“Love is an emergency
Tweet
that slips like a deer
from the wound of Christ”
– Ashley Capps
This poem, “Kindly,” used to be titled “Love is An Emergency,” after one of its lines. I changed the title because I didn’t want to dilute the energy or surprise of that line when it later appears; but that line was the originating impulse for the poem, and was based on my mishearing of something a child had said.
I was working as a nanny for a young brother and sister and had taken them to an Opening Day picnic on the lawns of the boarding school where their father was a Dean. The Dad came over to say hi, and as he was walking away, he told Sam, his young son, not to call him at work unless it was an emergency; Sam was in the habit of frequently ringing his Dad up to ask when he was coming home, even when he knew what time to expect him. As his father disappeared into the crowd of milling students, Sam yelled back, “But what if it IS an emergency?!” With his tendency to mumble and run his words together, however, I misheard his question as a remonstrance: “But love IS an emergency!”
While the writing of this poem was one of the more mysterious writing processes for me, the poem was shaped by a strong sense of fidelity to the knowing of that line: Love is an emergency. I believe, if we all looked more closely and with more care, we would see love—or something to love—everywhere in life’s fragility and precarity. Years ago, in a master naturalist course I was taking, we were introduced to the term biophilia: “love of all life and the living world; love of all life forms.” Biophilia, it turns out, is especially important to conservation because, as one lecturer told us, “We save what we love.” I adore that concept, biophilia. It reminds me of my favorite moral philosophy, the “ethic of reverence for life,” coined by the polymath Albert Schweitzer, who elaborates it thus:
“He shatters no ice crystal that sparkles in the sun, tears no leaf from its tree, breaks off no flower, and is careful not to crush any insect as he walks. If he works by lamplight on a summer evening, he prefers to keep the window shut and to breathe stifling air, rather than to see insect after insect fall on his table with singed and sinking wings.
If he goes out into the street after a rainstorm and sees a worm which has strayed there, he reflects that it will certainly dry up in the sunshine, if it does not quickly regain the damp soil into which it can creep, and so he helps it back from the deadly paving stones into the lush grass. Should he pass by an insect which has fallen into a pool, he spares the time to reach it a leaf or stalk on which it may clamber and save itself.
[…]
Today it is considered as exaggeration to proclaim constant respect for every form of life as being the serious demand of a rational ethic. But the time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race existed for so long before it recognized thoughtless injury to life as incompatible with real ethics. Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility with regard to everything that lives.”
Love of life, and the will for more of it, is the animating force behind all living things, and if we could give a closer and more devotional attention to the beings and lives we share this planet with, we would be humbled by the tender urgency with which they all strive to be here; the cri du coeur trembling in every cotyledon, the epic reverberating on every antennae. From the macro to the micro, each moment in which we decide to give or withhold love is an emergency for someone. And for all of us.
– Ashley Capps
Kindly
There are cases where a fact cannot come at all
and a leaf falls
down in front of me
and I steal this leaf
because I need it
and don’t want to think
about the future.
Just this leaf.
By looking at it.
Looking at it
regularly, then maybe
under a microscope.
Hours pass in this fashion.
When you got your first microscope
do you remember
how it came with four or five blank slides
packed in Styrofoam
and because you couldn’t resist
you picked your freshest scab
or ran the slide across your finger
so you could see
inside your own blood? Love
is an emergency.
And every decimal of dew is.
And every time that we are careless.
_____
Love is an emergency
that slips like a deer
from the wound of Christ
to land on the water
without bitterness
in a glister of accident
and won’t think twice
about climbing that tiny staircase again
in ice
to board a plane
again to fly
back into the kiss
of the same disaster
no recompense
no flotation device
the kind of suicide mission
where you’re not even free
after you’ve died
like how
when you hang yourself
in prison
they cuff you
before they cut you
down.
_____
Attaching a bird wing
to a fishing line and pole
and dragging it along the ground
trains hounds to trace game.
The name of the game
is kill what you love.
The name of the game
is kill what you hate.
The wings are bait
to teach the dogs to love their fate
which is to find what someone great
shot out
of the sky forever
and point: and it’s my heart
that is the convict.
I have to get the convict
what he wants.
_____
Someone dressed as Santa
shoots everyone
at the Christmas party,
beginning with the child
who answers the door.
Santa shoots everyone
then self.
In Spain, swordfish in the sea
do the seguidilla
and some make youthful mistakes
and some guffaw
and some are forced into slavery
and some are bedsore.
Some have beauty that is obscene.
We work in shifts
to be equivalent.
He was happy one minute.
12 a.m. to 12:01:
everyone turns to everyone
in their sequined dress
in a snow of silver dots
and kisses everyone’s champagne
mustache.
Someone’s false eyelash
floating in everyone’s glass
can only be distinguished
as unwishable and untrue
by the tiny bead of glue
that had been holding it in place.
You reach for my face.
A leaf falls down.
It is a featherless bone;
it is the sound of steel on stone;
it is the siren in the dial tone
rinsing out your brain before bed.
The leaf is green but it is red
in the microscope.
When all words contained all others, I said, I hope.
Ashley Capps received an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has published a book of poems, Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields. The recipient of poetry fellowships from the Iowa Arts Council, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the National Endowment for the Arts, she works as a writer, editor and researcher specializing in animal rights, and food and climate justice. She is at work on a second collection of poems entitled The FOReSt. With the poet Allison Titus, Ashley is co-editing THE NEW SENT(I)ENCE, an animal poetry anthology forthcoming from Trinity University Press in 2025. Her website is ashley-capps.com.