had realized that one day she’d no longer need to wash her boy’s feet, and the thought wounded her. “Mom,” she asked Sheila, “do you still miss that?” Sheila replied, “I’d give anything to wash my son’s feet.” As I write this down it sounds utterly servile. At the time I could not help but weep. Motherhood gets me. I cry whenever I watch a representation—whether fictional or no—of birth. I have also cried at the gym, on the elliptical, watching a trailer for some dumb and heartbreaking movie. I waited until my sister’s car was one hundred yards into her move to Maine, and then I cried. I cried in front of a crowd—mortifying—while reading a poem I wrote for my dead friend Bill. He would have laughed. He would have liked it.
Do you remember the hopelessness of watching a parent cry?
When Bill died I went to a museum and cried.
I do not allow roadkill to make me cry anymore.
When I was young my nose used to bleed so badly at times that when it finally began to clot, my nasal passages would clog up, and I’d cry tears of blood.
There are chemical differences between emotional tears and those produced by physical irritation. People who sniff emotional tears show decreased sexual arousal.3 Once I started to cry during sex, not about the sex, but rather the mawkish Belle and Sebastian song playing on the stereo. People cry in response to art, most frequently to music. Poetry gets claimed second.4 People can even cry about architecture.5
The first thing you ever did was cry. According to William Derham, writing in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1708, at least one human began crying while still in the womb, which led to skeptical responses from correspondents who thought the noise must have been a “Groaking of the Guts, or Womb, or the Effect of . . . Feminine Imagination.”6 “Scarce a Day,” insisted Derham, “in all the five Weeks escaped without Crying little or much,” though the boy was, he went on to say, “since its Birth, a very quiet Child.”7
I met Bill at a poetry reading when we were both still living in New York City, and we made plans to meet up, talk poems, try a friendship. Eventually we rendezvoused at a lousy bar near Union Square. “I’m pregnant,” I told him, and ordered a drink.
After the abortion I bled for weeks. One evening so much it frightened me. I called the clinic and they said to go to the emergency room, but I didn’t have any money. I called Bill and he said he’d come over. He spent the night in my bed while I cried and bled and cried. It was the only time we kissed.
I speak to Lisa and Lisa speaks of parallel crying, the crying that comes alongside art but not precisely from it. Plot does not jerk the tears from you; some other force corresponds. This pleases me, as I have always preferred parallel lines to perpendicular ones. Perpendicular lines are Chekhovian; the introduced gun goes off. Parallel lines are Hitchcockian; the present bomb is enough.
Most crying happens at night. People cry out of fatigue. But how horrible it is to hear someone say, “She’s just tired!” Tired, yes, certainly, but just? There is nothing just about it.
I remember watching my mother cry one brief winter day, though I can’t recall why she was so sad. Perhaps there was no reason, only an atmosphere: my merchant mariner father’s absence at sea, the endless demanding presence of my sister and myself. I remember the brightness of the room, sunlight assailing every surface.
In the immediate aftermath of the massacre at Kent State in 1970, one witness mistook the tears of students crying at the deaths of their classmates for tears produced by gas—the lacrymator the National Guard had weaponized against protestors. Years later, she told an interviewer:
I still was convinced, for some crazy reason, that there was just tear gas. [. . .] I had no clue where the ambulances were going or why there were so many of them and why they were so loud and moving so fast and why people were crying so hard and hugging each other and being so hysterical. So I kept walking. [. . .] And they drove me home. Shelly and Mark drove me home. And my mother was standing in the driveway crying, waiting for me, thinking that I was one of the dead people at Kent. And she was crying. [. . .] I don’t even remember what happened after I got into my parents’ house, other than there was a lot of crying on my mother’s part. And I don’t remember crying at all.8
The National Guard threw tear gas canisters at the students—“laid some gas,” to use their phrase—and the students threw them back, an act of protection and defiance: No, thank you; we don’t want this. Retaliating, escalating, the soldiers aimed their M1 rifles.
Among the remedies for tear gas—a cold-water rinse, a turn to face the wind—the command to remain calm sounds hardest to put into practice.
In the photo that came to represent the massacre, a fourteen-year-old girl kneels beside the body of a slain student, her whole body an anguished question.
Tears are a sign of powerlessness, a “woman’s weapon.” It has been a very long war.
Yi-Fei Chen, a design student in the Netherlands, literalized the metaphor after a demanding professor made her cry. She constructed a brass gun that collects, freezes, and shoots tears: tiny icy bullets. Chen presented the object at her graduation, where she accepted an invitation to take aim at the head of her department.9
