Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I don’t get to hear live music too much these days. But last summer, I found myself on the rooftop deck of the National Museum of African American Music, awaiting the next band. The DJ kept the crowd hyped in between sets by playing house music and classic R&B hits. The fashionably dressed attendees sipped mojitos behind sunglasses, for the most part keeping it chill, cool, blasé.

But when the DJ threw on the opening bars of “Before I Let Go” by Maze featuring Frankie Beverly, everyone abandoned their postures of cool, stopped doing whatever they were doing, and jumped up to dance.

Here’s the moment, one of my favorite occurrences in life: shortly into the track, everyone, I mean four hundred people or more, started singing simultaneously, with immense feeling, not missing a beat or a word “You made me happy / This you can bet.” A collective spirit of joy coursed through each person. Our voices rising in the melody seemed to enlarge us, as though our collective singing fused us into one.

We were strangers brought together by the sheer happiness of the song — well, maybe less so by Beverly’s lyrics and more by the places the song took us in our memories — for me, my first basement party, where my pre-teen crush Sherie Adler, the most popular girl in school, pulled me onto the dancefloor because I was the closest person to her. Shy, I think I did a two-step, side to side. She sang while holding my hands, the two of us, laughing. Amid the welter of adulthood, where did the gentleness and tenderness from those days go?

I hear that same lament in today’s poem, a sort of sentimental journey which ponders that tenderness of our youth, when it seems like our hunger for love and touch and connection peak. The poem realizes, too, that perhaps we eventually lose the ability to feel with such depth and intensity.

Polycardial
by James Hoch

You don't have to be a cephalopod 
to understand it's good to have a spare 
hidden somewhere in the body's crags.
You don't need to possess random 
superpowers nor free dive in arctic rifts 
or play emotional whack-a-mole.
I mean, who couldn't use a wonderfully 
engorged backup, a blue reliever 
to answer the hunger of being human.
You never know. You never know.
But spares, these days, hard to come by.
Can't score them in the East Village 
anymore, not dozing on a bench 
in Tompkins Square Park, not even 
Brooklyn. Forget Brooklyn. Imagine.
Some days you slump in the paunch 
of a lawn chair, sipping gin and tonic, 
and a Gremlin goes by and you dream 
the smell of your teenage self and herself, 
how you took time, how she showed you, 
kissing in an orange beater that forever 
faintly stunk of oil and singed carburetor 
hose and stale Parliament cigarettes.
Her car, her mouth. It was good, right?
In your rush, you were kind, right?
All those fantasies are now memories.
They float in a softly lit aquarium 
exhibit you've curated your whole life, 
and you are almost returned to 1982
yellowy streetlamp night, cassettes 
playing "Take on Me" ... "I Melt with You" ...
Why are we equal parts tender and not?
Perhaps, we were once polycardial:
one heart of air; the other air that burns.
Maybe one burst and cauterized
the other. Or the humans exhausted 
all the feelings, so ran to the fjord 
and threw our wasted heart into the sea.
Which might explain squid and octopi, 
and why we are lousy at swimming, 
and why your heart thaws in the sink 
of your old tired weak worn-out body 
which no longer sleeps, which wakes 
and stirs the warm second you hear 
your wife open the screen door 
or children shrieking in the yard 
as they gather jarfuls of fireflies.
Listen: Let the air be an ocean.
Let the ocean occupy your tongue.

“Polycardial” by James Hoch from THE LAST PAWNSHOP IN NEW JERSEY, © 2022 James Hoch. Used by permission of Louisiana State University Press.