Poetry from The Literary Review
In Season
Bob Rogers
| I ran into him yesterday, a poet I once knew, picking over the pyramids of fruit in the produce section, handling each piece with the same slow consideration he may have once reserved for etching his lines into the page. It had been years since I had seen him. In the old days he was a fixture at the poetry readings and in the used book stores, declaiming some extreme position in the back booths of the midtown beer joints. Now here we were in the supermarket's recirculated air, respectable and happy to be out of the house for a few minutes, the produce all around us waxed and glossy, in season or not, stacked with such precariousness that all our reachings brought down more than we intended. Such a strange place to be seeing him, a cold room foundering in cold light, unconnected to the past—not the way I would have written it. He told me he wasn't writing anymore: “The older you get the less you have to say.” The world was no longer a place of mystery and voices for him, I could tell. The avocados were just so many chances for guacamole; they weren't weighted with anything other than their own green heft, charged with no greater purpose than their likelihood of casting a shadow. They could explain nothing. And to him, I was just an old acquaintance, an association like a piece of road outside a town he left when he was young, or maybe the faint smell of newly laid carpeting, some vague thing that could drag him backward, a reminder of the years when he stayed out to all hours lighting one cigarette from the burning butt-end of the last, tamping it on the table first to count off a necessary rhythm, as though the innumerable parts in the works of the world moved in some discoverable time signature. He would return to his rooms half drunk, the other half confounded, and feverishly read poem after poem, in his hand a pencil pitted with tooth marks, writing his own answers in the margins next to some poet's maddeningly trim lines—Merwin's or Creeley's, maybe—driven and distracted by the noise of the night-filled city and how much of it could be brought home to a bright and empty page yellowed with the glow from a single goose-necked lamp, and how he still held on to enough anger at the end of the day to heat a few words so they might rise a little. All in all he seemed much happier, better groomed certainly, done with looking to lines of poetry as though they could be followed as surely as lines of reasoning, done with seeking some comprehensible story to explain why the night climbs onto us the way it does out of the ditches and tree roots knotted into the loess soil, grabbing hold of everything that had once stood up in the daylight to throw its sharpened shadow into the street. Maybe I've come to the same conclusions. I used to write with a fierceness, handling each word as though it were a hammer and the world a sheet of unstruck bronze, my job to raise it into some kind of meaningful relief. These years of laboring over draft pages, their edges curled from much handling and indecision then laid to rest in unlabeled file folders, and I'm still not sure I shape a damn thing, the concussions of the hammer more noise than ringing. Most of what I wanted to say lies obscured within the paper's merciless white, unwilling to tear itself free. But nothing worth saying is easily said, this much I have learned. The easy words are lies. It is what cannot be uttered that we must let be called the truth. When I got home, I put the green avocado on the window sill where it will wait through the greater part of the week as it ages and softens all the way down to its solid pit, readying itself to be cut open, its dense meat coming free of the skin that has protected it until this late moment. My wife will take a fork, as I've seen her do before, and mash the fruit in a shallow bowl until it creams and smoothes, mixing in lemon juice and garlic and a dash of salt, the flavors becoming something other than themselves, a complicated taste made of noonday sun and southerly wind soughing in the trees, the bitterness of ground water and a sharp bite like the slow decaying of wet bark, all colored with the simple sweetness of a flowering that has come and gone at the start of the season, the subtle record of a hundred days of skies clouded and clear, so rich on the tongue that a lifetime won't be long enough to learn how to say it. |
