Look At Me, and I Will Look At You

Heavy and constricting is the specter of death. Though its monuments in literature are often haunted by a procession of literal ghosts, these presences also materialize in protagonists’ memories. Both approaches reflect humanity’s inability to move beyond trauma or grievance. The cessation of the body in exchange for a spirit effectively forces a bait-and-switch, with the physical act of dying supplanted by the active forces of a person’s attempt to comprehend it.

This is why the most memorable examples of literary hauntings negotiate whether the spiritual manifestation of the deceased is otherworldly or all in one’s head. The line extending from Poe’s “Annabel Lee” (1849) or Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) to something like Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), or Carmen Maria Machado’s short story “Real Women Have Bodies” is the physical reality of grief cutting up against the social, psychological, and emotional facets that inform it. Optimists might balk at so much energy diverted toward bereavement when, at the end of the day, all we really have is what’s in front of us. But Tomas Tranströmer’s samurai in “After Someone's Death” does indeed look insignificant beside its armor of black dragon scales, and Muriel Spark’s telephone in Memento Mori (1959) keeps ringing off its noxious reminder all the same: "Remember you must die."

Still, the legacy of the deceased may truncate one’s growth, every feeling or decision checked against what ______ would’ve done. Two Minds (W.W. Norton, 2024), Callie Siskel’s panicked and sorrowful debut, addresses this stasis in inventive and often startling ways. The book presents itself as a fork in the road, with the poet indecisive as to whether she can move on from the loss of her father, the film critic Gene Siskel. It’s also an amalgam, with the poet’s mind overlaying the deceased’s mind like tracing paper, faintly sketching its contours to learn how to live a dignified life. Remembrance is comforting but worn like an ankle monitor: the reality of its confinement affects Siskel’s movement and thus all of her relationships, as depicted in “Intention to Return”:

In a past life  I was not defined by his death.
…                     I was not re-routed like a plane through Charlotte.
…                     I was part of a “nuclear family,” the phrasing
                         of which appears first in 1924 as “the nuclear family
                         complex.”
…                     I did not have a complex.
…                     I smiled for the camera.
…                     Love accumulated like debt—mindless, habit-forming.
…                     Similes were balanced equations.
…                     I had my father’s face, not “you have your father’s face.”

This poem is arguably the book’s best and indicative of how Two Minds works. Its lines are shrouded in mourning—not only for the deceased, but for the person Siskel was before her father died. Notably, the deceased is rendered not as a flesh-and-blood person but as an essence wafting through the text. Siskel keeps her father at a safe distance; indeed, the closest the poet allows herself to get when referencing him is “my father.” He is “in synagogue, praying // for himself inside his navy suit” (“Prophecy in Blue”). In the family’s home, he beckons Siskel to “Come in, come in”—the physical fact of his existence thinned out in Siskel’s memory so she has to reassure herself that “Yes he was here” (“Overwinter”). We are rarely allowed to see anything beyond the shapes that Siskel curates to sketch out a father, which in turn amplify the details that feel exclusive to her experience—the reflection in brass elevator doors, for example, which she remembers “more easily than his body next to [hers]” (“Mirror Image”), or the forlorn rush of memory in “When I Return to Your Room”:

I touch the window with both hands
 
as a child does
wanting to be remembered
 
by the world
When I turn them over,
 
they are my adult hands

The poem disassociates chronology; readers have no idea if Siskel is speaking from the immediate present or the distant past. How close to the end was her memory of her father drinking water “endlessly”? When she asks if he can “see the lake / frozen around the perimeter, the snow // dusting the grass,” does she mean then, or now? Time is rendered through increments of mourning—“You are wearing the green robe / I brought with me to college,” Siskel recalls.

The collection is general enough narratively to elicit a universal emotional response but specific enough in language and slant for the poet to ward off cliched empathy and assert ownership. Sifting through these instincts aesthetically feels like frenziedly banging on the glass under which the deceased has been preserved. But the tension has begotten a bracingly qualified lyricism. Siskel’s competing impulses of walking readers through her grief and shielding herself from re-traumatization has neutralized catharsis and introduced a haunting.

In “Cocktail Hour,” Siskel recounts the adolescent memory of her now-widowed mother dating, turning her childhood home into an Allman Brothers-blasting, gardenia-candle-burning rendezvous. It isn’t the routine nature of her mother’s boyfriend staying over that shocks, but rather Siskel “announc[ing] myself, tall, indignant / as a man, inside the doorway— / as if I were my father, coming home / early, hungry for dinner.” The adjustment of seeing her mother involved with another man is smothered by Siskel guarding her father’s legacy, almost as if she has become possessed by him.

Elsewhere, in “Marrying Houses,” Siskel’s mother channels her energy (and grief) into working on the family’s houses:

She transferred her love
 
each time we moved, calling them all home,
surprising them with flowers, monthly
memberships to individually wrapped fruit
 
[. . .]
 
I think she wanted to show me houses
could be a husband, only more lasting.
Like a mortician, she made them
more beautiful than they were in life.

Everything assumes the role of father and husband except the father and husband. He appears in the background, faintly, then disappears, with his survivors left to contemplate his death and the people and places left behind. In aggregate, the effect is tender and compelling, and one of the most idiosyncratic portraits of mourning in recent memory.

