Lost in a Living Maze
A slab of clarity carved out of cloud. A spiral staircase winding up and disappearing into mist. A door — and who has the key? In the midst of a lockdown, I am lost in a living maze, wrote a British poet, Tristram Fane Saunders.
Lost, lost. My son can’t find his birth certificate, which he needs to replace his passport (also lost). To go where?
I recognized the roads, but I was having trouble keeping up. “Wait!” I called hoarsely. The ones in front turned back to look at me, then turned away again and kept on climbing.
Tall locked door, frosted glass: I stood on tiptoe trying to peer in. No lights. No one was there.
To try to impose a pattern on the pottage and porridge of daily confusion: the daily round, the soft, the hard, steel girders folded in and out of cloud, intermittently visible this mild afternoon, the moon waxing and days getting longer.
Where can we find a place to stand? Groping through memory won’t get us there, wherever there is. Where did we want to go? Be present is a predictable instruction. Less often said: how slyly and how fast the present glides out of sight and hides somewhere behind us. If we were in the country now, we would enter the labyrinth and follow its curves, and look up and touch the rough or smooth bark of bare trees in passing, and then look down: dead leaves and pinecones poking through traces of snow. In the absence of a labyrinth, only a straight path from here to there.
The lostness is its own mode of escape. We would trudge down the road, down the winding hill toward the sound of running water. The thaw would have arrived. As it got warmer, we would hang our coats on a branch and keep on moving. Slow, enormous changes invisible till now would become apparent — had already become apparent, but we seem to need to pass through the maze over and over to become aware of them. A spiral staircase winds up and vanishes in mist. One radiant slit of light is carved out of cloud.
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Hum of the Season
Stretched out on the sofa after lunch, I’m marginally aware of a woman’s voice on the radio crisply holding forth on the sex lives of insects. At a woolly distance, I take in that the male honeybee has evolved a scoop-like apparatus on the tip of his penis to facilitate the removal of any phallic fragments his predecessor may have left behind. Male honeybees when they ejaculate, she adds, explode.
Voices before sleep fade. Hers is sinking to a hum, as of a mosquito cruising the sultry afternoon. I get up and go out and walk across the lawn.
Hum of the season and of the surround. Bees in the bee balm; also hummingbirds, which go, says Ishmael Reed, straight for the eyes. Bees in the towering top-heavy snake root, which is also called Black Cohosh, although its fragrant, spiky flowers are white. White flower, black root — like moly?
I wander around to the back of the house, which some people call the front. Between house and barn is a flourishing chestnut oak tree. Possibly first constructed by some other bird now gone — eggs hatched, fledglings flown — the robin’s nest in the chestnut oak is empty. Long strands of dead grass hang down from the nest — dolefully, I want to say, wallowing in the pathetic fallacy. Or just hang there like wisps of hair that have come astray.
That tree where the empty nest is precariously balanced — wedged? — between two branches: family tradition has it that my mother planted a sprouting acorn that she found in Central Park (or was it Riverside Park?) and brought up here. Family tradition, oral tradition, urban/rural legend, anecdote and memory both blurred and burnished. My book-loving family were never very interested in keeping records.
Bees in the bee balm. The hummingbirds zoom back and forth.
From my perch on the screened porch, I have a good view of the phoebe family — both outside on the lawn and inside, where I’m sitting at a battered white enamel table. Out on the lawn, the mother phoebe flips her tail up and down, up and down, as she perches on the back of a lawn chair and then hops to another and then another. We’ve been leaving the door to the screened porch open, so Mrs. Phoebe can also perch on top of the door on her way to the nest. From that height she swoops and ducks and flies in and out all day. Another point of entrance is the narrow space between the screened windows and the porch floor, left there by a builder for some reason it’s now hard to fathom, unless he was thinking of avian convenience. (Also, it occurs to me, he was the husband of one of my mother’s best friends.). Mrs. Phoebe knows how to fly through that tight space — another way in and out.
Her eggs, in the nest she has built in an angle where the porch wall meets the ceiling, have hatched by now. I can hear the soft chirping of the nestlings, and if I stand back and crane my neck, I can just catch a glimpse of their gaping little beaks as she swoops swiftly in to feed them I’m not sure what. Then, since she no longer needs to sit in her nest (there’s no room for her in any case, on top of four rapidly growing baby birds), she’s off again.
