“Then was the fear a little quieted”: at the reading last night
— for all my friends I never see
Ralph was an old professor of mine & he let me come into his office & take his books & sometimes he’d read a poem of mine & say, “read everything” or “you’re mad as a bag of cats.”
He read about his time in India with his teenage daughter & how Modi outlawed alcohol but they’d go to tea shops where the owner would fill teacups with beer. I guess all over the world there’s reason to smile, to be “so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
I sat at the end of a row of metal folding chairs that have been at the Y since the 80s, near a cheap old saloon piano with a green lattice of oxidation on its brass pedals. Pianos make me think of echos & elephants & death & the way parts of us live on but we don’t get to choose which.
Ralph & his daughter sitting in India sipping beer from teacups makes me think of Camus, which makes me think of this kid, a high school student of mine, who once asked me, “Is it hard not to be numb when you get older?” which made me think of Centralia, PA where since 1962 anthracite coal has burned under the streets & everyone had to leave, their homes seized under eminent domain, & in some ways — the work, the chores, the traffic, the alarms, the kids, the callous planning — yes. But it’s worse, I guess: you feel harder, subtler, quieter — some nights, the last three straight, for instance, I lay quietly in my ditch of pillow & try to see the outline of our windows in the dark & I roll over or wrap the sheet around my feet or listen to my wife dream.
In the evenings after work I run the back lake trail under the bridge painted with outdated graffiti beyond the man-sized cattails. I’m afraid of moving toward death, of the not stopping, which makes me think of that part in Slaughterhouse-Five when Vonnegutt says Celine, who had a head injury from the First World War, went crazy & started screaming for everyone in the street to just stop moving so they wouldn’t disappear.
That girl in school? When she left she left me a book called The God Who Weeps which was a Mormon book, & though I don’t believe in god or prophets, I thought it was tenderly worded.
Ralph read some poems about bears because he saw Hayden Carruth read, & Hayden said, “Wouldn’t it be great to write nothing at all except poems about bears?” & so Ralph wrote “a garland of bears.” & some of those poems were about Hayden who couldn’t read his own poems at the end of his time alive, so he’d sit in the front row at readings like this with his oxygen tank as someone else read his poems & I wonder if that’s part of what death is like — hearing someone read your poems. In the winter of 2007, I came here to see Liam Rector read from The Executive Director of the Fallen World & that summer he fired a shotgun into his mouth & he read a poem about his dead wife & how he had inoperable cancer so he sold everything for an old motorcycle.
& that makes me think of my friend Patrick whom I’ve never met but who posts pictures of cars stuck in Salt Flats & of Mexican beaches & piers & whom I think of as sad, though I don’t know why. Patrick took a class with James Galvin who said that he was interested most in what you think about how you feel & how you feel about what you think.
So I’m telling you now that after the reading I was thinking I’d tell Ralph how grateful I was for his teaching & so I did & we went to a bar that used to be called Awful Al’s that had couches & whiskey, but we had beer & he had his wife & other students there & my wife & kids were home & I rarely go out so I felt good & chatty & we all talked about the past & he has daughters who are grown & I have daughters who are kids & he told me about my future even though he’s from my past & it was like being at a party with all the best ghosts & Susan, his wife, was a warm smiler & we talked about the time growing up in Dublin, a tank pointed its gun at her as she walked home & how it was her first experience with terror, & I sat on the floor because the couch was full & one of Ralph’s students wanted to keep bees on the roof of her apartment building because Ralph read a poem about how his daughter cried over colony collapse when she was young & the other day my own daughter was shaken to tears at the site of dogs rescued from abusive owners on TV.
One graffiti was just a chalk outline & I admit one night I tested it, pressed my back against the bridge like I was fitting into dark matter, & tried to even take a picture, but it was too shadowy to tell where I was. & I thought about listening to RHCP sing “Under the Bridge” & how I used to think it was about vampires & how sad they were to be eternal &, like old men, need to feed off the realer lives of the young.
Kids feel everything but don’t know why, I guess, & then when they’re old they know more but not why & that all reminds me that Einstein used to write letters to children about death & space & infinity, refusing to condescend to them, but it’s rumored he had a daughter Liesl who had Down Syndrome & abandoned her in Eastern Europe with his first wife’s parents & she died of scarlet fever & that reminds me that I’ll have to sleep again tonight even though my wife is probably dreaming of her father who died last Christmas with blooming tumors in his machine-moved lungs while our pool was covered in ice. I remember just before he died everyone in the room — Kathy, her brothers, her mother — went up & kissed her father on the forehead & said a secret, & mine was, “I’ll take care of them. I’ll take care of them all.”