Ownership .................-- in memoriam, John Engels I’m in Anchorage, Alaska when I get the cell phone call. It’s from my pregnant daughter-in-law, who is nothing if not an angel, though in this case an angel of sorrow. I’ve stood here looking over Philip Roth’s Everyman, which, judging from passages I’ve browsed, will prove rough going for a sexagenarian. But I’m a lucky sexagenarian, one who happily looks forward to his first grandchild come autumn, and that among other things makes me feel I can afford to buy that book. After the phone call, in fact, and however puzzling my feeling will seem in retrospect, I suddenly believe I can’t afford not to own it. I need to stare Roth’s relentlessness down. Just now it’s June, and to hear the bad news in a bookstore, even if it be too cutely named “The Title Wave,” seems apt. The poet John Engels will soon be dead. John has been my friend and confidant for more than thirty years. I knew he was headed for back surgery while we were up here. I knew he had a history of minor heart problems. But, blithe, naive as ever, I didn’t know that he would suffer a series of coronaries under anesthesia, that he’d now lie in coma, and that in accord with his own instruction, he’d soon be taken off life support. John will have gone before we’re home. It’s also appropriate that together with my second son, who lives and works here, I will be looking for rainbow trout in the Kenai River tomorrow. John was an avid trout angler and the best amateur designer and maker of flies I’ve known in my fifty years of fishing. He turned out gem after gem, each as deft as his poems, though of course the poems are the grander part of what I’ll remember him by. My wife and three of five children are browsing other reading stuff on other shelves. I pay for the Roth. I go outside to cry. I’m weeping for John, of course, whom I hoped the Vermont authorities would at last and rightfully designate as our next state poet. That can’t happen now. Nor will the two of us ever talk again face to face. Nor will I read new work by his hand, but must dwell on what remains, some of the best and most scandalously under-noticed work of its generation. Nor will he and I wade another trout river together, though in fact, owing to his arthritis, we haven’t in fact done that for some years; in any case, sore joints or no sore joints, the trout fisheries we so cherished have all but died in his lifetime, my lifetime. Lifetime. The abstraction has instantly turned particular in John’s case. I can demarcate it now. It’s an integer. I must admit to something, though that’s likely unnecessary: my tears come too because, at 64, I realize that John’s 76 is a lot closer down the road from me than I’ve been thinking. Blithe. Naive. Not that I fear death. I don’t. Rather I want, I seem to require, many more decades than I have left for my younger wife and for my three daughters and two sons, for the granddaughter pending, and for any grandchildren after. Twelve years, if I look back, have gone by in an eyeblink. I need more than time, I can see: I need to pay more attention too --to everything with which I’ve been blessed, love and friendship above all. They can each slide away so abruptly. I can’t truthfully remember much in the way of particular events from twelve years back; I do know that the father-to-be, my oldest son, was only 23, the same as his Alaska-dwelling brother today; and our youngest, that leggy woman of 15 over there in the Young Adult section --when she was three I thought nothing of throwing her in a carry pack and heading up one of the steep local hills. I’d done that with all her older siblings, and just now there comes a particular recollection after all: a half-hour before dusk in January or February, when the afternoons had come back out of darkness. A feather-soft snow was sifting down, the three-year-old slumped asleep in the pack, the sidehills were purple with evening and the coming spring’s buds. I had a pointer bitch just then named Belle, and, just as I reached height of land, I called for her to come check in. She bounded up from below us, but some forty feet from where I paused, she also paused under an old, woodpecker-ravaged apple tree. I have owned that moment ever since. There seems nothing special about these particulars. I’d doubtless witnessed many similar ones before. But just then, feeling the warmth of the child in slumber on my back, noting the exquisite architecture of the bird dog’s frame, the flakes falling through the limbs of that bare ruined fruit tree and onto the hill’s granite ribs and the dense conifers to my west --in the midst of all that, I had one of those all-too-rare moments when the entire universe seems as ardently and skillfully engineered