I Can See A Million Miles From Here

Thresholds hold mystery and power, both for our becoming and for our writing—here's a structured exercise inspired by Tony Hoagland that takes a threshold moment & uses an "axis of voice" to unlock it

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Life is full of endings. Marked and unmarked.

I was especially aware of the unmarked endings when my children were small—the way those endings snuck up on me, emerged from the ether as fully formed after-the-fact realizations of loss. These endings come in constant tide-like patterns throughout childhood.

The way their baby-ish-ness (the tiny crumpled hands, the rolls on their arms and legs) would melt away slowly at first, then all at once. The way their misshapen words “nando” for candle “me deg” for my leg “har” for car, would rearrange themselves into a different kind of precision, whittled away at the overstuffed edges, until suddenly one day they were all speaking in full complex perfect English sentences. The way I fall asleep next to them in their bed at nigh, the way they would ask me to carry their tiny acorn treasures in my pocket, the way they always need to be carried in from their carseats, asleep and heavy as donkeys, until … they didn’t.

More often than not, I could neither recognize nor recollect the actual “lasts.” Instead, these experiences just vanished.

Then, later, there are less predictable unmarked endings. The last time your son sleeps in your basement, home on holiday. The last time you get coffee with a friend from a lifetime ago. The last time your mother comes to your house for a holiday.

Of course there are the marked endings too. The court hearing to finalize your divorce. The day you send your youngest child off to college. The funerals. The graduations.

These thresholds—the pause at the top of each breath, the space between the before and the after—can hold the entirety of our lives in a single second. Can hold everything we have been and everything we might become.

That is why I so often return to thresholds as a place of mystery and power for our becoming and for our creative writing—I have written about thresholds many times before, including here, here, and here. As a narrative device, a threshold can unlock our writing in marvelous ways.

I think of Tony Hoagland’s quietly wrenching poem, Coming and Going, in which he writes:

My marriage ended in an airport long ago.

I was not wise enough to cry while looking for my car,

walking through the underground garage;

jets were roaring overhead, and if I had been wise

I would have looked up at those heavy-bellied cylinders

and seen the wheelchairs and the frightened dogs inside;

the kidneys bedded in dry ice and Styrofoam containers.

I would have known that in synagogues and churches all over town

couples were gathering like flocks of geese

getting ready to take off, while here the jets were putting down

their gear, getting ready for the jolt, the giant tires

shrieking and scraping off two

long streaks of rubber molecules,

that might have been my wife and I, screaming in our fear.

That way Hoagland articulates this moment! The way he first uses concrete specific details of the airport parking garage, the jets “roaring overhead,” and then opens very quietly, almost imperceptibly into something just as concrete, but no longer literal, something speculative, as he imagines the items in the planes’ cargo holds, these “heavy-bellied cylinders,” still focusing, though, on specific, recognizable exterior details like wheelchairs and frightened dogs, kidneys in dry ice and Styrofoam containers (every single one of which reminds us of the fragility of life, the precariousness of it all).

And from here, he widens his imaginative lens even further, zooming out to imagine couples gathering like “flocks of geese” in—not coincidentally, I think, houses of faith, “getting ready to take off,” before returning to the airport to contrast those ascending couples with the utter brutality of an ordinary plane landing, the “jolt,” the “shrieking and scraping off,” then likening this brutality to himself and his wife, “screaming in our fear.”

It takes my breath away—and you must take a moment to read the full poem here to appreciate its glorious “ghost ending,” an effect/device I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.

About “Comings and Goings,” Tony Hoagland said:

So much of what I love about poetry lies in the vast possibilities of voice, the spectacular range of idiosyncratic flavors that can be embedded in a particular human voice reporting from the field. One beautiful axis of voice is the one that runs between vulnerability and detachment, between “It hurts to be alive” and “I can see a million miles from here.” A good poetic voice can do both at once.

And that, in fact, is exactly what the speaker of this poem does as he carefully moves his voice from the very close details of the airport to the speculation about things near the airport to imaginings of places “a million miles from here,” both in geographic distance and in psychic time with the last line, “to get the luggage/I would be carrying the rest of my life.”

Our multi-step structured exercise this week brings us through a clear process of using our voice in this same way, moving from close to farther to farthest and back again. We’ll start with a threshold moment (I’ll guide you in how to choose one) and then apply specific techniques to help it blossom open into something more than it might have seemed.

Threshold & Narrative: A Structured Writing Exercise

Here are your steps to writing a short threshold "thing" (all genres welcome, 500 words maximum)

1. Make a list of threshold moments you could possibly explore in brief but vivid detail; try to include at least 10 ideas on your list. I know that might sound like a lot, but this is an exercise is mental flexibility, non-attachment, and imaginative capacity. Don’t limit yourself to life’s traditionally “big” moments (marriage, divorce, birth, death). Include those if you like—but be open, as well, to smaller thresholds. Sometimes whole worlds are held in miniature.

And if you don’t want to write about your life, you could use a threshold in someone else’s life, or you could write fiction. All of those options will work, but I do not recommend that you mix these categories on your list. Be clear what kind of list you are making (your own thresholds, real thresholds of another, fictional thresholds), then find 10 thresholds to put on it.

2. Once you have made a list of 10 possible threshold moments that you could write