The Anthologist

by Nicholson Baker

  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.

  And now it’s like I’m on some infinitely tall ladder. You know the way old aluminum ladders have that texture, that kind of not-too-appealing roughness of texture, and that kind of cold gray color? I’m clinging to this telescoping ladder that leads up into the blinding blue. The world is somewhere very far below. I don’t know how I got here. It’s a mystery. When I look up I see people climbing, rung by rung. I see Jorie Graham, I see Billy Collins, I see Ted Kooser. They’re all clinging to the ladder, too. And above them, I see Auden, Kunitz. Whoa, way up there. Samuel Daniel. Sara Teasdale. Herrick. Tiny figures, clambering, clinging. The wind comes over, whssssew, and it’s cold, and the ladder vibrates, and I feel very exposed and high up. Off to one side there’s Helen Vendler, in her trusty dirigible, filming our ascent. And I look down, and there are many people behind me. They’re hurrying up to where I am. They’re twenty-three-year-old energetic climbing creatures in their anoraks and goggles, and I’m trying to keep climbing. But my hands are cold and going numb. My arms are tired to tremblement. It’s freezing, and it’s lonely, and there’s nobody to talk to. And what if I just let go? What if I just loosened my grip, and fell to one side, and just—fffshhhooooow. Let go.

  Would that be such a bad thing?

  I RAN OVER A ROCK with the lawnmower, now my lawn-mower is broken. It doesn’t start and I’ve bent the propeller shaft, which is something I can’t fix, so that’s two hundred dollars to the repair place, where they also sell baby chickens. And bags of chickenfeed. All this money is being swept from me. A faint breath of money somehow appears, a mist of money. I breathe it out into the air, and immediately it’s sucked away by those who have entered into elaborate agreements with me that I haven’t read.

  I can do five chin-ups now, and I’m going to be helping my friend Tim out with painting his house. He’s putting in a new door in back and painting the whole house a deep blue-black, and I’m going to make maybe fifteen hundred dollars helping him scrape and paint. Which means I’ll be fine for next month, financially. He says that Haffner College won’t have me back to teach writing. They are so right not to have me back.

  Elizabeth Bishop wrote: “I am so sick of Poetry as Big Business I don’t know what to do.” None of the good poets believed in teaching. Auden said it was dangerous. Philip Larkin said that when you start paying people to write poems and paying people to read them you remove the “element of compulsive contact.” Too bad Larkin’s poems are so killingly down-bringing. I can’t bear Larkin, not because he isn’t a very good poet—he is a very good poet—but because anytime I get anywhere near him it’s poison, I don’t want to go on living. His acid is just too corrosive. I can’t read his poems, but I can remember reading them with amazed undelight whenever I read his prose. So his poetry is still working on me indirectly.

  Late in the afternoon I was talking to Tim o
n the phone about Queen Victoria when I heard a huge buzzing in the window. I said, “Tim, excuse me, I’ve got to go investigate this huge buzzing insect.” I hung up and looked at it.

  It was a waspy sort of creature with a long tubular abdomen that carried a herringbone pattern in yellow. Something that resembled a hypodermic syringe poked out its back end. I called Roz right away. I said, “I’m sorry to bother you, but remember that insect that you told me about once with the long herringbone abdomen?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I said, “It’s on the windowsill in the dining room. It’s got a huge long pointy thing hanging off its end and the point has snagged a strand of dust and it is so big that at first glance I thought it was two wasps mating.”

  “I know that one,” she said.

  “Do you know what it’s called? I was thinking of writing something about it.”

  “Let me check,” Roz said. She got her copy of the Audubon guide to New England bugs and birds and miscellaneous other things—the one with the frightening picture of the star-nosed mole—a book that used to lie on a little rusty table on our porch and now she has it, because it’s her book. She had the happy sound in her voice that I remember from when she looks things up, a sound of optimism and soon-to-be-satisfied curiosity.

