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The Poetry of Being Alive with Danusha Laméris

In my conversation with poet Danusha Laméris, we talk about how art, poetry, grief, and language can keep you grounded. She reads from her latest collection of poems, "Blade by Blade," which is described as a book of hungers. We talk about what that means, how it relates to grief, and how grief is rarely isolated.


Grief is a whole range of feelings -- connected to many human experiences. And Danusha would know. We talk about two big losses in her life -- her brother and her son.

Transcript:

Sarah Cavanaugh: [00:00:00] I am Sarah Cavanaugh, and this is Peaceful Exit, the podcast where we talk to creatives about life and death. I so enjoyed talking about art and poetry and grief and language with Danusha Laméris. She reads from her latest collection of poems, Blade by Blade, which is described as a book of hungers. We talk about what that means, how it relates to grief, how grief is rarely isolated.

Grief is many feelings and many experiences, and she would know. We talk about two big losses in her life, her brother and her son. What continues to stick with me is that despite all that loss, she's a light. She's really connected to all of her emotions, all the emotions that are part of being human.[00:01:00] 

Welcome to Peaceful Exit.

Danusha Laméris: Thank you. Good to be here.

Sarah Cavanaugh: I love your poetry. I wanna, I wanna tell you a funny story. I had four copies of your book and I've been giving them as gifts, and I realized this weekend that I gave. The one that I had marked up for this interview, I had given it to someone. You gave it away.

So I ran over to Elliot Bay and I'm like, they had both of these in stock on the shelf. I was thrilled. Anyway, just had to tell you that little story.

Danusha Laméris: That's so funny. You were, you were being very generous but more generous than you knew.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Yes, exactly. It's like, oh, I, I need, I need one of those. Uh, but I'm sure it won't be the last one I buy 'cause I just love this volume.

Absolutely love it. So when did you start writing poetry and what drew you to this medium, which we both love? 'cause I understand you also painted for a while.

Danusha Laméris: I did paint. I, I loved painting too and being a painter, but I [00:02:00] think what drew me to poetry, my first memories around that have to do with my mother having a photographic memory.

And a British education. So she would just tool around the house, reciting Shakespeare, sonnets, or she would be stuck in traffic and it was Longfellow, or, well, that's an American poet, but you know, so I think just hearing poetry allowed around the house. Traffic. That was an unusual experience, but that was sort of my, my normal day to day.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Your poetry has a real strong sense of place and I wonder where you feel most at home.

Danusha Laméris: Well, I grew up. California and very much in this sort of bay area to central Coast. So that's from Berkeley down to Santa Cruz where I've lived since college. So this [00:03:00] topography, this kind of dry yellow grass, the ocean, the bay oak trees, redwood trees, all of those are just very much a part of where I.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Before we get to your new book, let's start with your poem. Small Kindnesses, uh, from Bonfire Opera. It went viral and it was featured in the New York Times Magazine. I've seen it all over social media, and there's a similar Naomi poem that also went viral about kindness. I think we're, we're hungry for kindness and I would love for you to read it, but before you read it, what do you think you've uncovered here that resonates with so many people?

Oh wow.

Danusha Laméris: Well, I think these are undoubtedly difficult days and days in which we sometimes are really reaching for something that gives us a sense of hope, and especially when it comes to human connection that feels somehow unmarred or [00:04:00] pure or genuine. Um. I think we want that so much, and I think we have that so much at the same time when we really notice it.

And so I think the poem became kind of a placeholder, certainly for me to mark those occasions, which tend to be very minuscule occasions. Maybe it's done that for other people as well, just so that they kind of can bookmark. Oh, that happened to me today. People write me notes like that. Oh my gosh, that you won't believe what happened to me at the grocery store today.

You know, that kind of news. That doesn't make the news. I'd be happy to read it. Shall I dive in?

Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah, that would, I would love that.

Danusha Laméris: Small kindnesses. I've been thinking about the way. When you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by or how [00:05:00] strangers still say, bless you. When someone sneezes a leftover from the bubonic plague, don't die.

