Those of you who read The Small Bow newsletter regularly know that poetry has been an important part of my recovery. Every morning, I read a poem as part of my daily journal and reading routine. This began in 2017, when I was working my way through early sobriety. I discovered a poem that I loved — Stephen Dunn’s “The Inheritance.” From there, I began to seek out more contemporary stuff, poems that I read for pure enjoyment. Poems that offered me recognizable worlds and helped me access some of the disorienting feelings I was navigating in early sobriety.

To better promote poetry and the poets who write it on TSB, I’ve started a monthly series called “TSB’s Poet Laureate Club,” where I’ll feature one poet per month whose work I appreciate and have found an excellent complement to my recovery.

This month’s poet laureate is Sydney Lea. Sydney’s latest collection, What Shines, can be found here.

My best boyhood companion and I got drunk on a bottle of stolen wine when we were about twelve. Next morning, we woke up in a stubble field, covered in our own vomit and savaged by mosquitoes. He said “I fuckin’ hate this! Never again!” Me? I couldn’t wait to do it again! That friend and I have lost touch in later life, but last I knew, he still hadn’t drunk another drop. 

My next drinking pal was a cousin I loved. Like me, he was an alcoholic from the get-go, though his trajectory was faster than mine. When he was 30, he told me his doctor had warned him that, if he kept boozing, he was going to drink himself to death, and soon. I said, “So you’ll stop, right? You don’t want to die.” He said “I don’t give a shit.”

I shudder to think how close I was to the same attitude when something turned me around. I don’t boast about that. No, I believe in what Christians call grace and the Kabbalah calls chesed, blessing one has done nothing to deserve. I mean, didn’t my cousin “deserve” recovery? How about my younger brother, who died a coke addict at 35? And what of my my mother, who endured a high-functioning but miserable alcoholic life until she was buried? These are examples of people particularly close to me who didn’t receive the gift I did. Why not? Even after many, many years of being clean and sober, I can’t answer that with any confidence. 

The Zach of my poem is in fact a composite figure: I pour a lot of my own addictive experience, especially the self-loathing and melodrama, into my depiction of him, and I add bits and pieces from stories I know about others.

From my perspective, those of us who have been granted life and serenity in whatever measure are mysteries in our own rights, just like those who were not so rescued. So I keep thinking–

“not all-day-every-day but plenty– of Zach,
of how we were like him and how for sure we weren’t heroes.

We just woke up one day and we were alive...” 

We fortunate ones were desperate enough to ask for help (and mean it) from whatever source that could provide it, and we got “saved and Zach and some others didn’t.” How come? Search me.

Zach’s Mystery, and Others
by Sydney Lea            

We remember how Zach finally hated himself so much
he became a walking– no, a stumbling cartoon: 
he left his apartment, say, to look for a brick,
not some handier thing like a lamp or a frying pan,
not any old rock– he left, and found the brick
and used it to smash his grubby bathroom mirror.
Cartoon Bible-thumpers would likely have shouted, 
The end is near.  Dirt-poverty, that was one thing, 

the lack of beauty in life was quite another, 
and people turning away wherever he went, 
the ones still willing to hear him sore as hell
they remained so. And something else: he couldn’t count
the years that had passed since somebody called him dear 
or whatever. Well, I guess that’s a lot of things.
Those Bible folk I imagined would have been right
if they’d meant the end of Zach’s pathetic world. 

We remember how we’d drink with him, and more
than half our gang are dead as he is now. 
But some of us gathered those thousands of little shards 
and managed to fit them together again like puzzles,
and so we all had mirrors that we could inspect
without thinking of bricks or drinking. But we kept thinking–
not all-day-every-day but plenty– of Zach,
of how we were like him and how for sure we weren’t heroes.

We just woke up one day and we were alive 
and it wasn’t because we were smarter or God knows better
to look at than Zach. (And I say God, by the way,
because what the hell else do I have for explanation?) 
Before it all shattered, Zach had a movie star’s features
and smile, an athlete’s body… I could keep listing.
Not beauty or brains or courage– none of that saved us.
But we did get saved and Zach and some others didn’t.

SYDNEY LEA is a Pulitzer finalist in poetry, founder of New England Review, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-15), and recipient of his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (most recently Now Look, 2024), six volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can, 2024), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines 2023). His new and selected poems, Dancing in the Dark, is due in early 2027.