be the last for many months. We cheered, then got to work trying to cancel those reservations. No chance. That money had flown. Still, we were the lucky ones.

Down in the hold, my suitcase was filled to bursting with supplies: chocolate, marzipan, whole bean coffee, jigsaw puzzles, narrow-ruled legal pads, Colman’s mustard, guitar strings, a kite, strong licorice, and books—among them, Ada Limón’s 2015 collection, Bright Dead Things, bought the previous summer at a little bookstore on Commercial Street in Provincetown. Limón is currently the United States Poet Laureate (what a great country this can be). But back then I had never heard of her. Seeing me pull the book from a shelf, a fellow browser chimed in: “That’s really good”. Sold. I added it to the stack on the counter, then later to the larger stack in a cardboard box in the rental car, and finally to the even larger stack in a friend’s closet, where whatever doesn’t fit in my luggage goes to die, or languishes, hoping to be chosen for a future trip.

Since that visit to Provincetown there had been a couple of trips back and forth to Argentina. But Bright Dead Things had not made the cut. It would have to wait its turn in the closet cue. Other books had been waiting longer. Wouldn’t be fair. For example, Pushpesh Pant’s India Cookbook (Phaidon Press, 2010) was slotted for that March 11 return trip. But as I packed, as push came to shove, Ada Limón’s 128-page paperback won out over the 960-page Phaidon extravaganza.

The next morning at Ezeiza International Airport, having made it through the controles sanitarios, I was surprised when Customs asked to open my suitcase. Surely they must’ve had bigger fish to fry. But their x-ray machine had spotted some paste of a certain density. Mazapán I said, suddenly understanding their concern. En este precio bien podría ser merca (at this price it might as well be “merchandise”) said the inspector when he saw the sticker price.

From there it was straight into quarantine, a pod de deux out on the windy Pampa. My wife and I settled in for an indeterminate time—something between a month and forever. Her work routine continued largely unaltered: reading, writing, online seminars and classes. I also read, also wrote. Strangely though, I stopped being a practicing musician, not even looking at a guitar for over a year. I played nothing, sang nothing—which is not to say that there wasn’t music. There were bien-te-veos, owls, chimangos. There were the neighbor’s horses, two mares and a pony, whose races around the potrero I could feel rumbling through the floor of my office. The pony always lost. Sometimes in a good breeze I’d go stand in the nine casuarinas, listening to their frequencies. When a poem drew me in I’d read it aloud, walking in circles.

Ada Limón’s “The Conditional” was one. The final poem of Bright Dead Things, I remember reaching that last page, reading it once, then again more slowly, and then out loud. I remember thinking it would make a good song. But like I said, I wasn’t writing songs. And anyway I’d always been of the opinion that a good poem doesn’t need music. It brings its own. Why meddle? Either the poor thing is going to be walked out onto the verse-chorus bridge or the music is going to spend all its time running around applying preposterous melismas to uncooperative metrical feet. Such was my limited, defeatist thinking on the subject of songification and adaptation. Now I think I was just depressed.

This was right about the time “the Before Times” went from joke to accurate description of historical reality. Likewise the poem struck me less as apocalypse hypothesized, and more like a plausible conversation for us to be having, say, in August of 2020. Or now. In any case, the poem made a deep impression, laying out the most harrowing conditions, only to explode it all into a beautiful unconditionality. But I don’t think I was capable of digesting that affirmation, much less turning it into a song.

A couple of months ago I read it again. It took me back to that winter out at the house, to that long, weird isolation, when a farm cat had befriended us, or we had befriended him. We’d all look out across the fields, toward the road in the distance. We’d see trucks but no cars and wonder what the hell was happening. Neighbors brought each other groceries. We looked out for each other, woodstoves blazing through the Southern Hemisphere winter. Thinking back, it all strikes me as beautiful, idyllic even. But I was not healthy. My musical self was absent, elsewhere. I might’ve wanted to be rid of it once and for all.

But now, a couple of years later, with no particular resolve or deliberation, I found myself strumming a guitar to the 18 lines of “The Conditional”. Then I began to sing. A melody appeared for the first eight lines. The middle section drove me nuts. I may have indulged in some of that preposterous melisma. But I got through it, and the last four lines followed naturally. Sometimes we leave ourselves. With time and luck and the patience of those around us, we come back and move forward. Those huge, negating hypotheticals recede. The poem slips into the imperative, one person speaking to another.

                                                     Say you’d still want this: us alive,
                                           right here, feeling lucky.

All that’s needed is an answer. I have mine. You have yours. And it’s just us here, clutching the cat.

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Here’s a recording of the song. Take a listen. But please read the poem first! And check out Ada Limón’s work. Thanks.

(words by Ada Limón / music by Richard Shindell)

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