Jill and I had no secrets.
We spoke everything out loud
like toddlers. One day
out of pure boredom
I told a lie. As I said it, my voice
creaked like a rotten stair.
Jill noticed, smiled.
That lie was so fun
I did it again. Secrets collected.
I buried them in the yard.
As Jill and I sat in the evening,
it was hard to pretend
not to notice the mounds of dirt,
wasps flying out of them,
swarming us.
I admired Jill’s honesty
but when she died
I found a map to her
island of secrets
in the pocket of her jeans.
At noon the next day
I stepped off the ferry.
Villagers spoke of a statue
of a traumatized bed-
wetting girl. In the school,
rooms of gas masks,
disintegrating desks,
one tennis sneaker
on a pillow of needles.
Below a Ferris wheel
overgrown with wildflowers:
Joan of Arc, in the flesh,
with Jill’s face. Is that you,
she said, Son of Man?
Yes, I cried, it’s me!
We hugged and sat
and talked all night.
We confessed our lies
and wept as we parted.
In the morning
the humble boatman
ferrying travellers
across the stormy waters
told me to go fuck myself.
I swam to the coast,
emerging naked on the sand,
my skin giving off
a minute light.
John Wall Barger is the author of six collections of poetry, and a book of essays, The Elephant of Silence (LSU Press, 2024). He lectures in the Writing Program at Dartmouth College.
Questions and Answers
How/where do you find inspiration today?
Italian cinema! I’ve been watching all these old Italian movies wherever I can find them. I saw a great 1952 neorealist film directed by Vittorio De Sica called Umberto D, about a poor elderly guy in Rome who is desperately trying to keep his rented room. He—played with real dignity by a non-actor named Carlo Battisti (he’d been a professor of glottology before the film)—wears a suit and tie and hat, and has a little white dog named Filke that follows him everywhere. Umberto walks around the big cold Roman streets with his dog, trying to make some money. He attempts to be honest and kind to everyone, but he’s running out of options. At one point he’s driven to begging, and runs into an old friend. His shame is mortifying, but not as bad as the end when he’s forced to abandon Filke. I love this film because I was feeling something the whole time I watched it. I understood his critique of the poverty in post-World War II Italy, but what makes me really love the film is De Sica’s heartfelt sympathy for people. That can’t be faked.
Do you use any resources that a young poet would find useful (e.g. books, films, art, websites, etc.)?
I find etymology (e.g., etymology.com) a great way to drill down into the diction of a poem. Etymology reminds us that every word reverberates with connotations echoing through time. Even an innocuous word like “nice” is weirder than you’d think. Listen to how “nice” has changed over the years: from Old French, “timid, faint-hearted” (pre-1300); to “fussy, fastidious” (late 14c.); to “dainty, delicate” (c. 1400); to “precise, careful”; to “agreeable, delightful” (1769); to “kind, thoughtful” (1830). So when we use the word nice, it’s hissing and buzzing with all these ramifications, which is useful to know as a poet.
What inspired or motivated you to write “Impossible Household”?
I’m inspired by the poetic spaces created by some of my favorite poets, especially surrealists like Alice Rahon, Lorca, James Tate, and others. When Rahon says, “I have borne my life like the sun bears itself from one wall to the other,” I think we as readers can both see the image and not see it. It’s a kind of impossible space, which is enjoyable to visit if we let go of our desire for control. For me, over time, aesthetically, an impossible space that I’ve spent a lot of time in is Chernobyl, or the idea of Chernobyl I’ve concocted from stray parts, like Robert Polidori’s photos of the site, and perhaps Tarkovsky’s brilliant film Stalker. So the “island of secrets” in this poem—“the school, / rooms of gas masks, / disintegrating desks, / one tennis sneaker on a pillow of needles. // Below a Ferris wheel / overgrown with wildflowers”—is a Barger-ified “Chernobyl” that has definitely made appearances in other poems of mine.
How did your writing process unfold around “Impossible Household”? How did you write, edit, and refine it?
The first (very unremarkable) draft of this poem was called “Secrets” and began: “A secret is the construction of an island.” Later in that draft comes the line: “Let’s call the island Chernobyl.” So, although this poem was not working yet, I felt like something interesting was happening that called me back to do more drafts. The difficulty with this early draft is, it’s an idea—a metaphor of a secret as an island—but for an idea to become a better poem, the poet needs to provide real-world details so that the reader can actually enter the ecosystem of the poem, with their feelings and psyche, and not just think about it cerebrally. That means we, as poets, need to see it first. So after a few drafts I discovered a couple, and the poem began “Jill and I had no secrets.” The writing process was, then, to get the speaker from that first line to the island of secrets. That’s the bare bones of the process, but the sorcery of a poem is of course in the details, what the reader experiences while stumbling through the Chernobyl the poet has created.