We are saying, and sometimes when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly we don't wanna harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot and to say thank you to the person handing it to smile at them and for them to smile back for the waitress to call us honey, when she sets down the bowl of clam chow in.

To let us pass. We have so little of each other now so far from tribe and fire. [00:06:00] Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, here, have my seat. Go ahead. You first. I like your hat.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Beautiful. The line that really, really hit me was we have so little of each other now

Danusha Laméris: and that can feel so true. Kente. I think we tend to be holed up in our homes and in our cars and watching the news, which at any given moment is dire. Extreme in one way or another, and I think there's just these simple moments of connection that make us feel a part of something and a part of each other, and that's [00:07:00] magic when that happens.

Mm-hmm. I

Sarah Cavanaugh: love that. Hmm. Well, most of the poems we're gonna read today are from your new book, um, blade by Blade, which is described as a book of hungers. And what does that mean to you?

Danusha Laméris: Oh, that's such an interesting question. I think that we are creatures of longing in so many ways and we were just talking about that longing to feel connection, to feel deeply rooted in the world and and with each other.

And I think we have so many longings and so some of that is passion and desire in that way. Some of it.

The way we want to feel, to feel at peace in ourselves, to feel hope. There's so many things we want and want so deeply, and I, so [00:08:00] I think that's what comes to mind right now when you ask me, maybe in a different moment it would be something else entirely. I'm looking at the book right now to go, what do I mean a.

Poem about eating meat from my friend's ranch. So some of it's food, but a lot of it is about the other hungers that are underneath. I'm looking at a poem here called Daughter That Begins, I always wanted a daughter, which is to say I wanted a better self flicked from my marrow made flesh. So I think that too, registers to me is we want, we want, we want, we're wanters.

Sarah Cavanaugh: How does writing help you grieve, um, and also turn toward joy?

Danusha Laméris: I feel that those things live in almost the exact same [00:09:00] place. Grief. That's, that's what I feel in my person and in my body, that those things are adjacent. And so when I'm writing about something that I have a lot of joy or around or something pleasurable.

I'm always gonna reference in some way a little grief that's connected to it as well. And when I write about grief and loss, I notice there'll always be something connected to that that's maybe not quite joyful, but maybe even sometimes funny, darkly funny. Or maybe it's that there's something, um, larger my, as.

I go, oh, this grief is connected to that too, to something else bigger than the grief itself, something that it's held within. And so those feel so [00:10:00] connected. And I think we often think of grief as its own category that is separate. And that feels painful because when we've lost and suffered a, a big loss or a series of losses, we can identify ourselves.

As so connected to that grief that we're not feeling the other tentacles of the grief. And what those are touching, and sometimes those tentacles are touching a sense of wonder or something else that isn't quite what we think of as grief. And writing helps me to, um, make those connections and to feel the aliveness of grief in a different way.

Sarah Cavanaugh: You really dip into the. Vast array of emotions that come up for all of us when we're grieving. [00:11:00] It's the whole spectrum. It's everything, right? It's all the things.

Danusha Laméris: It's all the things. It's, and it, I think it feels better to know that it's all the things. To feel it's a narrow, tight closet that we're kind of cramped into a box, you know?

Um, it's bigger than that. Grief does give us a connection to every other living thing, every other being, because all beings experience suffering. And so that's one thing it does, is it connects us very intimately to everyone else.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Now, uh, let's turn to Blade by Blade. Can we start with construction? I'm happy to start there.

Growing up in California, I. It makes sense that your metaphor would be earthquake. I know,

Danusha Laméris: and in this case, referencing a very actual earthquake that I experienced right when I went to college. You know, you send your kid off [00:12:00] to college and it's like, oh my gosh, it's such a big deal getting into the dorm and getting their life set up in a month after I arrived here in Santa Cruz for my college experience, we.

A massive earthquake that actually, um, tumbled many of the buildings downtown. Our downtown is completely different from what it was, and we slept outside. We weren't even allowed in our dorms until they were. You know, checked thoroughly. And so it was a very dramatic event and some people died in it. Um, not on the campus but in the town.

