Story of a Poem

Prologue: Story

Once upon a time, two people met. It was summer, in a peaceful, mostly empty college town. It was evening, in a bar he had been to so many times, originally drawn by its mysterious, suggestive name. The Spoke. It sounded like a secret society, maybe of poets, which is what he had come to this small New England town to become. It took him many visits to notice the eponymous bikes from various eras hung on the walls, for he was not what you would call a visual person.

The Spoke had cheap drinks, a large table in the back corner good for writing, and in the afternoon, light and dust interacted in a silent, one might even say poetic, way. Also, the parking lot backed directly onto the cemetery where Emily Dickinson was buried. He could take a break and walk back there and ask her for help, staring at her gray headstone, which she had in a poem presciently described as her granite lip. Upon it was written the phrase Called Back.

He had been a student here in this small town, first for college then, after living elsewhere for several years, for graduate school in poetry. Now, after many years away again, he had returned as a teacher, in a week-long summer program. Everyone had gathered at that same bar where he had gone as a student. Without thinking, he placed himself back at his same table. He felt someone sit down next to him. He turned, and suddenly his presence in that bar felt fated. When she said her name, he felt he had known it all along. They began talking easily. She lived in San Francisco, he in New York. Their families had come from the same small region in the old country, and they nervously joked that they might be distant cousins. After the bar closed, they walked with a small group of people to Dickinson’s grave, and, standing before it, earnestly recited some poems.

The next day they met up and wandered the deserted college town. A few days later he came to see her at her childhood home in Boston, where she was visiting her father, who engaged him in some requisite paternal harassment, quizzing him about deep Google results revealing certain inconsistencies in an intermittent employment history, then bringing him upstairs to demonstrate a working switchblade collection. She went back to San Francisco to her job as an urban planner, and he to New York, where he taught poetry at various institutions to graduate students.

A year later, he moved to San Francisco. They rented a small, dark apartment in North Beach. While she was at work, he went outside and walked past the brightly colored houses, many of them surrounded by scaffolding and wrapped in odd black gauze. The city seemed to be quietly waiting for a great calamity. He often walked down to the famous bookstore, all the way to the back and up the wooden staircase to the poetry room. The faces of the dead poets stared at him from the covers of books on tables and shelves.

It was so quiet, a few people sitting in corners and reading. He looked out the window over the avenue and watched the buses go by, the tourists weaving too slowly down the sidewalks while people dressed in professional clothing and sneakers impatiently tried to go around them. The majestic, forbidding, opaque blue-and-gold windows of the office buildings reminded him of his late father, who had worked as a lawyer in similar buildings in Washington, D.C. It was easy to imagine big decisions were being made behind them.

*

He had lived in San Francisco once before, in the early 1990s, after graduating from college then going to live for a year in the Soviet Union. As an undergraduate he had studied Russian, then received a fellowship, ostensibly to continue his senior thesis which gamely, albeit superficially, considered the work of a famous actor, songwriter and poet Vladimir Vysotsky, who could be described as a Slavic combination of Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, and James Dean. His fellowship would allow him to attend Moscow State University, a Stalinist monstrosity built in what was known as wedding cake style. Thousands of students from all over the Soviet Union lived and studied in its interconnected wings. You could go from section to section, never exposing yourself to the elements, up and down the many floors. You could eat and shop without ever going outside, and find little clusters of every ethnic group within the USSR, each speaking their language, cooking their native food. It was easy to make friends quickly and get lost for hours, even days, in an Uzbek or Armenian microculture. There were just a handful of Americans there, all housed on the same floor, being watched, though it was easy to forget, since they were never bothered. It seemed no one really cared what anyone was doing anymore.

The USSR was in what no one at the time would have predicted was its final stage. Everything was literally and figuratively crumbling. Everyone was, even for Russians, deeply depressed. Most of the students at the university spent all day in their rooms, not going to class, drinking tea, then eventually vodka or what was called cognac but tasted more like that same vodka with cheap perfume dumped into it. There was almost nothing to eat, unless something from the black market would randomly appear, like a whole chicken that needed to be beheaded and plucked, or tangerines from Moldavia, probably radioactive.

Russian is a difficult language, because it conceives of central concepts—such as motion and time—in unique ways. Verbs are divided up into categories of repeated or singular actions, gradations of directionality, and distinctions in purpose that make little sense to a non-native speaker. Before he went to Russia, he would desperately memorize phrases with no idea why they were correct. When he first arrived, crucial linguistic concepts still eluded him, and he made laughable mistakes. Surrounded by native speakers, breathing in the language from everywhere, he began slowly to understand the language, not intellectually but intuitively. He found his awkward Russian gradually, then suddenly, becoming fluid and conversational. Not only could he speak, but his mind was changing: its categories, along with his sense of time and space themselves, were shifting.

Despite the progress he was making in the language, the omnipresent decay and futility permeated and threatened to overwhelm him. He began to feel he was becoming too lethargic to bother breaking down. He spent long hours playing a variation of backgammon, and wondering why he was there, other than to helplessly witness a society in despair. Suddenly, a month earlier than he was supposed to depart, he impulsively changed his plane ticket and left.

*

Exhausted, his body saturated with nicotine and ethanol and countless other impurities, he decided, without much thought, to move West. He tried Seattle, and eventually found his way south to California. Pre-internet San Francisco was an exotic destination, with no discernible industries, especially for a young person with no actual skills. It was where you went when you wanted to make nothing of yourself. He realized he wanted to check out completely from the competitiveness of the great American cities, where most of his other friends had gone. You could live in San Francisco for cheap, virtually unnoticed, and pursue your unformed, inconsequential dreams.