On the table where I sit and look out through the screen at the garden, the table where I write and where I sometimes make collages: phoebe poop. (The table is directly below the new nest.). Down the backs of the lawn chairs: phoebe poop. On the floorboards of the porch; on the ratty quilt that covers the cot at the far end of the porch: phoebe poop. And a new development: on the floor of the barn, like an unwelcome visitor from the city, pigeon poop. We never used to have pigeons in the barn — just phoebes and barn swallows — or not until last fall. The particularly viscous, adhesive texture of pigeon poop was something I’d always associated with New York City windowsills and awnings, but now hardened piles of the stuff formed little mounds on the barn floor. Our neighbor and his stepson eventually pressure-washed that floor. The porch, with its softer and fresher phoebe droppings, was something I could and did deal with daily.
Indoors, tiny ants are crawling over the kitchen counter. Trying to keep such surfaces wholly free of anything greasy or sweet is a quixotic enterprise, a battle that can’t be won.
All of this has been done before; it will all need redoing. The clean-up in life is constant. When we stop needing to mop up after those who came before us, or to make room for those who will follow, is when we abandon the cycle.
But not yet. The barn with its stalactites of pigeon excrement defeats me, but I’m going back into the kitchen now. I’ll ignore the ants and fish a bottle of Simple Green out from under the sink. A roll of paper towels is on the enamel porch table already. I’ll spray and scrub, and the table will be briefly pristine for whatever it will next host as I sit there and look out at the garden and down the vistas of past summers. I’ll wipe up what by now must be almost the last of this generation’s leavings; soon the fledglings will venture out of the nest and flutter and stagger around the porch. I can hardly bear to watch that stage, but the cats are safely indoors, probably asleep upstairs. The cycle goes on.
The phoebe whose drab color matches the brown and grey of the faded lawn chairs is probably a descendant of the phoebe that built a nest on this same porch one summer late in my father’s life, perhaps even his last summer. She is also, presumably, a closer descendant of the phoebe that built her nest on this porch one of those years during the pandemic when we arrived before spring had begun and stayed on until almost the end of November. Each year the phoebes’ nest in in a different spot somewhere among the rafters of the porch. The nests built in previous summers remain, still sturdy so far as one can tell, but as empty as unrented summer cottages. Traditionalists who also relish variety, each generation of phoebes builds a new nest regardless.
Theme with variations? James Merrill’s poem “Another August,” whose title fits these reflections of mine, would, if I understand it, delete variation: “Open the shutters. Let variation/abandon the swallows one by one. / How many summer dusks were needed/to make that single skimming form! / The very firefly kindles to its type.” Summer after summer carves and molds the archetypal shape into the most streamlined, economical version of itself. Lines adapted, scenes reset: resurrected recurrences we recognize, reenact, forget, reenact again.
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On My Knees: Morning Messengers
Not an epiphany, a revelation, any abrupt realization. It was more like a three-part feature film, a triple memory of a buried problem. Three buried problems.
I was kneeling planting onion sets one radiant June morning. Suddenly out of nowhere a line from a Shakespeare sonnet I hadn’t been thinking about, hadn’t read recently, hadn’t known I knew, announced itself: The other two, slight air and purging fire … Sonnet 45 (I checked later). Air and fire? The other two? Sure enough, Sonnet 44 is about earth and water. I had recently written about fire and water, but that didn’t seem to be the connection. The other two: a continuous chain of reference, a conversation caught in mid-air, or if not a conversation, then a monologue, a love letter, a meditation. Who are poets talking to, anyway?
My hands were still busy in the earth, but my mind slid away from the elements to a matter closer to home, more urgent — even if also impossibly distant — in the sparkling morning: who are you down there on your knees, wrist-deep in dirt, lines of poems skimbling through your head at random — or not at random? Skimbling: from T.S. Eliot’s poem about Skimbleshanks the railway cat, whose nickname is Skimble. But I like skimble as a verb denoting a kind of nimble skittering, sliding, skipping.