And so that was a pivotal event for me and recently. Maybe it was a couple years ago by now, I was sitting downtown in one of the places near where I used to sit before the earthquake thinking, oh my gosh, everything's different because of that earthquake. [00:13:00] But also being here 30 years or so later and realizing how much I'm different and thinking about the events that have happened in my life too.

And so that's the origin of this. It's really me sitting in that location looking around at what used to be rubble and what before that was a building I remember. And and so forth and so on. So, okay, here we go. Construction. I remember downtown after the earthquake. Piles of rubble metal gates set up to corrals in the middle of the road so we wouldn't step on all that.

Broken concrete impediments fallen from doorways, makeshift memorials to people who died under the debris. Sometimes you'd pass a [00:14:00] building's facade held up with beams. The rest of the structure gone an empty lot visible through the blown out windows. I know that place. That's saving what I can. Okay, I lost my house, but I'm alive or, okay, my brother died, but I'm living twice now.

Three times. For me, for him, and for my son. I saved the front of the building. Its delicate arches and raised freezes. I didn't hate it. You could still buy socks or get coffee in these giant tents that popped up in the ruins. That's aftermath for you. The way we keep on drinking out of little paper cups, walking through disaster in our brand new shoes.[00:15:00] 

For everyone who can't,

Sarah Cavanaugh: you know, your poetry is so visual for me, but I don't know if that's because I'm a photographer and I'm very visual to begin with. Is there a primary sense you have when you're writing? Is there something you lean into?

Danusha Laméris: Well, I trained in the arts. I trained as a painter. That's what I studied in college.

And so that's one of the places I began was definitely with the visual. And I have to say that was one of the happiest times of my life. There was nothing better than just looking at the world through the lens of color.

Tone, light and shadow. I just loved it. It was such a happy period of my life. And I think because when you're focused that way, especially on one sense in particular, everything else falls away. And so it's becomes a kind of meditation [00:16:00] and I felt so happy. Why did I switch? I.

Sarah Cavanaugh: I wonder if you had continued painting, whether that would be as effective for metabolizing grief as writing is.

Danusha Laméris: I. I wonder that too. I, I think that it's possible. I can imagine starting a painting in one place and the developed painting taking you to a different place. 'cause that's what it is about. The writing process that I find addresses grief so precisely is that you start in one place, the arc of the poem takes you to somewhere else, and in that you find yourself freed of something.

And I can imagine that there are painters listening who would say, oh yeah, that's a painting. And to conclude it, but me writing has been. Point A to point X. It's not even quite point [00:17:00] B. It's just I end up somewhere else. It's not

Sarah Cavanaugh: linear. Yes, it's not linear. It's not linear. No. Exactly. Uhuh. No. So in the poem you just read, what does living three times mean to you?

Danusha Laméris: Well, you know how when people lose someone and they might say, you know, now I'm living twice. I'm living for myself and my brother. And I think for me it was this sense of, okay, I. I lost my brother, but I'm also living my own life. That seems like three lives, and not that I really believe that I have to carry them.

Way that I have to live my life in some amped up way because they're not living. But in the process of writing the poem, somehow that idea drew me. I'm here, I'm living, I'm seeing this. And so in this moment I'm seeing it for all of us [00:18:00] In this moment, I'm sitting here for all of us. So maybe there moments that feel like that I don't.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Well, and you have a body and you have all your senses too, and so it's like you're sensing the world for them too. You know?

Danusha Laméris: Yeah. Maybe there's that sense of, oh, I get to be here, and so maybe one way of of expressing that is I get to be here and so maybe I want to really pay attention. It's not so much that I feel I have to do anything heroic to justify my outliving.

Other people I've loved. I think that's a thing we can also sometimes, uh, go toward. But it's more that I wanna see, really see the world or really feel it.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Yeah. Well, you have many beautiful poems about your brother and his death, and I understand he died by suicide. Can we read Blue Note? [00:19:00] 

Danusha Laméris: Blue note, my brother named all his house plants after jazz musicians.

