by John Skoyles
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden: and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
It was not in my box, not to be typed for class. I wrote a note saying that the most despairing lines I had ever read were, “ask me what difference/their strongest love or hate has made.” A few days later, another poem appeared, this time by John Clare.
I AM
I am—yet what I am, none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes;
They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes:
And yet I am, and live—like vapours toss’t
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise—
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest, that I love the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
Beside the underlined words, he wrote, “These, to me, are the saddest lines. ML”
I typed my own poem on his machine, and accidentally left it behind. The next morning, I ran to EPB, hoping to snatch it before Lawson arrived, but in the hall I saw 405’s open door.
“Looking for this?” he said, handing me the page.
“I didn’t mean to leave it,” I said.
“I thought that was your intention.” He didn’t say any more, so I reached over and took the poem. “Some of your work is witty, some is melodramatic,” he said. “It’s never really funny or heartbreaking. Your real poems are the ones you haven’t yet written.”
I wondered when I would begin.
“You know I haven’t done a lot,” he said. “A reputation as a perfectionist. I wish it were otherwise. I wish that instead of revising and revising a poem, searching for the right word, I had left it alone, or moved on to another. The changes I made which took weeks, well, I think now they made scarce difference.”
He looked again at my poem.
“Take more chances, see what happens when you forget all this,” he said, referring to the workshop.
I was touched by his candor, especially about his own life, almost a repudiation of his stature as a “craftsman.”
I thanked him and moved to the door.
“John,” he called, the first time he used my name. “The middle way is the only way that doesn’t lead to Rome.”
Ridge visited the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown at the invitation of Stanley Kunitz, one of its founders. He returned enthused about the staff, which included Alan Dugan, and its mission—giving emerging artists and writers seven-month fellowships. He described the beauty of the town on the water and the charm of the Center, where fellows worked in converted coal bins, lobster-trap sheds and rough-hewn studios. Artists and writers like Mailer, Motherwell and Lowell visited out of goodwill. Ridge was staying in Iowa to finish his doctorate, and urged me to apply. Kunitz edited a supplement for the American Poetry Review and included two poems of mine, which Ridge had shown him, so Ridge thought I’d have a good chance. With this report, I saw a path out of the workshop’s claustrophobic hierarchy and clawing competition. I imagined the shore, the threshold between land and sea offering a home to struggling unknowns. I rhapsodized about it to Ridge who said, “Don’t forget, Provincetown’s known as The Last Resort.”
Pryor started referring to Barkhausen as Galahad, and the name garnered the interest of many women who flirted with him in the halls. He brought several to 405 where they lolled around the books, shook the dry snow globes and laughed at Uncle’s photo. Lawson came in one day and seemed pleased by the little gathering.
“When are we going to meet the pooch?” Barkhausen asked.
“He’s in the car,” Lawson said.
The girls begged to see him and Lawson said it would take him a while because he had to adjust the new horse blanket coat. “I paid for it,” he said. He gave a precise explanation of the buckles and straps.
Half an hour later, Lawson came down the hall pulled by a stubby tan and spotted dog wearing a crimson jacket. A bloodhound and a truck. Loose skin hung from his neck and shoulders so that he seemed more like an old man in a dog suit than a dog. Lawson stopped at the office door while the girls gushed and Uncle looked up with huge red eyes, one long canine rising from his pushed-in muzzle. I bent over the dog, who rested his head on my knee and immediately closed his eyes, as if in relief.
“He’s still cold,” Lawson said.
“So cute,” one of the girls said, squatting next to me. Uncle stayed on my knee, drooling.
“I think he’ll grow into that baggy skin,” Lawson said, and asked me to put water into a bowl he had brought. We watched in disbelief as Uncle drank for a minute straight.
“He seems to have a hard time getting water through that muzzle,” Lawson said.
I rubbed the dog’s head and jowls, and Barkhausen joined me, asking, “Why are his eyes so red?”
“I’m not sure,” Lawson said.
“I’d have that checked out,” Barkhausen said, which annoyed Lawson who said it wasn’t anything, and he started to leave on that sour note.
“Good-bye, Ugly,” Barkhausen said.
Lawson turned. “It’s Uncle, Artie, Uncle.”
“I like Ugly,” Barkhausen said.
“When you get your own dog, Artie, you can call it Ugly,” Lawson said.
Lawson ran into Neil Clarke, his friend and teacher of romantic literature. They played a little game. When they met, they spoke Stevens. The rule was that their first words had to quote Wallace Stevens and be appropriate in greeting and reply. This involved two things Mitch loved—poetry and competition.
Clarke took a look at Uncle and said, “There are not leaves enough to cover the face it wears . . .”
“The creator too is blind,” Lawson replied as Clarke looked warily at the protruding teeth of the gentle pup. I went back into the office.
“That’s a funny looking dog,” a girl said. “So opposite of Mitch.”
“Who’s always so neat and refined,” the other added.
