My first encounter with “Molly Brodak,” or with Molly Brodak, was with a poem on a page in a photo on the Instagram story of someone I’ve been in many rooms with but never really met. There is an inherent predictability to the poem-on-Instagram, but in five sentences strung across thirteen lines, Brodak stunned me. The poem itself is so simple it risks becoming trite, a string of aphoristic non-sequiturs which gain their power from the fact of their being strung together. Instead, through this nearly trite simplicity, Brodak achieves a kind of perfection, with a self-awareness that demands its own critique even as it works against it. Ben Lerner, in The Hatred of Poetry, posits that “[o]ur contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable us to experience, if not a genuine poem—no such thing—a place for the genuine, whatever that might mean.” [1] A close reading of Brodak’s “Molly Brodak” left me in this contempt: hackles raised at Brodak’s activation of the genuine through such seemingly uninvolved means.

It begins with the second sentence, lines 2-4: “The amount of fear / I am okay with / Is insane.” Through all its banality this statement carries the weight of a confessional, making the reader Brodak’s confessor. The first line, “I am a good man,” is thus an avowal, a desperate assertion on the heels of which Brodak offers us vulnerability, a naked belly. If, as Kierkegaard proposed, every man is both good and bad, but no one man can be both at the same time, the demand made of the poet is then to describe human beings as they are, both good and bad, through the “medium of … imagination.”[2] At every turn she introduces a challenge—whether or not she is a good man; whether those she loves love her in return; whether or not this is true—only to undercut each at the next turn. This is what Brodak does that so trips me up, the ambivalent depths of this poem’s simplicity. That is, she is so pulled by contradiction as to become immobilized, frozen even as the poem’s ice melts.

In “I love many people / who don’t love me. / I don’t actually know / if that is true,” Brodak cuts to the core of the thing. That is to say, in loving, we accept that we will only ever understand the specificities of our love for the loved one; in being loved we submit to the uncharted mystery of the lover’s feelings for us. In his Lover’s Discourse, Barthes proposes that “[a]morous absence functions in a single direction, expressed by the one who stays, never by the one who leaves: an always present I is constituted only by confrontation with an always absent you.” [3] Here, Brodak leaves the you absent entirely, unaddressed. The experience of love depicted in this moment is then a solitary one. One does not know Brodak’s beloveds, only that she loves them; this is a poem entirely about her, an avowal; love serves as a reflection of the lover rather than of the beloved who here remains absent.

This ambivalence gives way to an emotional outpouring in what feels like the second phase of the poem:

This is love

It is a mass of ice

Melting, I can’t hold

It and I have nowhere

To put it down.

The enjambments turn the eponymous Molly to ice, “melting, I can’t hold.” The joining, “It and I have nowhere.” This love is a mass, an overwhelming volume, a slow-moving element activated unintentionally by the narrator’s physicality. This image of holding ice is a familiar one, a skeuomorph. To hold an ice cube in one’s hand or press it into one’s skin as it melts is a canonical alternative offered to self-injury, alongside nervous system activations like cold showers and snapping a rubber band against one’s skin.  In my own personal history of self-harm this sensation is so familiar as to be repulsive, walking a thin line of cringe as do all things so viscerally associated with, in my case, one’s own teenage moments.

Ice is not an uncommon figuration for an emotional state; once again Brodak almost makes it too easy for the reader.. In “If Ice,” W. W. E. Ross writes, “if life return / after death, / or depart not at death / then shall buds /  burst into may- / leafing, the blooms of may.”[4] Tanya Davis sings, “Every time a cold heart thaws it sends a river of tears to nourish the ground on the way to the sea.”[5] In James Schuyler’s “February 13, 1975,” a part of the Payne Whitney suite written during his institutionalization at the eponymous psychiatric facility, the closing lines read “…I wish one could press / snowflakes in a book like flowers.” [6] Any reading is the product of the reader. This could be love then, too: a thawing-out, rather than a dissolution.

Through this ice there is a sense of how the experience of loving can feel and be entirely one-sided, can feel entirely one-sided even if or when it isn’t. Anne Carson: “That which is known, attained, possessed, cannot be an object of desire.” [7] The understanding of love presented by Brodak is by nature a one-sided one, this tender and fragile and short-lived substance that the human body has the power to destroy just by the nature of being and through the passing of time. Holding onto love is to remain unawares while conscious of your lack of awareness: we are only sensorially aware of the ice in our own hands, slowly melting. I’m led by this temporal anxiety to Freud’s “On Transience,” which recounts a walk taken with two friends. Despite the beauty of the countryside, his friends are too aware of the looming winter to enjoy the summer landscape presented to them; they are instead preoccupied by “a foretaste of mourning over its decease.” [8] This experience of mourning is, to Freud, the pain of losing the object of one’s libido, the difficulty of libidinal detachment without an outlet for redirection. This is Brodak’s melting ice: the sense of preemptive mourning that stems from one’s awareness of temporality, the ever-present future absence of the beloved and the experience of having nowhere to put it down. The lover Brodak depicts through absence is still in thrall to the elements, to the passing of time, mourning in advance the change they await breathlessly. As Barthes describes, the anxiety of the lover is “the fear of a mourning which has already occurred, at the very origin of love.” [9] The rest is then this effort to love love, to let the present tenderness outweigh the anticipated misery.

When I first read this poem to a friend, he asked me what about it I found so compelling. Over the past seven months, I’ve struggled to understand and verbalize just that. The more time I spend with “Molly Brodak,” the more it evades me. My experience of this poem, like the love Brodak describes, has been that of it slipping through my fingers as I struggle to grasp why and how it moves me. Brodak’s piercing concision is just what makes it so difficult to maintain a hold of. This deceptive simplicity is also its difficulty—it walks such a thin line that you could almost blink and miss it, so condensed as to become completely opaque.
 






Notes

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[1] Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry (New York: FSG Originals, 2016), 9.

[2] Søren Kierkegaard, The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard, ed. W. H. Auden (New York: New York Review Books, 1999), 62-63.

[3] Roland Barthes. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 13.

[4] W. W. E. Ross, “If Ice,” Poetry 44, no. 4 (1934): 182.

[5] Tanya Davis, “Eulogy for You and Me,” track 4 on Clocks and Hearts Keep Going, November 2010.

[6] James Schuyler, “February 13, 1975,” New York Review of Books 25, no. 13 (1978).

[7] Anne Carson. Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 65.

[8] Sigmund Freud, “On Transience,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 305-307.

[9] Barthes, 30.