So when he left town, he'd say, can you water miles? Coltrane is getting too cold by the window. Give Billy A. Little extra drizzle, but let her dry out. Was there a Nina? I can't remember, but I know Mingus had broad, glossy leaves and Cassandra a pink tilt to her foliage. Was frail due to less than tropical conditions.

I'm trying to say it was music and plants and sprouted greens, and my brother in the kitchen chefing up roasted beets and everyone hanging out. Old style Oakland, which was wood floors and hummus and takeout. Ethiopian, I thought we'd live like kings, a dynasty. From one potluck to the next. [00:20:00] It felt that way.

The red carpet days of our twenties, I took care of those plants as best I could, put them in my own living room, gave them fertilizer, and I hoped the right slant of light. I thought we'd gotten out beyond the worst of it. The story we were born to. Though we both had a feeling he'd die young, but the years kept ticking and the friends kept coming and his children arrived curled and new in their cribs.

It was hard to notice things beginning to turn to see the signs. The mine's erasure. He started checking the locks, closing curtains, talking in low tones. [00:21:00] Sometimes the leaves start to yellow and you don't even notice. There's a sound absence makes even before it arrives. EC static in the ether, high and blue, and held

Sarah Cavanaugh: the minds erasure just leapt out at me because when you look back after and you wanna find what you missed,

Danusha Laméris: you notice the signs of things often much later. Right. When you know where the story's headed already, and I had so much going on in my life back when he had all that going on, and so I'm aware that there must have been things I missed and didn't notice until they were pretty extreme already.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Hmm. That's [00:22:00] so tough, especially because it sounds like you guys were really close. What was your relationship like with your brother? But

Danusha Laméris: I, I had a very particular sibling situation in that my brother was not only my only sibling, but we got along so well with each other, you know, that sort of sibling fight stuff and, and all of that that people dread dealing with.

As parents, we just had hardly any. And so I know families where they actually decided to have another child because they thought, oh, if we space them apart, like Denu and Tyson, you know, if we do this, if we do that, it'll maybe be the same. And, and it seldom was, but I was so close to my brother. And so in a way we were so connected that we're never really disconnected, but in a.

[00:23:00] It's almost like losing a twin because we were so close. I'm three years older, but there was just a natural harmony of personalities and humor and way of seeing that that gave us a very unique situation as siblings and so it has felt like an enormous loss. And yet, and yet, and yet, um, I'm looking at a picture of him.

Even right now, I have a little cutout of him next to my, on my desk, and I just feel joy when I look at him like that. And so it's a, it's again, like we've been saying about grief, it's everything. It's sometimes I can't believe that I'm here at this stage in life and that he's not. That seems surreal.

Impossible and how am I even here? I can't understand that. [00:24:00] And then I look at his face and go, oh my God, there he is. I love him so much. You know, so it's, it's just everything in a way he's here. It's just everything

Sarah Cavanaugh: in a way,

Danusha Laméris: you

Sarah Cavanaugh: know?

Danusha Laméris: In a way he's here doing his thing in a way he's not, in a way he is.

Yeah. It's that both end stuff that we just Yeah. Dance with, you know? Well in

Sarah Cavanaugh: Blue Note, the line. We both had a feeling he'd die young. Yeah. Did you ever talk about it or was, what was that feeling? You did talk about it. We did.

Danusha Laméris: We did. We talked about really everything a, a childhood game we would play that is connected to this.

I would hide a thing in, in, maybe in the hall closet, and then I would challenge him to draw it. Or he would have a new substitute teacher and tell me, describe my teacher. And so we practice things, I guess now you would call remote viewing or [00:25:00] something like that. But we, we played that as a game and we used to sometimes go, well, what's going to happen?

And we both didn't see him in the future very far. And so we would talk about that. Maybe this is Caribbean family stuff, that this seemed normal to us to have that kind of discussion and to hold the world as maybe a little more, um, I don't know if it's a little more magical or a little more, I don't, I don't even know what the word would be there, but that was how we helped things.

And I would say, yeah, I don't see you there. And he'd say, neither do I. And there was a year he was in two car accidents, but nothing bad happened and we said, oh, maybe you got over the hump and the fates will go differently now, but we weren't sure. [00:26:00] But it did feel like he could have died then. It was young.

