My father died on January 10, 2024. In the first couple of weeks after that, I couldn’t read at all. I couldn’t write, watch movies, or think much. Then, I reached out to my poet friends and asked them to send me their favorite poems about grief. I have always turned to poetry when nothing else helps—in moments of despair, anguish, or loss. And I have always turned to my friends, too, so this seemed like the right approach.
Robin Myers took the time to create a little anthology for me: Larry Levis, Sonia Scarabelli, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Victoria Chang, and a beautiful poem by Mirta Rosenberg about her mother’s death. And yet, something in me remained unchanged; poetry wasn’t doing what I expected it to do.
My friend Ezequiel Zaidenwerg sent me a poem by Jack Gilbert that moved me to tears, but it still felt like words on paper, not a magical flow of air. Chloe Aridjis sent me a poem by Neruda that I hadn’t read in years, plus a musicalized version of Jorge Manrique’s Coplas a la muerte de su padre, sung by Paco Ibáñez, which made me think of the music my dad liked when he was young. I then read Jaime Sabines’ Algo sobre la muerte del mayor Sabines out loud in my room, but my voice faltered when I got to the part about “prince cancer.”
Hernán Bravo Varela sent me Borges and Sharon Olds. Someone else—I don’t know who—sent me ten or fifteen photos of a Raúl Zurita book. And then, at last, Luis Felipe Fabre told me to go way back, to the very origins of poetry, and read the Epic of Gilgamesh.
I requested the book in the Allen Room at the New York Public Library in Bryant Park. When the book arrived, I went up to the Rose Main Reading Room and sat on a chair directly under the windows, bathed in sunlight. I read the poem there, and when I got to Tablet VIII, where Gilgamesh cries for the death of Enkidu:
“May the heights of highland and mountain weep for you,
may the lowlands wail like your mother,
may the forest of cypress and cedar weep for you…
May the holy Euphrates weep for you,
whose waters we libated from waterskins…”
I knew that was it. That was what I was looking for.
And although time passed, and I read many other novels, essays, and diaries—Leslie Jamison, Mónica Ojeda, Layla Martínez, Brenda Lozano, María Gainza, Ángel Rama, Ariel Florencia Richards—finding joy, light, and wonder in all those books, that page, written some 4,000 years ago, is the only page I truly read in 2024.
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