And yet it was all for the best, perhaps. Out of those feelings of miserable exclusion and persecution and lucklessness, Poe wrote "The Raven."
I got home and sat in the kitchen staring at an empty bowl. Paul Chowder's bowl of poetry.
WHAT I'M STARTING to realize is that I don't want a bowl of poetry. I want, more than anything, a bowl of cold potato salad with bits of parsley in there and the skins of the potato and the flesh of the potato but somewhat confused by the presence of the mayonnaise. I want to own a summer-sized drum of mayonnaise. Roz always used to buy a double-big jar of Hellmann's mayonnaise to celebrate summer. I want there to be cold potato salad in the empty bowl. Roz's potatoes held the cold of the fridge inside them, like chewable ice cubes. But there isn't any potato salad.
The mouse came out about ten-thirty p.m. I was still sitting at the kitchen table and I heard a tiny rattle and I saw him climb into the box made of squashed pulp that held the last stalk of blueberries. I'd picked one bunch of unripe blueberries on their stems in order to remember the different colors they have before they turn smoky blue. There are pale greens and pale pinks-Rubensesque colors that you don't expect blueberries to have because you think of blueberries as these smoky heavy bosomy black things in leaf shadow waiting to be plucked. But they're very light and green and springlike in their unripeness. And then they ripen and turn blue-black and finally go all wrinkly and raisinous. The mouse emerged from the stove and did his funny jerky rushing worried progress, branching here and there, retreating, advancing, and finally he made it across past the baking-soda box and the detergent bottle and up on the splash guard, and then he went down into the sink, and up from there into the drainer, and then he climbed into the pulp box and found the bunch of blueberries inside, and he dragged it back up into the stove.
When he came out again I tried to catch him with a plastic pitcher, but he climbed up the curtain and ran along the curtain rod and got away.
Here's the tune I made up for Poe's "Raven." It goes:
Raymond helped me disassemble the bed in Nan's guest room and move it out, and I went to Home Depot and strapped several hundred dollars' worth of pine planks to the roof rack. I bought a new saw blade, and flooring nails with long spirals graven into them so that they'd grip the subfloor better. I felt full of joyful purpose. A floor is a permanent thing. I was putting in a floor for my neighbor Nanette, and getting paid for it.
My finger bothered me a little bit when I was getting a nail started, till I learned to hold it a different way, the way somebody-maybe William Holden-smoked a cigarette. Raymond turned out to have a knack for carpentry. As did Nan, in fact. The three of us stapled down a layer of blue sheeting over the subfloor, and Nan cut around the edge with a retractable knife as if cutting off the excess of a piecrust. Then the planks started going in. We nailed all afternoon. We drank lemonade and talked about zombie movies, and zombie novels, and zombies in video games, and then we nailed some more. Raymond got his music player going, and we sang "Zombie Jamboree." I pointed out the off-rhyme in the song: "belly to belly" and "stone dead already." They were mildly interested. I also made a few mistakes of measurement that Nan saved me from. She had a good spatial sense, which carried us successfully through the tricky area around the bathroom door.
Chuck, Nan's boyfriend, appeared late in the afternoon, and I got him a hammer and a cupful of nails and he nailed, too, for a while. He was a perfectly decent guy. He is an engineer who works at the Navy Yard in Kittery caring for nuclear-powered submarines. He and his friends pull the nuclear engines out and change their spark plugs and bang their carburetors with wrenches and then slide the engines back in place. With Chuck there we talked about fractions of an inch and acceptable degrees of gap between boards, and we politely debated which length of board to use next.
When we were almost done I paused, sprawled on my elbow on the floor, thinking about the song of the nails. There were four hammers going now, each with a different speed of hammering. A nail starts by sounding low because there's more length of nail to vibrate, but as more and more of it disappears into the wood, its pitch gets higher and more strained. It goes bong, bang, bing, bink. And then, at the very end, just after the highest-pitched note, there are two or three confident wide low smacks when the nailhead has touched down and you're hitting the whole floorboard-whang, whang, whang. We all wanted to sound like good nailers, and we all did sound like good nailers-and I think we were content in the midst of that happy racket.
Just before I left, Chuck asked me why I was publishing an anthology of rhyming poems.
"It seemed like it would help somehow," I said.
Chuck said, "Are you making a statement? Are you saying that free verse is a bad thing?"
I said no, I didn't think I was, not really. My own poems were free verse, after all. But then again my own poems sickened me, so I was confused.
"Are you editing the anthology out of self-hatred?" Chuck pursued.
I smiled. "Yes, Chuck, I think that's it."
"What's the best poem ever written?" asked Nan.
I told her I couldn't answer that. "One poem I liked recently was James Fenton's 'The Vapour Trail.' "
" 'The Vapour Trail,' " said Chuck. "I'll check it out."
Nan walked me out to the deck and wrote out a check. What a nice sound it was to hear her tearing it out of her checkbook, while the frogs chirred away.
"I hear you singing in the barn sometimes," she said.
"Oh, sorry," I said.
"Roz told me she was at her wits' end because you were up in that barn for weeks singing away, not writing."
"Yes, but I'm doing better now. I'd like her to come back. If you talk to her, will you let her know that?"
"Sure," said Nan. "Thanks for the floor."
I WOKE UP after a nap. It was dark and very late. I found a pen and turned to the back of Mary Oliver's book of poems, and I wrote: "People I'm jealous of." I wrote:
– James Fenton
– Sinead O'Connor
– Lorenz Hart
– Jon Stewart
– Billy Collins.
"Billy" Collins, indeed. Charming chirping crack whore that he is. No, that's incorrect-I know nothing about him. I know only my own jealousy. I'm not jealous of Merwin, though, and I'm not jealous of Mary Oliver. And I'm not jealous of Howard Moss. And I'm not jealous of Elizabeth Bishop. They're beyond all jealousy.
Yes, I wish I were a different person. Yes, I'm attacked by my embarrassments that are like those flying antibodies in Fantastic Voyage that glue themselves to the bad man's face when he swims out of the arterial spaceship. Yes, I sometimes have terrifying dreams in which a cat I've never seen before attacks a mouse and bites it and bites it, until I can hear its tiny neck make a popping sound. I pull the cat gently away and I take my shirt off and ball it up, and I prop the hurt mouse up against a balled-up shirt, and the mouse turns into a wan woman who talks to me in a laborious cheerful whisper in her brokenness. I want her to live. She says: "It's just impossible for me to live after what I've been through with that cat."