It was like maybe around age 21. He, in fact, lived into his early thirties and got married, had a family, had two children. We thought, well, maybe we were wrong. And then he started having issues with, with mental illness, which my father also, um, has dealt with. And at that point I thought, uh, oh, maybe this is where this story goes.

I. Um, but that wasn't until he was around 30 years old.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Thank you for sharing that beautiful poem. Let's do another one. Okay. Okay. Do you have a request, uh, dressing for the burial from your second book Bonfire opera?

Danusha Laméris: So this is a poem about trying to decide what to wear to my brother's [00:27:00] burial and talking about it with his wife.

Okay, here we go. Dressing for the burial. No one wants to talk about the hilarity after death. The way the week my brother shot himself, his wife and I fell on the bed laughing because she couldn't decide what to wear for the big day and asked me do I go for sexy or Amish? I told her sexy. And we rolled around on the mattress.

They'd shared for 18 years, clutching our sides. Meanwhile, he lay in a narrow, refrigerated drawer, soft brown curls, springing from his scalp, framing his handsome face. This was back when he still had a face and we were going to get to see it. Hold up the black skirt [00:28:00] again. I said, she said, which one? And then she said, you look so mafia chic.

And I said, thank you. And it went on until we both got tired and our ribs hurt. And now I don't even remember what we wore. Only that we both looked fabulous. Weeping over that open hole in the.

Sarah Cavanaugh: I know that sometimes you can write something about such a deeply emotional event and it comes out too much, you know, it's too sensational or whatever, and I don't find any of that in your poetry.

Danusha Laméris: Well, thank you for saying that. I, I think Chekhov was known to have said when writing about emotional content. And so I think I've certainly taken that advice to heart. Let the reader feel it. [00:29:00] I don't need to be pushing all the feelings on them. If you tell the story with the context, the reader will have their own feelings, and certainly for me writing these things, I do revisit all.

Be a.

We relive some of what happened.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Let's talk about your son. What was your son's name?

Danusha Laméris: Santiago. But I called him Santi or you know, the bubs or just, you know, you all these nicknames.

Sarah Cavanaugh: You wrote in your substack, I had a lovely big-eyed baby with a chromosomal variation that meant he'd never walk or be able to feed himself, nor communicate with us his thoughts, needs, and [00:30:00] feelings.

My marriage fell apart under the weight of all the decision making and sleeplessness that came with this new life. Soon I was a single mother sharing caregiving. There's a lot of grief in those few sentences.

Danusha Laméris: Boy, I really was packing it in in my early thirties, just having so many intense experiences of, of loss and of grief so much, and I'm glad I that in a, because it's kind of like a Cliff Cliffs notes that people can visit and know background.

You know, there's period when you. I.

I remember at that time it the worst thing being when people were nice. Here we are talking about small kindnesses being something we [00:31:00] want, but I would go to the grocery store, see someone I knew and they'd say, oh, I'm so sorry. And I, I've heard about what happened, you know, and I would just fall apart and go home.

Um, so I remember it just being in. Quite bear the retelling, which now doesn't feel that way.

Sarah Cavanaugh: One of the things I love is talking to authors and poets because you have processed the grief and then in a way that you've put language around it and you're able to share it with others, and once you do, you're making space for other people who have been through a similar experience.

Someone out there needed to hear this. Um, and needs to hear it today, and we'll feel less alone.

Danusha Laméris: That's definitely the hope that you're sort of building a house that other people can take refuge in.

Sarah Cavanaugh: I'd love to have you read another poem. Okay. How about the sound?[00:32:00] 

Danusha Laméris: The sound? I'm not sure if I want to tell you this, but it's only a story. And like all stories, it's held in time. It begins with death. My son's off life support. The doctors wheeling him into the OR to harvest his still living organs. He was not conscious. He had, I told myself already vacated the frame, something he'd been close to doing.

Since he was born, I sat at home alone on the couch, while the surgeons, no doubt with great care severed him from his heart, his kidneys, his liver. I don't want to know what else. I could not think about it. And so instead I closed my [00:33:00] eyes. Imagine him a wisp. A breath of air moving upward out of the confines of the body.

