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By Charles Rammelkamp
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Two-thirds of the way through Stop Lying, Aaron Smith begins the poem, “The World of Men,” in which he is talking to his psychiatrist,
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I’m a therapist’s wet dream, I say, and he writes
in his notebook, probably, that I’m using humor,
again, to cope.
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Self-deception, deflection: there are so many ways of “lying” – to ourselves and others. Humor is certainly one of Smith’s gifts, as he comes to terms with his mother’s death from cancer. In his previous 2019 collection, The Book of Daniel, also dedicated to his mom, he is likewise coming to terms with her sickness, her mortality. Now she is dead. The drama of her death is central to Stop Lying.
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Other forms of lying include withholding information and changing the subject. As Smith writes in “The Only Thing,”
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I never told my mother
I wrote books, and as far as I know,
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she never saw one. She Googled me,
once, and found an essay I wrote about
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being gay. She called my sister and cried,
begged her to ask me to take it down.
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I didn’t, and we pretended it never
happened. She loved me without looking.
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at me.
Or sometimes the lies are what sound false, boilerplate, as when we struggle toward being authentic and come up short. In “Letter to My Sister,” in which he realizes “Anyone, I now know, // can be lived without (I feel guilty for knowing that.),” Smith writes:
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I hate the words we use –
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especially numb, or how grief comes
in waves because it’s not true
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but it is, and there’s no language
that belongs only to us, how it feels
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to miss her, nothing someone else
hasn’t already thought of.
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In the title poem, his mother is in Intensive Care. It’s the last week of her life, and the cancer has spread to her brain. Of course, her loved ones are trying to be encouraging, comforting, but to her it feels like deception. Smith writes, “In the ICU, my mother
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asked: Is this a dream, or am I really dying? She asked
my father for a kiss, said: tell me the truth, stop lying.
A short poem, “When We Know My Mother Will Never Wake up Again,” reads:
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My sister says:
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Aaron’s a really talented poet, Mom. He’s published four books.
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My sister says:
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I thought it was important she know.
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In a tender moment of frank honesty, in the penultimate poem, “Fourteen Mondays,” Smith remembers sitting in a restaurant with his mother only months before her death, on his birthday.
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She looked beautiful those last months, and I told her,
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and not because she was my mother and sick,
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but because she was beautiful,
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as if the illness had made her more herself.
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Similarly, in “Three Months Before She Died We Went to Dollywood,” he writes,
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We watched roller coasters, and she said you’d
probably rather be here with friends, and I said no,
and it was the truth. She bought me a mug
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with my name printed below Dolly’s perfectly
painted face. She wanted me to remember the day.
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But it’s also true that for years both his mother and father, West Virginia fundamentalist Christians, tormented him for his lifestyle. The poem, “Afterlife” sums it up:
Sometimes
the hardest part
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is wondering
if my mother died
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believing
I would go
to hell
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But Smith is funny, witty. “My Father Was Frank O’Hara” is a poem about discovering the love letters his father had written to his mother when they were in high school. Smith calls his sister to read them to her. He notes:
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there’s an O’Hara quality
if O’Hara was straight
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and in high school
and couldn’t spell. Okay,
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they’re not that good.
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“God Is Not Mocked” is a satirical poem that contains lines like:
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Three Gods walk into a bar…
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There was a farmer’s daughter named Mary…
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Knock, knocketh…
Who’s there?
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How many Gods does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
One, because I am the Great and Powerful Oz!
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As the title suggests, “Plathoholic: A Party Game” is another clever poem. And then there’s “Some Days Everything I Do I Do,” which is both funny and heartbreaking:
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with a broken heart.
Today, for example,
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I threw away
the ceramic red
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wheelbarrow she left
in the yard last
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winter; it froze
and cracked beside
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the abandoned
birdbath. I know,
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I’m writing a poem
that mentions
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a red wheelbarrow—
fuck off!
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As when his dying mother demands it, Stop Lying is also Aaron Smith’s plea for his own sense of identity. This is who I am!
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You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Stop-Lying-Poems-Pitt-Poetry/dp/0822967049
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Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. His most recent releases are Sparring Partners from Mooonstone Press, Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books and Catastroika from Apprentice House.
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North of Oxford 