Uncle left behind a scent like a rainy day in autumn—decay, wet leaves and mud.
Barkhausen went with Pryor and Wendy to lunch. The three of them were often in a booth at The Deadwood and they arrived at readings and parties together. Barkhausen, the odd duck, the isolato of Black’s Gaslight Village, was suddenly social. I asked Ridge about Barkhausen’s sudden friendship with Pryor and he said, “If I wanted to fuck Pryor’s wife, I’d hang around with him too.”
Harvey and Lawson gave a reading, introduced by Dan Cook who wore his usual ascot and a tweed coat with patches on the elbows and left breast. Our teachers sat behind him in jackets and ties, which was odd for Harvey who always wore blue work shirts. He had let his goatee grow, and it hung from his chin like the tongue of a shoe. He could have been a high school math teacher who held eccentric theories about alien abduction. Lawson wore a tan corduroy suit with a white oxford and red knit tie, like his neighbor who sold insurance. A chalkboard off to the side emphasized the academy. Lovers of poetry,
serious readers, supporters of libraries and arts centers across the state came to see their famous citizen-poets. They circled the stage like people feeding ducks. We were those who watched them feed the ducks. Harvey and Lawson were the ducks.
Harvey went first, and Dan read a list of awards, quoted reviews, and ended with Lawson’s blurb, “In his hands, the pedestrian stalks the infinite.” Harvey stood at the podium, and gave a little talk about the difference between raw and cooked poetry. He said he was proud to be reading with his former teacher, whose skill was unequaled, and who “edits with a scalpel.” He read some funny poems, darting through the pages. He took off his jacket and draped it on his chair. He began one poem with the opening line, “Renoir painted with his dick,” then stopped, looked disgusted, tore the page from the book, rolled it into a ball and threw it into the amused audience. He said the room was too warm, and loosened the knot of his tie. At the end of the next poem, he lifted it over his head, placing it on the microphone where it faced us. He thumbed through the book front to back, then back to front, reading poems at random, yet they seemed to have a thread. Sweating, he sipped from the water glass and then unbuttoned his shirt, revealing a red undershirt printed with the words Kellogg’s of Battle Creek. The poems became more serious, about his dead parents. His long hair fell from behind his ears and he popped on a headband from his back pocket. He ended with a sequence about the Vietnam war, perspiration showing as he now read as seriously as he had recited comically, concluding, flushed and depleted, with a forceful moral outrage. The audience applauded loudly. We had been taken from comedy to tragedy, from formality to humanity. Harvey’s spontaneity at the podium somehow arrived at a perfectly shaped performance. When he left the podium, he was an entirely different person from the one who had been introduced, changing from schoolmaster to beatnik stalking the infinite. He left the tie hanging from the microphone.
Dan walked across the stage, clapping, then bowing to Harvey. He leaned toward us, beckoning further applause with his fingertips. When silence returned, he reached for something inside his sport coat. He tried another pocket, his concern becoming panic. He felt the shelf under the podium, as if in the dark, which he was, because he had lost his introduction to Lawson. He touched his chest again, and again scanned the shelf, like an obsessive, compulsive mime. Loudmouth Trotta called for him to begin, which was followed by catcalls and laughter. Dan righted himself, looked directly at us, and said, “This man needs no introduction,” which produced an even greater roar of taunts and boos. He abandoned the microphone, headed toward the chalkboard, wrote Mitchell Lawson! and left the stage.
Lawson moved like a scarecrow dragged by a farmer to its post in the field. It was tough enough to follow Harvey’s transformation and final dramatic subject, but the botched preface challenged Lawson to both obliterate the introduction and rise to it. If before he seemed a man awaiting the firing squad, now he looked as if a few bullets had grazed him at the knees. He winced his way toward the lectern and calmly removed the tie, as if it had caused the commotion. He walked over to Harvey and handed it to him, the way a teacher returns a forbidden object to a student at the end of the day.
When Lawson again faced the audience, he said, “Tonight I’m reading all the poems in my books no one’s ever liked.” With those words, he had us on his side. He read flatly, his index finger following the list he had compiled for the evening, and his wistful tone permeated the room. Many poems described his own character: the invisible man, empty mirror, skeletal heart. By giving us his negative persona, a three-dimensional human being appeared. He sometimes shifted his shoulder, as if to lean away from a blow or an arrow he had dared someone to aim at him. He was both archer and target, and the only sounds in the hall were his lines across the air. When he finished, the quiet man was met with noisy approval.
Workshop students who never frequented The Deadwood filled booths. Ridge, McPeak, Pryor and I discussed the reading over a pitcher. We fell into different camps. Ridge and I loved Lawson’s flat delivery. Pryor, who had gained weight and grown a goatee, praised Harvey’s showmanship, but criticized Lawson for being as stiff as a mannequin. McPeak said they couldn’t hold a candle to the best actualists. He quoted a poem by Robert Slater called “Crazy Lady.”
Look at that
Crazy lady shopping
In a night shirt.