  “Yes, here it is,” she said after a minute. “It’s called a ‘pigeon horntail.’ Here’s what it says. ‘Female has long ovipositor.’ ”

  “That’s for sure,” I said.

  “It says the ovipositor ‘deposits eggs deep into wood that larvae eat.’ So you should probably take it out of the house because it wants to lay eggs that will eat the window-sill.”

  I thanked her and got a glass and a mailing envelope and scooted the soi-disant pigeon horntail into captivity. It buzzed, but it was tired from its struggle with the window dust. I walked with it down to the old lilac tree and let it go there. It could probably insert its ovipositor into one of the dead lilac branches. Roz once showed me something about old lilac wood: it has a streak of purple deep inside, as if it soaks some of the purpleness of the blossoms back into itself when they go.

  I’M BACK from the reading in Cambridge. I “gave” the reading. Beforehand I took Smacko for a long walk, all the way to the salt pile and back, nodding and smiling at passersby, practicing being a public person. I washed out his water bowl very carefully so that all the invisible slime was gone, and I filled it with cold water while he panted, and I listened to him drink it. His collar clanked coolly against the brim. Then I drove to Cambridge.

  As I drove I tried to do everything very gracefully. At the tollbooth I fished my wallet out of my pocket and turned it over and opened it very gracefully, and I used just my thumb to lift a twenty out of its pouchy slumber. And when the toll-taker gave me back my change, I slid it into the change nook with practiced smoothness. I tore open a bag of vinegar-flavored potato chips and fished out one of them and turned it and touched my tongue to it, and drew it in without a sound. I sipped some coffee, and I looked to my left with an easy swivel, to see what kind of car was passing me. It was a blue Dodge Magnum—I forgave it with the gentlest of nods for being a big, arrogant car. Then I folded up the receipt for the coffee and potato chips and put it in my pocket with an extreme fluidity of gesture. And when I pushed the turn signal, I didn’t click it all the way, but just held it with two fingers so that the circuit completed and it went click click, and then I released it. I turned on the CD player and listened to Carl Sandburg read aloud two lines of one of his poems and then I turned it off, with the subtlest pressure on the off button. I had the touch. I was good at what I did. And what I did was drive to poetry readings.

  I found a place to park, and I was on time, and the bookstore manager waited until there was a good crowd—twelve people, I think, maybe thirteen, including several bookstore employees, who were kind people who didn’t dwell on the fact that their bookstore was going broke. I read some poems into the brightly lit corner of the store, including a new version of the one about Roz’s white pants, and they didn’t sound too bad as I read them. The cash register began printing its noisy nightly transaction summary just as I was finishing “How I Keep from Laughing,” which kind of wrecked it, but that’s all right.

  A woman asked a question: did I agree or disagree with Philip Larkin when he wrote that it was better to read poems silently to yourself than hear them read aloud? I said, Well, Larkin was right that when you heard a poem read aloud you never knew how far you were away from the last line, and you didn’t know what the shape of the stanzas were, but on the other hand if they didn’t sound good when read aloud then forget it. I said I found Carl Sandburg unreadable on the page, but when I drove around listening to him read in his wildly mannered way—“in the coooool, of the tooooooombs, of Chicaaaahgo”—then I loved it. Sandburg gives every syllable a special extra squeeze. I told them that Sandburg was so incredibly popular at one point that he had a secretary to help him answer his fan mail, and he’d go through it and write “Send A” or “Send B” or “Send C” on it, meaning that the secretary should type boilerplate letter A or B or C as a reply. So there was something to reading poems aloud.

  I sold one book—a copy of Worn. A man came up and said he’d bought all three of my books but he didn’t have them anymore because when he got married he decided to clean out his shelves and he took a few hundred books to a book dealer and the dealer gave him a ridiculously low price but he took it. And now he was divorced and buying books again, and would I sign this one and this time he would keep it. So I did.

  ON THE WAY back up Route 95 I sang along with Slaid Cleaves doing his song “Sinner’s Prayer” until I couldn’t stand it anymore and I called up Roz and left a message.

