This initial version of Marie Howe’s “The Gate” appeared in our 1996 winter issue—coincidentally the year and season of my own birth. For a number of reasons, I’ve been obsessed for a while with the concept of a gate: the gates that we keep, the ones we pass or don’t pass at TSA, the rooms we are kept out of and are forced to break into or recreate outside toxic systems of power. Here, Howe deals directly with maybe the most important door we all must someday pass through.
By immortalizing her brother (the poem serving as the tragic death mask of a 28 year old), she forces us to think harder on the ceremony of the tender quotidian things: a cheese and mustard sandwich, the glasses we wash as they are used. Time catches up to everyone in the end; it seeps out of our hands like running water…it’s a marvel she trusted us with this initial version of one of her most heartbreaking and relevant works.
The First Gate
Marie Howe
Afterwards
I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world
would be the precise shape of my brother's body. He was
a little taller than me: a young man
but grown, himself by then,
done at 28, having folded every sheet,
rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water...
This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I'd say, what?
And he'd say, This.—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I'd say, what?
And he'd say, This. Sort of looking around.