Situated next to poems that deploy this logic are appreciations of art. Some appear as resting places from the other poems’ heaviness, such as “Bird in Space,” an ode to Constantin Brâncuși's eponymous sculpture in the Met. (Variations of this sculpture with the same title are in other museum collections.) Others refract Siskel’s consciousness as she works toward healing. The poem “Jeanne” notes that Amedeo Modigliani primarily painted his wife, Jeanne Hébuterne; it hints at the all-consuming devotion Siskel’s parents had—“the two of them so / in love I felt unnecessary.” Another poem, “Caravaggio’s Narcissus,” ruminates on that painting’s beauty before it flips, and the poet crumples on her own floor in grief as if she were swallowed by the pool of water reflecting the subject’s gaze. Siskel’s introspection is agitated by the limitations of fetishizing her pain. Time only moves forward, as evinced by “Giverny” (named after Monet’s hometown in France): “Who knew // the room would go unchanged? / That we would be outlasted / by a heavy coat of paint.”

Artists of different disciplines are entitled to be influenced by each other, but in a book hemmed so closely to the question of whether it's fair, to one’s self and others, for loss to be so all-consuming, these beautiful ekphrastic poems are initially confounding. They raise the question of why Siskel’s admiration for art is integral to her grief—an issue that becomes clearer with the unmentioned detail that her father is that Siskel, Gene, the famed film critic for the Chicago Tribune and host, along with the late Roger Ebert, of the TV show At the Movies. A notorious aesthete whose appreciations often ran counter to box-office success, he set a standard for popular criticism that’s still respected a quarter-century after his death from brain cancer, in 1999, when Siskel was 12.

Perhaps the greatest strength of Two Minds is that mentioning this fact feels like a violation—not because we have run afoul of an unwritten rule, but because the entire point of Siskel’s book is to wrestle with the private, interior nature of grief. Does it matter that Siskel went to Yale, like her father? Only inasmuch as that, in “Emissary,” the “familiar silhouette obscuring the clock face” is an apparition—spawned by the legend of her father climbing trees dressed as Batman while an undergrad—and that she dug up books written by his mentor, the writer John Hersey, “thinking what if he held what I am holding now.” Another famous fact about Gene Siskel is that he purchased the white disco suit John Travolta wore in Saturday Night Fever (one of the critic’s favorite films) at a charity auction. When considered next to the image of Callie Siskel “burying [her] face inside / his jackets” in “Transparent Man,” and her opening the garment bag that holds the suit to imagine “a different actor, one // who seemed to play [her] father,” the knowledge becomes so sad, so intimate, that you almost wish you didn’t know it.

Sharing in Siskel’s mourning would rob her not only of the right to process and interpret her grief, but also of her ability to empathize with how it has affected everyone in her orbit differently. In “Succession,” Siskel and her two siblings each read the three-page goodbye letter their father wrote to them, “the script so tight, I can barely read it.” But her younger brother running down the hallway with a balloon is a markedly different experience than Siskel watching her mother “consoling the air” on the phone with her older sister, so that when, in “Bildungsroman,” set years later, her brother says “it was harder for you,” it feels like both a validation of Siskel’s feelings and an acknowledgement that it isn’t all about her.

This is felt most keenly in Siskel’s relationship with her mother. The child who idolized her father winds up clashing with a person who, as Siskel remembers in “Aubade,” “would tell / me and my sister to walk ahead” when the family traveled together. If there is any theme in Two Minds equal to its idea of grief’s mobility—its vacillation between universality and possession—it’s how another person’s grief can be so all-consuming that it crowds out your own. This is addressed directly in “Echo,” with the poet told by her mother that “My pain is greater than your pain,” though other times, as in “Heir,” Siskel addresses the tension via commentary:

               Mother and Daughter’s
               faces receding
 
in one mirror,
but one was chosen,
 
arranged for the hierarchy,
the silverware, the fork
 
on its own, while I, unaware
that Grief does not divide
 
evenly, shuttled a yolk
between two shells
 
until it broke. The fantasy.
Of fruit with no pit.

The fruit Siskel is referring to—the death of her father—carries a profound bitterness. Through no fault of her own, his death introduced an environment where caring for others is in emotional conflict with acknowledging how death has affected her personally. It’s diplomatic to say that you love your spouse and child equally, but without the tempering presence of the deceased to hide behind, all that’s left is a zero-sum game: whose experience feels bigger at any given moment.

Siskel grows up and moves—from Chicagoland’s North Shore to California. She gets married and decides she wants to have children. In “Pendant,” when reflecting on the beginning of her courtship with her husband, the writer and producer Michael O’Neill Burns, she notes his opinion that the death of his father, which was also unexpected, “was not exceptional, but natural. / Whereas I feel my father’s death // is the only exceptional thing / I possess.” One wants to mention her MFA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, or her PhD from the University of Southern California, or the fact that she was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and currently edits for the Los Angeles Review of Books. But a long collegiate tenure aided by residency support and steady work from a journal really isn’t exceptional, just impressive, and the exceptionality she is reaching for isn’t professional but cosmic. It’s a testament to Siskel’s skill and unabashedness that this sentiment lands the way it is intended: straddling the line between sympathy and exasperation. By this point, even the most generous of readers has probably begun to wonder if Siskel’s grief is a shackle or a security blanket.

Almost as if expected, this issue is laid to rest with a funereal scene in Two Minds’ last section. In “Cover the Mirrors,” Siskel’s family is sitting shiva, a Jewish period of mourning during which one of the rituals is to cover all of the mirrors so as not to think about one’s own appearance but instead reflect on the dead. For Siskel, this means remembering sitting on the sink and watching her father shave: “I asked him if it hurt // as he rounded his chin, which was also my chin. // Vanity and grief are closer / than we think.” Instead of darting her eyes at all the dark coverings and being swallowed (or upheld) by her memories, she searches for her mother, one of the only people who understands what she has experienced, albeit through degrees: “look at me, and I / will look at you.” At the intersection of solace and judgment is a will to go on.