  I said “Hello, I’m calling to give you a progress update. I’ve done the reading in Cambridge, check, and I’m almost done cleaning out my office, almost check, and my finger’s healing up well—thank you for taking care of me that day— and the introduction is now progressing. So things are moving along. And I’m hoping you’ll come back sometime and hang your tablecloths back on the line.” And then I added: “And I just wonder if there’s anyone who knows you like I do!” And then I couldn’t talk any more, so I hung up.

  One time when Roz was still with me I came home late from a reading in Madison, Wisconsin, and she was already asleep, and so was the dog. I kicked Smacko in the head by mistake in the dark, not too hard, but he made a little growly yelp, and I said I was sorry to him, and that woke Roz. I got in bed, and she smelled so smilingly sleepy that soon I had my hand on her hip and I said, “Baby, that is one big sexy hip.”

  She stirred and said, “Yikes, what’s going on here?”

  I said, “I don’t know, what’s going on with you?”

  She turned and unbuttoned her pajama top over me, and I could see one of her breasts outlined in the orange light coming from the street. Her breasts didn’t have to rhyme, but in fact they did rhyme.

  THE MOUSE HAS COME OUT from the control panel of the stove, and he’s making a lot of noise by scraping things off of the burners with his mouse teeth. He wasn’t discouraged by the Boraxo I sprinkled around, or the spritzes of Windex. I set up a humane trap of a toilet-paper tube with a dab of peanut butter on the end, balanced tippily on the counter out over the trash can, but he wasn’t fooled. He’s scooting silently across the counter now, in search of the Lava soap, which he gnaws at. He eats the corners first. Imagine eating lava soap. His head is very long, like a weasel’s head. He lives in fear. If I lift my arm he dashes back. But then he creeps out again. He’s bolder than he used to be. He doesn’t know whether it’s okay to be a part of my life or not. And I would be quite happy for him to be out and about, and even gnawing at my soap, if he wasn’t constantly taking little craps everywhere. What a foolish thing for him to do. I may have to buy a trap from a guy in Sandwich, Massachusetts. It runs on a maze principle and is supposedly not traumatic for the mouse. It’s called the Mouse Depot. I can’t
have fifteen mouse droppings on the stove every single night, and that’s sad because I’ll miss him.

  You know what? I could write forever. This is me. This is me you’re getting. Nobody else but me.

  You may not want me. I don’t care. I want you to have me. That’s the way it works. I’m here giving and you’re there taking. If you are there. I can’t know and you are probably falling asleep. You have many reasons for reading what you read. You want to, quote, “keep up.” Good luck. You want to know what somebody who was rumored to be on the short list for poet laureate of the United States would write after it turned out that he wasn’t in fact chosen. What does he write about then? Hass was chosen, and Pinsky was chosen, and Kooser was chosen, and Simic was chosen. And Kay Ryan was chosen. Goody.

  Goody for all of them. It’s all about a piece of steak. There’s that Jack London story, about the old tired boxer who almost wins a comeback, but he doesn’t because he didn’t have enough money to buy that one piece of steak he hungered for the day before—the steak that would have given him the strength to land the big punch. So he’s beaten. He’s smacked around. He bleeds. He fails. That’s me. If I could only have written a good flying spoon poem back three years ago when I first wanted to, I might be poet laureate right now. Maybe. Probably not. But maybe. I might be going to fancy diplomatic receptions and talking to flirty women from the Spanish embassy with no shoulder straps and eating steamy vulval canapés that leap into my mouth practically of their own volition. I would be part of the Washington evening scene, and I’d be sent invitations to receptions engraved on heavy stationery, with very sharp corners and skimpy tissue overlays that would fall and glide low and long across the floor. I’d own a black-tie outfit. But it has all happened a different way. I’m up here in Portsmouth, city of brick sidewalks. And I like this city a lot. But I’d love those canapés, too.