Today, please welcome writer MARIO CHARD.

I am sitting alone in a rained-out and unused chapel on the campus of the school where I teach. Today is Thursday. I am here, I hope, to write. The benches were dry when I arrived but the floor is still wet. Most days I never make it here, though most days I trick myself into believing that I will: after work, after school, sometime. Clearly, that’s one of the ideas I can’t let go of: that constant loss of a possible thing. Years ago I put the speaker of my first published poem at a kitchen window, washing dishes, anxious to leave his chore for a walk before the evening comes, and then the evening comes. The poem ends this way: “He does not look to know / the trees are lost / and all the fences still.” The lines are pretty, I think, a little sad, but muy dramático, my mother would say. And here at the chapel, made nervous again by that too-serious strain in me, I cringe, say something stupid aloud and laugh to no one. I do this often in case the angels are recording. I want them to know that I’m in on the joke.

I have rarely felt so tempted to exaggerate the truth of my life as I do right now—and admitting that, I can tell you truthfully that all day I kept returning to one or two lines that had revealed themselves to me, lines that maybe I could make something of. The lines were something like I started to believe that you were a character in my life and not your own. That I had made you that. The words were from a conversation the night before, and they were still there in the morning, and maybe I can follow them here for this reliving of a single day: the words there in the background all through a dark morning, the drive to work, my sons walking to their school, the trail behind their school that led to mine, and teaching there all day, then waiting for everyone to leave, and writing at the chapel, and walking late, and driving home.

At the chapel I am trying to remember the day, how the moments after waiting for my sons to walk through the door of their building led finally to my opening the door to my own classroom, turning on its ten lamps. Most mornings I have a quick half hour before the first students arrive, so I take two bottles down the steps to the main floor faculty lounge and fill one with hot water from the spout on the coffee maker. Small drops always burn my hand. Down the hall I fill the other bottle with cold water from the drinking fountain. There is always something odd left pooled or dried in the drinking fountain. I note it and then ignore it. In a few moments I will pour the hot water over yerba for a morning mate, drink the tea from a silver straw or bombilla, start the day and teach the lesson. I will note the expressions my students make and then ignore them. They will note my words and then ignore them. This is the game we play. How else could we live if we weren’t allowed to ignore nearly everything we note or sense in a day? Does everyone live this way? I ask that question at the chapel but not the fountain.

Sometime later after lunch, I had a moment in my room alone when I remembered the lines from earlier. I felt something like excitement. I pulled up Twitter on my phone and pressed the quill icon to draft a tweet. After a few false starts I published this:

That the people we love are characters in our life stories is the oldest lie.

I knew that I had liked the syntax of the sentence. It reminded me of Eavan Boland’s “That the Science of Cartography is Limited,” a poem I adore. But of course I didn’t know anything about “the oldest lie.” How could I? What I mean is that I wrote that line to see if it were true, if it could be. I chose a public forum to say a thing I couldn’t know.

Now at the chapel, sitting in a place I love, in the open air, I am finally grateful at the end of the day for the chance to rest and think, which as a gift outweighs the little slights I felt throughout the day, the slights I made, the constant worry of losing the possible thing: more time with my wife and sons, more time to hatch another plot or plan, lines I could have made if given time. It’s only then, grateful, that I realize something about the lines that woke me, about the people I love, the ones I too often make characters of. I write down what I couldn’t know and keep it there. No forum but the angels now. And then it’s time to leave. And then the evening comes.

~

NOT THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What one word best describes your writing life?

• Fitful.

2. Would you give us a little piece of advice about reading poetry?

• I find the thing I love about the poem (the rhyme or sound or story or image or form) and follow it through. Then I read it again. The best poems are desperate to tell us what they are, even what they mean. The best poems hide nothing. Like that moment when we finally recognize a single voice shouting in a crowd of shouting voices: we wouldn’t say that the voice was hidden before we heard it, that the voice of someone we love was never there before it was. We would say that it was masked or waiting. Still, when I find nothing to love about the poem, I read another! Then another. There are so many waiting.

3. What question do you wish someone would ask you?  

• Most days, it’s “How would you like this [life-changing-amount-of-money] deposited?”
• But a secret one would be “Why does the speaker in your two “Parable” poems (of “Migrants” and of “Prophets”) kneel at the window?”

~

By Mario Chard:

BLUE

—Other Writers in the Series—

I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how he or she spends the day.

March 1, 2019: Mario Chard

Thumbing through the special section in Poets & Writers, Jan-Feb 2019, on debut poets and inspiration, I came across Mario Chard. The article said he lived in Atlanta and taught at an independent high school. Well, I grew up in Atlanta and went to an independent high school. And yes, it turned out to be the same one.

Mario is “a poet of borderlands.” In the article, he said he started out wanting to write poems “about migration, war, parenthood and childhood. But without authority beyond attention or observation.” It’s the second clause that makes his work so strong, his reliance on what he can observe as the highest authority.

I once asked Pam Houston what she looked for in a poem, and she replied, “To be unsettled.” Which is exactly how I feel reading his poem “Machismo.” It gives me chills every time.

Refugio from Mexico is not Mexico,
nor is every man who makes other men small
in the convex mirror of his buckle

Refugio, who turned his daughter gold
in the mirror of his own—the last world unknowable
to Refugio—the night he carried her out of Mexico

before the war to give her Mexico
before the war, before a man named refuge
in his native tongue could be hung from an overpass in the sun

for something smaller than his buckle:
the figures of the men unmade inside it,
the thousands vanished in its glass.

Robert Pinsky selected Land of Fire for the Tupolo Press’s 2016 Dorset Prize. The poem that serves as a sort of prologue for the book begins, “We make a thing we marvel / and learn to worry.”

Like “Machismo,” many of these poems tell stories. The following excerpt is from “Mistake.”

The father laughed; the Board followed.
The room of parents broke
into laughter.
I keep that sound like the words I offer
no one; buried stones I find weeding
the garden; the word my young
son speaks who finds me there, points
to sweat on my forehead, says water.

The book unearths a longing for names, and we follow a thread from “Renditions,”

What is your name? they said.
I am nameless I said.
Yes they said.

… to “Coax,” where “it was always language I was after. Names.”

…and then to “Austral,”

Name for what we never name above:
Far south. Farther. Land of light
that goes out slow. Land of

prisons without doors. Land of fire.

Even Mario’s acknowledgments are poetry.

To my family, from this country to el fin del mundo. To those who live in these poems: my parents and my siblings. To my sons–there are clues here if you search for them. And to Wendy, for our life together, and how we once stood like the nameless who first brought her young / to the shore, / looked down into the water, / shapeless: city / without form.

Mario grew up in a northern Utah mountain valley, the son of an Argentine immigrant mother and an American father. When he was young, he had an obsession with ordering maps from all over the country. But these days, he wants us to look for patterns in small things, in the things we pass over, and then open our eyes wider.

Come back on MARCH 1st to read how MARIO CHARD spends his days.