Can You Tell Me What Life Is?

If the name Laura Gilpin rings a bell, it’s probably because of the “The Two-headed Calf,” a poem of haunting genius that has enjoyed a remarkable digital life since 2019— first as an illustrated webcomic, then as a meme, and, most recently, as a viral TikTok:

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this 
freak of nature, they will wrap his body 
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
 
But tonight he is alive and in the north 
field with his mother. It is a perfect 
summer evening: the moon rising over 
the orchard, the wind in the grass. 
And as he stares into the sky, there 
are twice as many stars as usual.

The poem is sublime in the true sense, joining the terrible and the beautiful with astonishing economy. It begins in foreboding, “Tomorrow when the farm boys find this / freak of nature” but ends with an insistence on peace, “tonight . . . there / are twice as many stars as usual.” It is the kind of writing that stays with a reader.

“The Two-headed Calf” first appeared in Gilpin’s debut, The Hocus Pocus of the Universe, winner of the 1976 Walt Whitman Award. It is one of only two collections she completed before her glioblastoma diagnosis in 2006, and her death five and a half months later, at age 56.

Gilpin has been on my mind the past two years, during which three of my close friends ended their battles with cancer. Like Gilpin, these women were in their 50s. Their sudden, premature absences bring to mind lines from Gilpin’s “The Meaning”: “Suddenly you understand / your purpose in life: / to crawl through the ferns and mushrooms / asking why.” We, the bereft, spend weeks and months contemplating why. Thinking of Gilpin, whose work I had only ever seen circulated in digital facsimile, I began to ask why she had been overshadowed—or perhaps kept alive—by the popularity of a single, exceptional poem. I wondered who she was beyond “The Two-headed Calf,” and how she had come by her powers.

Like John Keats—whose life was also cut woefully short—Gilpin’s poems are fueled by negative capability, that capacity to be “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” a restless insistence on “asking why.” It’s that Keatsian commitment to mystery and surprise that has me so persuaded by her vision, and her candid admission that “none of us have to be here / and yet all of us are” without attempting to deliver the final word on the subject.

Born in Wisconsin and raised in Indiana, Gilpin graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, then received an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. A few years after winning the Walt Whitman Award, judged by William Stafford, she received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. One might expect these accolades to mark the beginning of an auspicious literary career. Instead, after teaching creative writing for a while at the New York Public Library, Gilpin studied nursing at NYU and became a registered nurse in 1981. She went on to work in pediatric nursing at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and in adult oncology at San Francisco’s California Pacific Medical Center, before becoming a founding staff member at Planetree, a nonprofit dedicated to developing and implementing a patient-centered model of care in hospitals. The organization would support her in her own final months.

For more than 20 years, Gilpin proved a tireless champion for Planetree’s mission. She composed her second collection, The Weight of a Soul (2008), while on “sabbatical” from the nonprofit in 2004, then assembled it under duress of a terminal diagnosis. As she writes in the foreword: “All my years as a poet and as a nurse are now woven together into becoming a patient.”

The marriage of her two vocations at a critical moment helps explain the visceral intensity and “mysterious natural power” that critic Michael Heffernan identified with Gilpin’s poetry in 1979. He highlights the plainspoken clarity of her voice, calling her writing “deceptively simple . . . but invariably on the mark.” Nothing feels overworked. One might flag certain efforts as insufficiently distilled, draft-like in their conversational ease, as in these lines from “Black Willow”: “My brother asked / in his small voice why / the lightning wanted our tree. / My father tried to explain to him / about grounding. / My mother said it was just one of those things that / happen.” But Gilpin stays true to the reality of experience over its aesthetic imperatives. She has little interest in poems so polished as to forfeit the rough grain of daily life in favor of the author’s reflection. Her voice is wonderfully unfettered by academic approaches: a life outside academia could have allowed Gilpin to cultivate this distinctive, appealing balance between unadorned writing and existential inquiry.

Her conversational directness and affinity for homespun metaphysics align her with Jane Kenyon and Mary Oliver, poets who also grappled with fundamental questions of being without literary pretense, critics be damned. But Gilpin’s lifelong career as a nurse shines through in the humanity of her poetry. Her intimate familiarity with the practical realities of the body in crisis and its slow descent out of consciousness lends her poems an uncanny resonance, a sense of humility at life’s astonishing mystery. In "The Bath," she writes: “I stand here bathing her / while she sleeps / in a far place beyond my reaching // I bathe her / as I have been taught to do: / first the eyes, then the forehead, / the face, the neck . . . She offers no resistance / except that of gravity, / the earth pulling her down / while I lift, as though something between us / is being weighed.” Gilpin knows that the writer and the doctor’s labors only take us so far, that “Bones can be named but a life is / invisible.”

Beyond the unforgettable descriptions, stark economy, and dramatic pacing of “The Two-headed Calf,” The Hocus Pocus of the Universe affirms Gilpin’s skill with imagery: “You’ve come home unprepared / for this new season / the way a worm falls asleep / beside an apple blossom / and wakes up deep in the fruit,” she writes in “Coming Home.” While homecoming is a motif across both books, it’s death that Gilpin returns to most insistently, imbuing it with its own hidden life, as in a poem simply titled "Death":

Time stops. 
At last it is quiet enough 
for me to go to sleep.
  
Time starts again, 
I go on sleeping.

Her fixation takes on an unmistakably Plathian energy in “Body Count”:

The corpses are laid out 
like cucumbers in the grocery window. 
  
