A Field of Telephones

The new friend asks me to tell her something about myself that she doesn’t know. I was never a kid who could say their favorite color. I liked colors. I told the teacher I wasn’t sure when blue became green. She had me tested for color blindness. Once, I misread birding as braiding. The branches wove.

*

I hadn’t been asked a question like that in a minute. There’s the idea that your life story starts when something happens that you’d need to mention before you could say anything else. There’s the other idea that your life story starts after the above has passed and you could start your story anywhere. I’m interested in the story after and around the story we “need to tell.”

*

Jack Gilbert: “What I’m interested in is writing about people who have gotten beyond the beginning.” (Yet also: we ask of each sentence, could this be, at last, our final, eventual beginning, however late or untoward?)

*

Or: I don’t need to tell you where I’ve been, for us to be here, but we can talk if you want.

*

I said I was working on a study of the poet Theodore Roethke (1908-1963). I was about to go to Saginaw, Michigan, his hometown. Isn’t there a song about Saginaw, the other new friend said. Lefty Frizzel’s “Saginaw.” 1964. We were waiting on the pretzel bites. She began to sing: “I was born in Saginaw, Michigan. I grew up in a house on Saginaw Bay.”

*

For a long time the story I needed to tell before saying anything else was cancer. My thirties. I often didn’t need to tell it. It was obvious. I got used to people in public asking if I was all right. The palliative doctor asked what I wanted. “Moments,” I said.

*

The person who says they want “moments” knows they may have only “moments” left. Sun on my wrist one afternoon I could handle it, among treatments. I preferred the light when it steadily flared.

*

I was born a bit southeast of Saginaw. The house was sunflowers taller than anyone. I saw a stranger peeing in the raspberries.

*

Sun tea on a stone. Potato bugs under.

*

Johnny Cash covers Frizzel’s “Saginaw.” A mix of hard-scrabble and schmaltz: very Roethke. Consider the beginning of his poem “The Saginaw Song”:

In Saginaw, in Saginaw,

The wind blows up your feet,

When the ladies’ guild puts on a feed

There’s beans on every plate.

*

The palliative doctor was a few years ago. The few-years-ago tumor was in a scar from an earlier tumor, or was in the scar from a tumor from before that. A confusing metaphor, redundant. “You can’t punch yourself in the same tumor twice,” a friend said.

*

The rhymes above are slick. Neither “feed” nor “plate” rhymes with “feet,” not exactly. But each picks up part of the sound. Their chime with “feet,” therefore, is more ambient. An overtone that emerges from plucking the string of “feed” and the string of “plate.” The rhyme with “feet” isn’t a single harmony, it’s a harmonic.

*

The harmonic, which emerges within and exceeds.

*

Rhyme is not a matching game. It arranges, activates, assembles. And, in the next two lines, shifts, settles: “And if you eat more than you should, / Destruction is complete.” We end with a resolution, “complete” calling back to “feet,” fulfilling the ambient effect generated by “feet / feed / plate.” Resolving the imperfect matching. Meanwhile, “should,” in calling back to the “d” in “feed,” establishes a counter-chord, an undertone, with dissonance: “complete / feed” echoing through “feet / feed / should.” Rhyme is in motion.

*

Forms of language are forms of thought, as we often said. Ways of swimming. You don’t need to use them, but you’ll use them, in ways, in particular waters. And everyone who used them, who really used them, or who I want to say really used them, really needed to swim. There’s no language without it, just as there’s no swimming without the body. Even in stillness, the body is moving. In the silentest reading. You can’t move any part without moving everywhere. Reeds in the shallows and mixing the colder depths and the warm algae.

*

“I don’t want you to have to find my body,” I said to my wife, during those years of moments. “I can find your body,” she said.

*

Hard-scrabble, schmaltz: this was the landscape, childhood. In Saginaw, Roethke receives a postcard from his cousin, in 1916. It shows a macaroni factory (“last year Larkin customers received more than 1,000,000 packages of macaroni”). “Dear Theodore,” the message reads. “We are just going through this factory. It is very large.”

*

Another, from the cousin on a visit to Detroit, sweetly: “Hello Theodore. How do you feel after your picnic?” And here's one from his father, in 1918, a few years before the father’s death. “We are all having a good time and I shot a deer the first day in the woods be a good boy and help Mama all you can Papa.”

*

The father’s death defined his life. He didn’t return to Saginaw when his mother was dying.

*

A landscape, childhood. His father’s greenhouses, 25 acres. Up in the night to fiddle the steam. Visible from his bedroom window, immortal diamond. “It was a jungle, and it was paradise,” he wrote. In the present, shards of glass sometimes work their way up in neighbors’ gardens.

*

Shards of glass working their moments up in neighbors’ gardens. This is the legacy, the university.

*

Father and uncle ran the business. Largest florist in Michigan. Manure and roses. Lived next door to it and each other. Then the business went bad and the uncle killed himself and the father died from cancer and the poet wore a long black coat for years. “Carnations, verbenas, cosmos.”

*

Our garden was a little strip. Even the smallest strip can be garden. Fecund glitch. From my bedroom, I could see the tree with snowball blossoms. Put one down your pants. Bare room, wood. Light I have seen a few times since.

*

I asked my friend the attorney, “What advice would you give me for finding an attorney, in case it helps with dying?” “My advice is, I will be your attorney,” he said.

*

In the archives at the University of Washington, in Seattle, among the postcards and other items of Roethke’s childhood, there’s a set of collectible cards that recall the more saccharine, jaunty moments from his poems, especially in his lighter pieces and poems for children. One shows a dopey, grinning kid whittling near a windmill. “De happiness off my heart sprouts oudt off my face,” it says. Another shows a boy and a dog: “If I had viskers like dis feller’s I vunder vould I be somebody’s pet.” Another: “The moon in the sky is a custard pie.”

*

“I had a Donkey, that was all right, / But he always wanted to fly my Kite,” begins his poem, “The Donkey.” Sensibility oh la.

*

I surrendered my pens, sanitized my hands. I told the librarian that I was a scholar of materiality who interpreted biographical effects, authors’ notebooks, and other physical ephemera as sculptural artifacts. I needed to touch the stuff, bypass the microfiche. So held a lock of his childhood hair up to my ear. “Theodore’s first haircut.”

*

After which my notes digressed into a shaggy meditation on Keats’ poem about a lock of Milton’s hair. Cut it.

*

And put on his glasses. Opened the cigarette case that had been in his pocket when he died, swimming in a pool outside Seattle. Counted the cigarettes in it, strained for a lyrical thought: These would have become his breath. Blew a small whistle. Keys he stole from hotels.

*

Is heritage lineage? Or an echoing span. This shaking that speaks through us. In which meaning is. Or in which meaning is released.

*

The librarian, interested that I was a poet, told me he’d been friendly with Elizabeth Bishop when she briefly taught there, shortly after Roethke’s death. They once went for a drive. She said a field of flowers looked like a field of telephones.