I COULDN'T THINK of who to call, so I called Roz's cellphone and told her I'd stumbled on the stairs, and she arrived amazingly quickly and pulled up a chair and took the bunched-up paper towels away and looked at my finger. She is very good at taking care of a person who has hurt his finger. She had brought some bandages, and she bandaged me up. She said, "You probably need stitches. I can take you to the hospital." I said no, no, I'll just let the skin do what skin does.
Then I said I thought I would take a nap. Roz patted my shoulder, which felt good. Then she walked Smack and left.
I lay there wondering why I had fallen. Why am I in such a rush? Why can't I just feel my way carefully down the last several steps? I've had problems with those steps before. You think the flat plane of the floor is there and your whole balance system has already compensated for the landing on the floor, and then it's not there, and you fall. It's a short fall, only eight inches, but it's a forward fall.
And what if I'd hit my head? I thought, Poor Edna. That was how Edna St. Vincent Millay died, falling down the stairs alone. She'd written that embarrassingly bad propaganda poetry during the war, and she knew her singing days were done. She was drunk, and I wasn't really. I'd just had two New-castles. Not drunk but not in a state of tip-top balance either. It's not good to live alone when you fall down the stairs.
Vachel Lindsay died on the stairs, too, more or less. After drinking poison, Vachel Lindsay staggered up the basement stairs. His wife called, Is everything all right? He said no. And when Vachel Lindsay died Sara Teasdale was heartsick, and she drugged herself one night in the bathtub.
I fell asleep for about an hour with my bloody finger on my chest. Fortunately it was my left index finger. There were some small cuts on my right hand, but they also had stopped bleeding. I looked at the cuts for a while before I went to sleep.
WHEN I FIRST started reading the Norton Anthology of Poetry in college, I thought, There's a problem here. There are too many poems about death. Death, churchyards, wormy cadavers. Death is really a small part of life, and it's not the part that you want to concentrate on, because life is life and it's full of untold particulars. For example, take my briefcase. Is there anything about death in my briefcase? Let me reach in, with my good hand, and I'll feel around. Ah: a raisin. Will you look at that dusty raisin? Actually it may be a dried cranberry.
And what else? A yellow clamp to hold papers together. And a green clamp. Both useful. And a Cruzer USB Flash stick. And here's a crumpled receipt from a car-repair place that says CUSTOMER STATES THERE IS A RATTLE NOISE UNDER VEHICLE. It's been stamped P A I D in green ink with a woman's initials in red. And here's a small notebook with some passages from Dryden copied into it. And here's a bubble pack of Pilot G2 Rolling Ball pens, with two pens left in it. And, what else? A crumpled sleeve for an Amtrak ticket. And a visitor badge with my name on it, and on the back it says: "This visitor badge can be used as an adhesive badge or non-adhesive badge." And here's an untwisted twist tie. And here's a dime, and a penny, and a nickel. And a sixteen-pack of Duracell AA batteries. They say:
GREAT VALUE
GRANDE VALEUR
Six batteries left. And it turns out I've been carrying around a New York subway map and didn't know it.
And that's just one side pouch. So, anything about death in there? No! Well, yes. The Dryden couplet in the notebook is about death. It's in what experts call iambic pentameter:
All human things are subject to decay
And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey.
But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It's a mistake of emphasis.
On the other hand, maybe my briefcase is wrong. Poems do seem to want to announce, over and over, that life's warm zephyrs are blowing past and the gravestones are just beyond the next rise. Little groupings of gravestones, all leaning and cracked, with a rusty black Victorian fence around them. They're just over that rise. Poets never want to forget that. And actually we need to hear that sometimes. And we need poems to declare love, too. Which they do, over and over. I love you, or I love her, or I love him-love is behind a huge mass of poems-and that's good. Because actually those are two truths that we should keep on thinking about for ourselves. I love you, and all the people I know and depend on are going to reach the end of their lives and when they go it's completely unexpected even when part of you knew it was in the offing.
YOU CAN TAKE IT a step further and say, as Herrick did, "Gather ye rosebuds." Go ahead, say it if you must. But know it's a typo. It was supposed to be "Gather your rosebuds"- the "ye" was an abbreviation for "your" but with an "e" in place of the "r." It was corrected to "your" in the second edition. So, yes, you can say enjoy the panoply now, friends, gather your rosebuds, make the best bouquet of them you can manage, use all the sprigs of baby's breath you care to use, because time is on the march and you must, of course, "seize the day."
But here's the thing. Horace didn't say that. "Carpe diem" doesn't mean seize the day-it means something gentler and more sensible. "Carpe diem" means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be "cape diem," if my school Latin serves. No R. Very different piece of advice.
What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day's stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things-so that the day's stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant-pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don't freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That's not the kind of man that Horace was.
And yet if it hadn't been wrongly translated as "seize" would we remember that line now? Probably not. "Pluck the day free"? No way. And would we have remembered "gather ye rosebuds" without the odd mistake of the "ye"? Probably not. It's their wrongness that kept these ideas alive.
9
I WENT ON A BLUEBERRY-PICKING DATE with Tim and Tim's new girlfriend Hannah and Hannah's friend Marie. I kind of liked Marie. She wore flowing scarflike garments and some kind of weird perfume, and she knew a lot about Dorothy Parker. She stuck her head inside one of the taller blueberry bushes and then she said, "You know, the really good ones are deep inside."
I said, "Are they?" I stuck my head in, and Marie was right. If you push your head way into the green shadow of the bush and then you look up, you'll find amazing pendular arrangements of giant almost-black berries hanging everywhere. Nobody's seen them but you. They've been there all along, growing an ever darker blue and ever more engorged with rainwater, and yet no previous pickers have found them because they did not know to push their whole head into the blueberry bush.
"You have the gift," I said. "But I don't think you're going to develop any feelings of affection for me. Am I right?"
"Let's just pick blueberries," she said. So we picked a whole lot of blueberries, and then the four of us walked to the water and smelled its mumbling muddy smell, and Tim suddenly held out his arms and said, "Look at this river!"