Are poetry collections supposed to be read like a book? Turning pages, reading one poem after another? That is how I read this.
Raymond Carver is known for his short
stories and was tagged “the American Chekhov.” In college, I read a little of Carver's work—I
know I read “Cathedral,” one of his best-known short stories. I remember very little of what else I read then, but I do remember liking it all. (The subtitle of this pile blog came from Carver’s poem, “The
Other Life”; that stayed with me somehow.)
Carver gets up in the morning and writes poems. He was an alcoholic but by age 40 managed to stop drinking and then live what sounds like a happy life. That life, I take it from the poems, consisted of living in comfort along a river, traveling, and fishing, enjoying his wife’s company, and reading a hell of a lot during his non-writing time.
Reading this book of many poems renewed my appreciation. A good poem read on the commute could lend a sense of peace—a remote peace even on a crowded, damp, flatulent bus in which someone two rows ahead talks loudly on the phone, someone across the aisle plays TikTok videos, and someone from the back of the bus walks to the front and stands by the driver in order to get off first, before everyone else, when this peaceful ride finally nudges through traffic and wheels up to some anointed curb.
Notes:
- “Deschutes River”
- “The Other Life”
- “Happiness”
- “Reading”
- “To Begin With”
This sky, for instance:
closed, gray,
but it has stopped snowing
so that is something. I am
so cold I cannot bend
my fingers.
Walking down to the river this morning
we surprised a badger
tearing a rabbit.
Badger had a bloody nose,
blood on its snout up to its sharp eyes:
Later, eight mallard ducks fly over
without looking down. On the river
Frank Sandmeyer trolls, trolls
for steelhead. He has fished
this river for years
but February is the best month
he says.
Snarled, mittenless,
I handle a maze of nylon.
Far away —
another man is raising my children,
bedding my wife, bedding my wife.
Now for the other life. The one
without mistakes.
- LOU LIPSITZ
My wife is in the other half of this mobile home
making a case against me
I can hear her pen scratch, scratch.
Now and then she stops to weep,
then – scratch, scratch.
The frost is going out of the ground.
The man who owns the unit tells me,
Don’t leave your car here.
My wife goes on writing and weeping,
weeping and writing in our new kitchen.
So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.
They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
They are so happy
they aren't saying anything, these boys.
I think if they could, they would take
each other's arm.
It's early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.
They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.
Reading
yours is, and mine. Imagine
a château with a window opening
onto Lake Geneva. There in the window
on warm and sunny days is a man
so engrossed in reading he doesn’t look
up. Or if he does he marks his place
with a finger, raises his eyes, and peers
across the water to Mont Blanc,
and beyond, to Selah, Washington,
where he is with his girl
and getting drunk for the first time.
The last thing he remembers, before
he passes out, is that she spits on him.
He keeps on drinking
and getting spit on for years.
But some people will tell you
that suffering is good for the character.
You’re free to believe anything.
In any case, he goes
back to reading and will not
feel guilty about his mother
drifting in her boat of sadness,
or consider his children
and their troubles that go on and on.
Nor does he intend to think about
the clear-eyed woman he once loved
and her defeat at the hands of eastern religion.
Her grief has no beginning, and no end.
Let anyone in the château, or Selah,
come forward who might claim kin with the man
who sits all day in the window reading,
like a picture of a man reading.
Let the sun come forward.
Let the man himself come forward.
What in Hell can he be reading?
To Begin With
called Sulieman A. Sulieman and his wife,
an American known only as Bonnie. One thing
he remembered about his stay there
Was how every evening Sulieman rapped
at his own front door before entering.
Saying, “Right, hello. Sulieman here.”
After that, Sulieman taking off his shoes.
Putting pita bread and hummus into his mouth
in the company of his silent wife.
Sometimes there was a piece of chicken
followed by cucumbers and tomatoes.
Then they all watched what passed for TV
in that country. Bonnie sitting in a chair
to herself, raving against the Jews.
At eleven o’clock she would say, “We have to sleep now.”
But once they left their bedroom door open.
And he saw Sulieman make his bed on the floor
beside the big bed where Bonnie lay
and looked down at her husband.
They said something to each other in a foreign language.
Sulieman arranged his shoes by his head.
Bonnie turned off the light, and they slept.
But the man in the room at the back of the house
couldn’t sleep at all. It was as if
he didn’t believe in sleep any longer.
Sleep had been all right, once, in its time.
But it was different now.
