A Ride With a Poet
DRAFT
“You should have known me in my prime,” the boy in the back seat said to me, looking out the window as the Kansas prairie sped by. He brushed back his thick long black hair in a gesture of distraughtness, if there is such a word, my point of view being that you know very well what I intend by it, distraughtness that is, a mix of worry, heaviness of heart, distractedness and dejection, which by my lights means that it should find an honorable home in any dictionary around the world. “I was really something. Before all…this, happened to me.”
I had a special interest in this boy, he was rumored to be one of the shining stars among the young literary set on campus there in Manhattan, or so it had been said to me by my niece Roberta.
And I will tell you why this special interest, that being my coming into recent possession of “Tales of the Trade, Ten Secrets to Becoming a Successful Author, With Examples, Exercises and Tips” courtesy of the First Presbyterian Annual Book Sale, where this little gem sat unannounced in the bottom of a cardboard box, it’s translucent plastic layer peeling back from the yellow cover like a snake shedding its skin (“Exercise #32, Integrating Simile into Your Characters’ Speech”).
The publication date was in the early 1950s, but I would imagine these classic lessons haven’t much changed since the days of the early Romans building the Coliseum and their other magnificent civic structures (“Lesson #3, Incorporating Historic Detail into Your Narrative”).
As to Roberta my niece, this being the same Roberta, strong-hearted and good-willed and vice versa (“Wordplay, Knowing When to Use It”) who the week before had asked me to give her and this literary fellow a ride back to school from Kansas City at the end of the weekend, and who now was imploring me to instead take the boy back alone while she attended to some phony baloney just-invented necessary business on Sunday night, as she now intended to catch a ride with a dorm mate on Monday morning.
“Perhaps he can ride with the two of you,” I suggested tactfully.
“No, I’m afraid that wouldn’t work,” Roberta said.
“I wonder why that is,” I said, though I can’t say that I really wondered. He was a boy and she was Roberta, and the soft warm wax of young people’s heart wasn’t set quite yet at their age, leaving them open to every stray impression.
These boys.
She came to know them in class and then they trotted after her in golden retrieverish fashion, which is to say, extreme loyalty mixed with as little immediate brainpower as could be imagined. They were a fixture in my life, and while most of Roberta’s weekends back home seemed to start with the intention of heading back to school together, they never seemed to end that way.
Some conversation, some slip of the tongue or heart, some excess of character or personality that had bubbled up in fervent conversation always had Roberta turning to me on Sunday afternoon pleading for me to take this or that boy back to school. Solo.
“You know, there is a bus from here to Manhattan, I’d be glad to drive him to the station.”
“Oh, but he has his books and his bag, and I know he’d have no one at the other end to pick him up. No,’ she said, in the manner of someone who has given it the best thinking there could possibly be, “No, I think you should drive him.”
“You know, does it ever occur to you, Roberta, to check with me before the last minute? I might have had something important to do this afternoon. Why, just yesterday I picked up a book all about becoming an author in just a few easy….”
“Oh, an author! Then you’ll simply have to drive him back He’s one of the most celebrated young writers on campus, the latest thing in dejection and angst. He’s won all sorts of awards. You can talk and talk and talk. He’s usually happy to let you know how things strike him. You’ll learn all sorts of things from him!”
I made a point to look up this ‘angst’ word, if that is the right spelling. “I expect I could talk and talk to him on the telephone…”
“If I had thought for an instant that this would be a big deal at all, at all (“Tip #17, The Artful Use of Italics”), I never would have asked my favorite Uncle Jack…”
“All right, all right, I’ll do it.”
“My favorite Uncle Jack who dandled me on his knee when I was just a wee lass…”
“I said I would do it.”
And so there I was (“Tip #7, Handling A Change of Scene and the Passage of Time”), driving down I-70 on a late March day, along the Kansas prairie, specifically the Flint Hills. The ranchers were burning their bluestem acreage by the mile in controlled fires to strip the soil of last year’s weeds and brush, leaving a layer of nutrients behind, speeding the growth of the new grass in time for the cattle shipped in there in late April for their final fattening before the pens.
Which by rights I would have thought would have been a scene that in its sparseness of color and tone interrupted by the vivid red and yellow and black ring of fire and smoke, particularly as the darkness crept in, was absolutely made for the creative soul, leaving its own nutrient layer behind so to speak.
Since it wasn’t having that effect, I was left surprised at his dolefulness and general artistic inertia.
Though perhaps that was part of it, this artistic intertia being part of the job description, writers and artists in general always being on the verge of great work rather than actually doing any I have noticed. I suspect I had a lot to learn about writing. I didn’t see the harm in asking.