Hey crazy lady.
A cheer went up near the bar, and Pryor craned around and announced Harvey’s arrival. He went from table to table, shaking hands, nodding and smiling. He lifted a chair from a stack, sat at our booth and asked Brandy for a glass.
“Mitch’s a riot, isn’t he?” Harvey said, laughing. “That calm demeanor, but he goes right for the jugular.” He lifted his beard and grabbed his throat.
“But you were spontaneous,” Pryor said, shaking his head in admiration.
“I had a list,” Harvey said.
“It looked like you were picking poems at random,” I said.
“That’s what it’s supposed to look like,” Harvey said. He turned to Ridge. “Was Charlotte there?”
“I think so,” Ridge said.
“She liked that poem I threw away,” Harvey said. “I did that to tease her.”
“You planned that?” Pryor asked, leaning forward.
Harvey winked.
I was waiting for McPeak to pounce, but his eyes were drifting to a table of workshop girls here for their first time. Even Pryor seemed stunned, maybe by the magician revealing his tricks, maybe from the effort of learning them for himself. Charlotte walked past with Monique, and Harvey reached out and tugged Charlotte’s sleeve.
“How’d you like it?” Harvey asked.
“I wish I could have been there,” she said. “My cat’s sick.”
Monique said, “Sheba puked and shit all over the rugs. It’s a mess.” They took a table in the back.
“I don’t believe it,” Harvey said to us.
“Come on, Harvey,” Pryor said. “She dotes on that cat.”
Harvey pushed his beer away as if he didn’t deserve it.
“Hey,” Pryor said, “Lots a laughs you got tonight.”
“Laughs? Thanks, David.”
Pryor lowered his head. “I thought it was a good response. They appreciated the humor.”
“Please,” Harvey said, and got up. He put his chair on the stack against the wall and said good night. Pryor said he would walk him home since they lived near each other.
“Pryor is becoming a little Harvey, don’t you think?” McPeak said.
“And you’re a little Lawson,” Ridge said to me. “In fact, you’re looking like him!”
Ridge had a few books with him and one was by Merwin, which I’d lent him.
“Are you finished with that?” I asked.
He handed it to me, saying he liked the way Merwin abandoned punctuation halfway through. I noticed a girl’s name and number written on the inside cover. I showed it to him.
“Sorry!” he said.
In the men’s room, I saw what Ridge meant. Thinning hair, the beginning of jowls, I was starting to look like the great craftsman, but without the craft.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CORNEAL EROSION—SAMSARA—HELLO? HELLO? IT’S ME! IT’S ME!—GROOMING UNCLE—THE GREAT LOVE OF THE THIN MAN
I met Lawson walking Uncle on South Governor. Students joked about never seeing him on the street, in a store or outside at all, and McPeak referred to him as an air fern. But now he came toward me, a stick figure pulled by a hunk of muscle. I petted Uncle whose red eyes matched his coat and seemed to reach from the depths of hell. Lawson said he thought the dog should be gaining more weight and he worried about his diet. The next day he came to 405 and said the neighbor told him that Uncle wasn’t eating because the vitamins they mixed into his dinner tainted the taste. He asked me to type almost twenty pages of material, and I finished it right before his class, when he thanked me distractedly. As I straightened out the desk, I found a revision of his
rhymed poem about visiting a dying friend. He had changed a line from:
Blood drained from his face
to:
His father said he lost his place
The rewrite brought another person into the poem. The next time I saw him, I mentioned it and he seemed pleased, saying he had published the original in a quarterly, but was never happy with it.
One day he complained of an error I had made typing a student poem.
“John,” he said, calling me by my name, which he did rarely. “Please proof the stencils!”
“I did,” I said. “I must have missed something.”
He pointed out the line, “I keep my bong in the closet.”
“Bongo!” he said. “It should be bongo!”
I was sitting at his desk as he lurched over my shoulder. I defined bong. He put his hands on his hips, but instead of getting into a snit, he laughed, as much with relief that his worksheet was flawless as with the new word.
I was embarrassed when Dan Cook stuck his head into 405 because I was looking in the mirror. My drinker’s/reader’s eye had worsened into corneal erosion, a condition that tore the thin membrane when I woke up, feeling like someone was scratching my pupil with a pencil point. The doctor at the infirmary had given me a tube of erythromycin, which I hid in my pocket.
“Hello? Hello?” he said. “It’s me! It’s me!” He grinned from the doorway. “Don’t you recognize an actualist poem?” He walked to the pile of new books sent by publishers, discarding them like playing cards. “There’s not one here I’d want to read,” he said. “I understand you’re the lucky man who squires Kim Costigan around.”
He inspected the shelves and stopped at the music books.
“Mitch wanted to be a composer, did you know that? He studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.”
“He writes a lot about musicians,” I said.
“What are they saying about me?”
“Who?”
“People have been talking about me, haven’t they? About me and Nora.”
I said that students talk about faculty all the time.
“I know, but they’re critical.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.