And then I heard it a humming that seemed to be everywhere at once, but not everywhere For a moment, I couldn't say if the sound was coming from inside. As a sound might in a dream seem to arise from inside the dreamer. It was clear that it was outside and circling the house, a Song of arrows, and all at once I saw them, the one body, they made a kinetic cloud at the window.

Those wound givers, honey makers, and something like fear arose in me with. I must have risen crossed the room to close the window, though I don't [00:34:00] remember. They moved as one, the whole of them, a clustered orchestra, first dense and singular, then dispersed Agile entity, both bound and unbound. I watched H until I could longer say what?

If they were one or many or what, what anymore was a body,

Sarah Cavanaugh: the choice of the word arrows, and that was so compelling to me. The arrows circling the house, it seems equal. Parts menacing, but also comforting

Danusha Laméris: because it happened at that exact time when I was sitting there, um, knowing what was happening. The operating room and with my son, and it was a very obviously heightened, the most heightened kind [00:35:00] of moment.

Sarah Cavanaugh: My mother died 22 years ago, and I remember sitting on her bed, we were talking about her illness, she had cancer and we were having a very intimate conversation and I looked up and there was a western Tanger on. They had a uh, uh, bird bath. And I'd never seen one. In all the years I've lived in the Northwest, I'd never seen one.

And it looked like, it looked like a, someone had had a exotic burden, let it free because they have all these colors and you're thinking. Where did that come from? And I've never seen one since. I only saw Oh, never since. No. And only in that one moment in that place. Um, my father still lives in the same house, but I've never seen one again.

Danusha Laméris: So it kind of punctuates that moment, doesn't it? Mm-hmm. It

Sarah Cavanaugh: does. Then

Danusha Laméris: you really can't forget that moment.

Sarah Cavanaugh: How do you think about your son now? What's the shape of your grief?

Danusha Laméris: I think of him as almost the most pivotal [00:36:00] figure in my life because the experience of having him and the experience of caring for him and the experience of losing him.

Are probably the most defining things that have happened to me in many ways, but he just taught me so many things, how to be in not knowing even when it was painful, how to enjoy things like just combing his silky hair. And I took all these black and white photos of him and made a little album that was just so cute.

You know, I would show it to everybody and celebrating him in that way and, um. That I could still enjoy so much about him, about his presence and about his snugs. I could just enjoy [00:37:00] so much about him and we were just hanging out there not knowing, not knowing really anything. Of what would happen.

Sarah Cavanaugh: So what does a peaceful exit mean to you?

Danusha Laméris: My friend Christopher, who died years ago. And I do have a poem about him that he found out he was dying. There he was in his sixties where he could have had many years left, but he found out he was dying and I got to go be with him in that time when he was, I think, beyond food, but maybe still drinking a little water.

And we talked a little. But he said, I look forward to seeing you again someday. He said, Bon voyage kind of to himself. To me, bon voyage. But then he said, more seriously, he said, getting ready is the [00:38:00] best part. I said, what do you mean? And he said, the letting go. The letting go. A peaceful exit is something we can experience even in the day to day, whenever we have deep acceptance and we are in that moment letting go, and that's practice for that time when that's all that's asked of us.

Sarah Cavanaugh: Beautiful. Thank you. It has been so fun to talk to you today. Same with

Danusha Laméris: you. Can we do this all the time? Like do you wanna do?

Sarah Cavanaugh: Thank you for listening to Peaceful Exit. I'm your host, Sarah Cavanaugh. You can find me on Instagram at @APeacefulExit. And you can learn more about this podcast at peacefulexit.net. Our senior producer is Katy Klein, and our sound engineer is Shawn Simmons. This episode was edited by Sydney Gladu. Additional support from Cindy Gal and Ciara Austin.

Original music provided by Ricardo Russell, with additional music and sounds from Blue Dot Sessions. If you'd like to support our show, please follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, rate and review us wherever you listen. It really does make a difference. And as always, thank you so much for listening.

 

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