“Doesn’t the sight inspire you?”
He looked out blankly. “Inspire me?”
“To write, I mean.”
“Oh, ahh,’ he said as though considering the notion for the first time. “I suppose it should. It should. Any tortured creative soul worth his salt ought to be able to knock off a few good stanzas about the corners of the world burning and curling in blackened wisps.”
He looked out tragically. “I fact, I’ve probably done it a time or two, ‘oh world-consuming fire, oh, ring of flame, blast furnace of the soul, burn ye, burn the layers of deceit and falseness born of the human stain, make cinders of our hot o’ervaulting pride …’ and… and, well… whatnot.” He waved his hand carelessly as he recited.
Well, I thought this was pretty hot stuff, his having gotten into a couple of throwaway lines Tips #22, #4 and #15 nearly all at once, and who’s to say, maybe somewhere down the line around some curves and straightaways in the poem I hadn’t yet traveled upon so to speak, it might even rhyme at some point. Accidentally or not. And I told him so.
“Oh, so kind, so kind,” he said weakly, as though from a far distance, putting the back of his hand to his forehead. “But don’t waste your praise. Do you want to know what I am writing now?” He was undoing his backpack and pulling out a notebook. “Do you want to know what immortal images I’m penning for posterity now? Here, listen.”
His tone now was one of polite distaste and he seemed to hold the paper at one corner as if he held something contaminated. (“Exercise #11, Use the Lively Image!”). “You eyes, your eyes are like stars! Your lips like precious fruit. Your ears like the delicate shells of the sea!”
He dropped the page to the floor of the car. He watched it drift down with disinterest. “This is what I’ve come to. ‘Eyes like stars.’ I don’t think anyone has ever heard that one before, do you? And ‘precious fruit.’ What exactly makes a fruit precious, I wonder? And why in the world would any fruit, precious or not, remind any rationale soul of someone’s lips?” He sighed. “Even if she is the most remarkable creature on the planet.”
Oh. Ah. Now I recognized the symptoms. “This has to do with my niece?” I asked gently.
He only looked into the distance as night fell. “You know, they used to say I was a real up-and-comer. Fluent in free verse, blank verse, prose poems, and, not scorning the traditional forms, adept in sonnets both Shakespearean and Petrachan, terza rima, and odes of every flavor and variety.”
He looked at me in the rear view mirror with a new intensity. “I had the market cornered on today’s youthful despair. No one, no one, could do alienation like I could.” He held his hands and ticked off his fingers as he listed accomplishments. “A full spread in Void, A Magazine of the Arts, special mention three months running in Modern Dread, for Today’s Young Poet About Town, two thumbs up in Non-Linear Narrative, A Journal of the Institute of Advanced Poetical Conceivings, Staff Favorite in Shards, Fragmented Realities for Discerning Readers…” He put his head into his hands and then suddenly looked up. “And difficult? I tell you, I could barely be read at all, my lines were so difficult! There were times when even I didn’t know what I was saying, I was so dense, and referential, and fragmented. Oh, if they could only see me now, how they would scoff. Just look at me! Look at me! Like stars! Stars! Undone by a raven-haired beauty. Undone!”
He looked up and shook his fist skyward defiant at first and then he sort of collapsed, or collapsed as well as you could in the back seat of a Buick going west on I-70 through the Flint Hills. “All I do now is hope and dream and wonder.” He shook his head sadly. “If this is what love does to you…”
And left it at that.
I could see how it would be hard on a fellow if he had mastered the art of despair and what I believe is called anomie and the hollow horror that lies at the pit of the human heart, which I take to be similar soul-wise to what becomes of the grass underneath one of those plastic wading pools if you leave it down on the lawn for too long if you know what I mean?
And then, right when you think you have the whole thing figured out and under your control, reveling in what you might call your very own patented mellow brand of bleakness, you get shanghaied by love.
Leaving you wondering if the whole shooting match might actually be worth something after all.
He looked furtively at me, as though confessing something awful. “I sit for hours writing the words ‘June” and “moon” down in my notebook and trying to come up with new lines of poetry to use them in. Oh, what is to become of me?”
He brought his head up. “She is all I think about,” he said quietly with complete frankness, “and those are the most honest words I’ve said in my life.”
I thought and thought and thought about it. Who was I to advise a young master of the poetical arts, but I decided to give it a go. “Well, Maybe that is the first line of a new kind of poem for you,” I suggested kindly. “She is all I think about.”
His eyes lit up and he grabbed for his pen and paper.
We drove on through the night, the world curling in fire at its margins.
(Tip #7, Leave the Reader Wanting More.)
