My dog was sleeping on the rug near the bed, and when he shifted I could hear his collar go clink. And I thought, So what if there are some broken veins in my cheek? So what if I look like some wind-worn fisherman, or golf caddy, from the Western Isles? So what if I stay up late eating sesame chicken and watching back-to-back episodes of Dirty Jobs? The rhubarb plant has grown an enormous seed stalk. It seems to want to say something to me. So what? I can't keep up with these nature lovers. It all just has to come elbowing out, and if a poem is a mistake it'll be clear that it's a mistake, and I won't collect it. There's something narcissistic in the phrase "collected poems." Who's collecting them? The poet. How hard is that? That's not a real collection. Now if he had made a collection of water fountains, or of oven mitts, that would be a collection. Or if he'd collected editions of Festus, the long mad poem written somewhere in the nineteenth century by a lost soul named Bailey-that would be an achivement. But collecting your own poems? What's so great about that? And mixing and mingling them in with some new? New and Collected Poems? Oh, well! Good job. Nice going.
I flip a lot through the biographical notes in the anthologies, and I find out who was alive when I was in my twenties, when I could have known them. I could have known Leonie Adams, I think. I could have known Louise Bogan, almost. I could have known Ted Roethke, a little earlier. Well, no- Roethke died when I was about ten I think. That's out. And if I had known him, what would it have mattered? Would I have become a better poet if I'd taken his class at the University of Washington and watched him climb out the window and stand on the outside ledge, working his way around the corner of the building, making crazy faces at his students through the glass? Maybe so.
The woman who was my French tutor in Paris was a great admirer of Mark Strand. She was a frayed, delicate, elegant woman, divorced. She would say her hero's name, in her gorgeous juicy accent, holding her fingers together: "Mark Strand-he is simply the top." And I would say, Okay, I'll have to check him out. Later I did check him out, and I thought he was fine but not great. But he was exceedingly good-looking, I could see that. A real Charlton Hestonian face, one of those hellishly handsome poets. James Merrill was another, and back then I lumped W. S. Merwin in with them. They were practically J. Crew models before there were J. Crew models. But that's not right, because Merwin has genius as well as looks. Merwin's late poetry gives me hope.
I feel everything breaking up inside me. I can't rhyme, and I don't believe in writing plums anymore. I don't even know the names of many common plants. What is a zinnia? I don't remember. What is pale jessamine? I don't know. Mary Oliver's got deer waking her up in the field in the early morning by licking her face. She's got grasshoppers eating sugar out of her hand. This just doesn't happen to me. I do know what a poppy looks like. It looks like a coffee filter but open and yellow-orange-red. Sometimes I think knowing the names of everything is overrated. It takes away the sense that each thing is itself and not part of some clique. But names help you see things, too, and remember them better.
I can remember her white living room, this tutor who almost taught me to talk in French, and her modern white fiberglass chair with a purple cushion. There was one lesson where we had a conversation, and she told me that I had made a distinct advance. But then I fell back. My shyness killed me in the end. I hated to speak wrong. Wrongly? I hated making simple mistakes. I hated not being able to speak quickly. One French guy at a bar wanted several of us to "faire le parachutisme." He said it was easy, you just jumped out of a plane. I said it sounded very exciting but no, thank you. He said, "I'm not a homo." I said it's not a question of whether or not you're a homo, I just don't want to jump out of a plane.
I called Roz and told her about the reading in Cambridge. She said she wished she could come, but she couldn't. I asked her how things were going. She said she was busy. I asked her if she missed me at all, at any time of the day or night. "Some, yes," she said. I thought that was a good sign.
WHEN SHOULD I give the beads to her? Maybe wait? Maybe give her the gift of not having to occupy her mind with my obvious wish to woo her back? Once when we were first going out she gave me a really big blue umbrella with about a hundred red cartoon monkeys on it. I left it on the train and then a man holding a cellphone ran after me and said, "I think you left this on the train." So I still have it.
What would Aphra Behn advise me to do? Aphra Behn understood love. She was the first woman in England to live by her writing. People set her love poems to music. She spied in Holland for the king, and then the king didn't pay her. She was always making love into a person: "Love in fantastic triumph sat," she wrote, "While bleeding hearts around him flowed."
Victorian women didn't like Aphra Behn. Back in the 1880s, there was a New Hampshire writer, Kate Sanborn, who published an interesting book on women's humor. She called it The Wit of Women. It cost me forty dollars to buy it from a dealer in Wellesley. "Aphra Behn," Sanborn said, "is remembered only to be despised for her vulgarity. She was an undoubted wit, and was never dull, but so wicked and coarse that she forfeited all right to fame." Why did they hate her so much-just because she wrote a quick poem about a seduction on a riverbank?
Let's pack it up. I've packed another two boxes. Here's a poetry packing tip for you. Make two load-bearing stacks or towers of books in two diagonally opposite corners of the box. The two stacks must go right up to the top edge of the box. That way it won't crumple and slump-you can pile boxes four or five high, and the weight of the top box will be transmitted down through the two stacks of the one below and the one below that.
13
I STARTED TO GET SLEEPY in the middle of the afternoon, so I went out and mowed half the lawn. That always wakes me up. And as I mowed, I thought, The interesting thing is that you can start mowing anywhere. The lawn will get done no matter where you start mowing. And that seemed like an important discovery.
Because so often I think when I'm writing a poem that I need to start in some specific spot. Where I begin becomes so important that I never begin. I've been trying to write a poem about a time when Roz wore a pair of white pants.
I walked upstairs behind her
Staring at her stitched seams
Normally she wore black pants
But it was the last day of the year
That she could wear the white ones
So she did
Haaaaahhhh! I'm going to oxygenate myself. Haaaaaaahhhh!
You can start anywhere. That's the thing about starting. If you start, you're in motion. If you don't start, you're nowhere. If you stop, you're nowhere. I have reached a crisis where I don't know where to start. It's arbitrary. I could start with sunlight on clapboards, because is there anything more beautiful than sunlight on clapboards? A strange word: "clapboards." It's one of those interestingly wrong words- it sounds flabby, like clabbered milk, when it's talking about something cleanly edged.
I wish I were happy in a disciplined way. Happy in a nondespairing way. I wish that I could spill forth the wisdom of twenty years of reading and writing poetry. But I'm not sure I can. I've published poems, yes. That much is beyond question. And for a while I was pleased with the poems that I published. I felt that I understood why people write poetry. I understood the whole communal activity of writing and reviewing and extracting quotes to go on the paperback. "Moss has arrived, with next to no luggage, at mastery." Being part of the interfaith blurb universe.