. . . 
  
If I 
were dead 
           would I recognize my body? 
Would I hesitate momentarily 
           knowing it was me?

Propelled by the unanswerable, “Can you tell me what life is? // You mean you don’t know? / You mean you only have vague ideas?” Gilpin proceeds like the poet-scientist she is, challenging the uncertainty from which she writes. “(Better to plead infinity than ignorance.) . . . Only what you don’t know is infinite,” she sustains in “Infinity.”

Hocus Pocus’s final section concentrates on the language of science: chromosomes, chemistry, catalysts, chain reactions, radiation, equations, proofs. It is as though Gilpin waves temporary farewell to the poet’s lexicon of feeling in favor of the clinical vocabulary that will, in part, shape her next three decades as a nurse. “Alchemists, / you were right. / It is magic,” she concedes, reconciling the two sides of her poetic storehouse and sensemaking. The human is the bedrock of this mystery in “Egg and Sperm”:

And for that moment they are 
so much a part of each other 
that the whole universe 
must readjust itself 
around them.

Gilpin revisits and deepens these themes in The Weight of a Soul. It includes new poems written between 1977 and 2006, followed by a selection of poems from her first collection. In the foreword, she articulates the indivisible bonds between her two vocations: “Many of the poems I have included here bring together my own perspective as well as my experience as a nurse listening to patients faced with illness and death.” She writes of bathing the comatose, the slow fading of friendship, and the moment one receives news of death (“an emptiness now / where her life held tight to others”). These appear alongside several personal elegies (“Mostly what we come home for now / is to bury the dead, / to walk, as we did as children, / among the stones that bear on their faces / the names we carry in our bones”). She poignantly describes her nursing duties in “The Ritual of Hanging Blood”:

I wind through the darkened hallways 
to the blood bank, sign my name 
beside the patient’s name 
as though I am signing for him 
in the book of life.

I’m reminded of what Algis Valiunas writes in his review of Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder (2008): “poetry needs science, which lifts the veil from nature, and science needs poetry, which elaborates for public appreciation the beauty of the secrets that have been unveiled.” There is something infinitely reassuring about Gilpin’s poems about the hospital: a renewed sense that our own friends and loved ones might be cared for by someone cataloguing, with utmost sensitivity, the unspeakable and unthinkable, the hopeful and harrowing. Someone alive and asking why, as we are.

In subtle, unmistakable ways, these poems honor the invisible threads that bind us and shape us lifelong, despite our grief at their severing. That enduring imprint is central to “Life After Death,” which concludes: “. . . nothing is wasted in nature / or in love.” A sense of ancestral belonging stills Gilpin as she mourns the childhood death of her youngest cousin: “Still, / it can’t be terrible to be dead / among those who have loved you for centuries.” Life’s persistent regeneration—flowers return each year, covering up the names on the gravestones—is one from which, she suggests, we may all draw strength and solace.

By the time we reach the collection’s titular poem, Gilpin has established herself as an authority on “the weight of a soul.” Nevertheless, the poem’s epigraph cites a 1961 study, in which a British doctor “weighing his patients before and after death, determined that the human soul weighs four-tenths of an ounce.” This is one of Gilpin’s most affecting poems, masterfully dramatizing the soul’s journey over the hospital parking lot, over highways and traffic, over shops, schools, and a churchyard, back to his own neighborhood and home until he reaches his wife:

. . . laying out what she will 
take to him in the hospital: 
fresh pajamas, a new book 

cards from the children.
He watches her, moves towards her 
touching her so lightly
she feels only the evening breeze. 

The phone rings. 
It is the doctor 
with terrible news. 
She says nothing 

replaces the phone with both hands 
lowers herself onto the bed 
her body shaking 
because she cannot bear up  

under the weight.

Much has been said about the liminal in contemporary poetry, so much that it’s a tired, vague, and often meaningless signifier. For Gilpin, the liminal isn’t a literary device but the inevitable outcome of paying attention: we each stand with one foot on either side of a threshold. Having sex while an ambulance passes in “The Moment,” the speaker reflects:

And I thought: 
this is what it means to be alive: 
one moment to surrender everything 
and the next moment 
to begin again.

We have too little time to pause and feel the extraordinary nature of our lives. “I will try to tell you once more how grateful I am / but you have put on the long white dress and are dancing,” she remembers in “Baking Bread (For Camille).” The Weight of a Soul movingly captures Gilpin’s desire to express profound appreciation for the moments in our lives that are free of suffering, moments full of ineffable grace against the boisterous background of life’s ongoingness.

Gilpin wrote in the shadow of death—her father’s, her patients’, the earth’s, and her own—and she was, at last, no less impervious to its mystery. “Death, 2006” concludes the collection: “Some in an accident / Some after a long illness . . . And now, I too / join them.” These lines suggest the hard-earned, spiritual wisdom gained in her time as a caretaker, and a genuine acceptance cultivated by appreciating nature’s rhythms.

Gilpin ends her foreword with simple humility: “My life is closing. I am grateful to those who are interested in reading these poems.” Her poised acceptance first seems impossible, then exemplary. Indeed, it is the most fully realized understanding of our pact with life: an appreciation for all that the days have offered despite their unexpected curtailment. Not raging against the dying of the light, but peacefully welcoming it with the same curiosity and openness one held toward life. Gilpin offers all of us a path toward this wisdom which is, after all, the work of our lifetimes.