Who are you? I asked myself. And then, so many decades after the fact: are you more your mother or your father? Neither. Both. They’re long dead. But evidently it isn’t only the memories of family faces that skip or skimble over decades; it’s the flow of a mind. A memory for poems, for example, or for decontextualized snippets of poems.
Theodore Kitaif has written about memory that “images from our past are quietly but incessantly bubbling below the surface of consciousness, prepared to leap into the light …” But “have they come haphazardly, or with an indecipherable purpose that eludes the ‘I’ in whom they may have abided for years before appearing?” I can’t answer that question, which hardly expects an answer anyway. But in my case, it’s less images from the past than lines of poetry.
Back to my parents: I carry them in me, with me. First one predominates, and then the other. I cook. I try impatiently to garden. I sit at a table and write. All this I’ve known for years; it gets clearer with time, and also it doesn’t. A small cycle: planting onion sets. A bigger cycle: the approach of limits.
I finished the rows of onions just barely poking their green tips out of the earth, and creakily stood up and stretched. A pang: my back was stiff, but that wasn’t the source of the pang. No: I’d suddenly remembered that there was a letter I needed to write, and soon, to pull out of something to which I’d thoughtlessly agreed — a misstep, and I needed to step back; a mistake I needed to correct now, today. I went inside, washed the dirt off my hands, and sat down to write my recantation.
And yes, I was apprehensive — had been apprehensive while I was still out in the raw brown garden — that an angry, accusatory response would answer my withdrawal. No matter; I had to withdraw, and I did. And in fact, no such letter came; rather, a friendly answer. Maybe they’d expected all along that I’d pull out.
That afternoon, swaying in the hammock for a little while, I found myself staring at a lilac bush, burgeoning, purple — up here the lilacs often bloom as late as June. The flowers’ fragrance floated toward me, suspended out of time in the sweet air. I kept on looking at the lilac bush: a yellow butterfly was tasting nectar, spray after luscious spray, in silence.
I climbed out of the hammock and reentered the day, but not before I recognized the messenger.
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Endless Other Questions
I have been struggling to read a book I’d forgotten my father wrote — possibly not his best book, but nevertheless a book I need to read. A book from 1960. He was sixty. Did he know he had six more years to live?
Even if an answer were available, that’s the wrong question. Though come to think of it, our financial advisor asked us just the other day, How long do you think you’ll live? So maybe in the nearly sixty years since my father’s death, the wrong question has become, if not the right question, then at least a standard question.
I wish I’d asked my father more questions — not actuarial questions but endless other questions. I want to reach out and back over the years, to somehow stretch across the strumming silence and say “I think maybe I know. I’m in that territory now. How was it for you? How did you manage it?” If he answered me, we might be able to compare notes. But mostly I hope I’d want to stay quiet, if I could do that — stay quiet and listen.
The glimpses I get are serendipitous, triangulated, sparse, tantalizing. I cherish them; they collapse the distance. Robert Pinsky writes in Jersey Breaks “In a certain kind of place, everything can feel simultaneous.” Place; time.
Here’s a nugget that came to me in a circuitous, contingent way — as if all our news from the past, and from the present for that matter, didn’t arrive by a twisty route. Fresh out of Harvard, new to the metropolis where he’d always dreamed of living, and disappointed in whatever he was studying at Columbia’s School of General Studies, John Ashbery enrolled in what turned out to be — as he described it in a letter — a transformational course: Greek Drama, taught by Moses Hadas.
Transformative how, precisely? My source, Rachel Trousdale’s book about humor in American poetry, doesn’t specify, though the quote does convey the young poet’s excitement. That was the spring of 1950. John Ashbery was twenty-three. My father was pushing fifty. I was one and a half. The three of us at that time weren’t all yet acquainted, but we have since achieved simultaneity. Greek drama, older than any of us, was always simultaneous. And is.
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“Lost in a Living Maze,” “Hum of the Season,” “On My Knees: Morning Messengers” and “Endless Other Questions” are included in Pastorals by Rachel Hadas, and appear here with the permission of Measure Press. To acquire a copy of the book directly from the publisher, click here.