He got found a tiny room in a shared apartment. Some previous renter had painted the walls an unsettling, febrile orange. The leaseholder was the prickly and hilarious founder of an independent record label. Boxes of LPs by bands he remembered vaguely from his stint as a college radio DJ overflowed into the hallway. Other renters came and went: a recovering heroin addict who rode a bike one hundred miles a day to keep himself sober, a dark-haired young woman who would stand for hours, weeping, in the middle of the little concrete fenced-in area at the bottom of the wooden steps that led out the back door of the house. A mouse died unnoticed behind the stove and was found months later, cartoonishly flattened from desiccation.

The city was affordably between booms (his rent was $250 a month). He worked for a temp agency that provided substitute paralegal work. He and his friends, including his brother, were in various bands that seemed committed to creating complex and unlistenable songs that evaded basic musical structures and pleasures for no apparent reason. From those legal offices, very like the ones his father had worked in through his whole childhood, he stole supplies and made copies of flyers for shows no one attended. It seemed everyone was painting inscrutable canvases or making experimental films and projecting them on warehouse walls, while living in giant apartments, formerly grand homes now in states of gradual disrepair.

Every morning with his headphones on he walked to work through the Mission Dolores. Someone told him there used to be a creek that flowed where Mission Street was now, from the bay all the way to the Dolores church. He did not know then that he was walking over the place where the villages of the Ohlone had been. He and his friends walked or rode their bikes everywhere, obliviously, through neighborhoods where generations of native San Franciscans lived and worked. That summer, Nirvana poured from practically every window, and when the bartender put on the compact disc with the baby in the swimming pool chasing the dollar bill on the cover, everyone danced in manic, triumphant glee, convinced it was the start of a new era.

One time, his father had come for a single night, on a business trip. They had lunch at some expensive place and then walked around North Beach. His father loved City Lights Bookstore, so they went up wooden stairs to the poetry room and looked down onto Columbus Avenue. Then they went to a bar and had a late-afternoon drink, then a few more. They said virtually nothing of substance to each other. Then a long, silent, buzzed walk back to the father’s hotel through the crowds of people heading home from work. It was getting dark, and the city was emptying.

*

After two years of working as a temp, paying cheap rent, being in a band that rehearsed all the time and almost never played shows, and aimlessly riding his bike around the city from coffee shop to bar to bar to bar, he felt anxious, starved for some kind of rigor and structure, or some engagement with art made not by his friends, or maybe just some conversations that did not dissolve inevitably into a spiritual fog. The only thing he could think of to do was to apply to graduate school.

He was accepted into a doctoral program in Slavic languages and literatures at UC Berkeley. His conversational Russian had disappeared, soon to be replaced by a stilted, artificial scholarly vocabulary. Long days sitting in the library, painstakingly translating texts about texts. Scraping at the very corner of an endless gray surface, revealing more gray, doomed to keep endlessly scraping. A giant clock, its immobile hands, the names of the great philosophers written in gold on the ceiling, motes of dust drifting around, the other bent-down heads.

He persevered for a year, then into a second. The exams to proceed to the PhD were notoriously, almost comically, difficult, with an impossibly extensive reading list. For hours candidates were grilled on the texts, sometimes in Russian, by the committee. Several professors had arcane scholarly specialties. One was an expert in Old Church Slavonic verb tenses, another in the literature of suicide. To prepare, he read every day, from 8 a.m. until midnight. At times, unable to absorb any more deep Slavic thoughts, he would stop and listen to Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted, staticky guitars and the possibility of being casually great. I was dressed for success, but success it never comes. He headed out to class and, passing a newspaper box, saw the headline that Kurt Cobain was dead. That was how he got the news. No internet at home, only at school, in the library, news on the street, the last days of writing letters.

*

One evening he wandered into a poetry reading on campus. He had, without thinking about it, almost automatically, been going to poetry events for a few years, sometimes at Berkeley but mostly at Cody’s, the legendary bookstore on Telegraph Avenue. There were weekly readings upstairs, where famous poets would come to outdo each other. This was not the rhyming, romantic poetry he had read in high school, or the highly formal, extremely literary work he was reading in Russian. One week the legendary naturalist poet Gary Snyder read, and talked between poems with great earnestness about eating roadkill. Specific wildflowers and delicious crushed possum.

He would never have called himself a poet. At rare times he would start scribbling and would get interested in a clumsy, excited process, trying for as long as he could to keep away the feeling that this was ridiculous and he was wasting his time, which didn’t feel precious at all. From the outside, at those moments, he would have seemed completely, uncharacteristically absorbed.

That night on campus, the Polish poet and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz was reading. Milosz was an exile, observer of grand historical forces, preserver of those noble feelings that history is always busy failing fully to eradicate. After Milosz finished reading, everyone went into one of the classrooms, with a few tables with ancient cookies and new wine. He decided to go talk to the great poet, despite having recently and inexplicably dyed his hair a nauseating admixture of blue and green. This didn’t seem visibly to bother Milosz, who graciously asked what he did. Without thinking about it, he said, for the first time, I am a poet. Milosz suddenly grabbed his hand, and, looking down, in a deep voice that thundered directly from his wild silver eyebrows, uttered, YOU MUST LEAVE.

He passed his exams, and did, then moved back to western Massachusetts, to go to poetry school. California an interlude, mis-remembered as a halcyon.

*

All those years later, as he walked again in San Francisco, in those same places, those times returned to him as if they were still some where happening. As he passed a certain doorway or street corner, memories would strike him with a startling reality and force. He felt, like a temporal breeze from unknown quarters, the memory of having nothing to do for days, no phone or internet or connection of any kind, of going places and just seeing who showed up.

They got married, under a tree on a hill. Mist came down from the headlands, freezing their friends and family, who had been warned by, and had ignored, the famous