as it could ever be. Here I stand in such reverie, on 4th Avenue in Anchorage, Alaska. I can’t say why it has possessed me. A dear friend is dead, my life is too short, my family seems a wonder, and I am flooded not with contentment but with the recall of contentment. I can refer to that state, as it seems I need to. It’s as if some mechanism in me, maybe even a physical one, though I think it’s more than that, supervened to carry me through a familiar grieving in an unfamiliar place. But --I struggle for words --perhaps I err in referring to that sacred moment as one of contentment in the first place. The word itself, “contentment,” seems somehow shallow just now, seems the kind of word you’d dredge up to describe the afterglow of good sex or good food. Oh, I have valued both and still do, but I’m looking for something that may include such deep pleasures even as it transcends them. If I had to evoke what I felt back then in all its fullness, I might appeal to a word like serenity, but that too would cartoon what went on in that spell. I think I encountered something like what Paul described in his letter to the Romans: a power in which “we move and live and have our being.” Why wouldn’t it happen on a mountaintop? Of course, that mountain, or any of the nearby Whites and Greens in upper New England, would scarcely earn the name up here. (Why all this fuss over names, words, nouns?) Not that Mt. Washington, say, isn’t as high as any I can see from this in-town vantage, but that each of those Alaskan ones is so young, so steep, rising almost wall-like from the very ocean, where sea lions and sea otters and orcas cavort, where halibut of two hundred pounds flap along the floor, where king salmon the size of sharks make ready to migrate up the local rivers. Alaska is so vast, so rife with wild creatures: everything is simply bigger than back home, where the squat mountains testify to eons of wear, as if they were slumping toward the incredible sea, not so far --especially by Alaskan standards --to their east. This year, a young bull moose has wintered on our homeplace, but next to the moose hereabouts he would look like some odd miniature of the species. There is bull kelp on these strands that’s as long as a schoolbus. Even Alaska’s mosquitoes dwarf our own. Tomorrow, though I don’t know it yet, I will take a great rainbow on the fly. A seventeen-inch rainbow in our own waters is a nice fish; the one in my net will be that many inches around. Our local genius, Robert Frost, had his ovenbird ask a question that must have beset John, as it besets me, as it comes perhaps on anyone who has lived a certain span: What to make of a diminished thing? It occurs to me that part of my tongue-tied stupefaction arises, precisely, from feeling the sort of grief with which anyone of a certain age is familiar --and feeling it in an un-familiar setting. There may then be an odd homesickness in all this perplexed urgency. Yes, though of course I can’t yet know it, I will hook and net and release a huge fish tomorrow. I will not, however, roar with accomplishment over all that, as I would have in my twenties. And yet, no matter, I’ve been pleased so far by my capacity for wonder up here. Reduced as I say from what it may once have been, still it lives, and with some vigor. I’ve been looking forward to the float trip, but less for any fish, as once I did, than for my beloved company. I did love John Engels, but felt no need to express that love flamboyantly. I could do that when time was right: I guess that’s what I thought. Blithe and naive. I remember his bending himself almost at right angles at the hip, making a backhand cast up under some alders on Vermont’s White River near Hancock, and drifting a Trico dry fly down through the dappled water to where a decent brown trout had been sipping. The fish took, John landed him, and we both admired the brilliant stipples of the autumn spawn on the beautiful creature’s flanks before --with an almost feminine delicacy --John slid the trout back into the water, where it slowly finned in the shallows for a moment, then flicked, lively, at an angle back towards its lair. A very, very sick man recently told me, when I asked him what he’d learned from his bout with cancer and chemotherapy, that “The best things in the world happen every day.” They may today include that gorgeous trout or tomorrow’s, include a view of glacier or small eastern hill in its October plumage, a sea otter lolling on its back with a clam on its belly or a white-rumped flicker, ready to leave, starting from a Vermont dirt lane; but these are not what the best things really consist of. What I’m struggling for, here on 4th Avenue, is some way to say what they do consist of; I am, after all, a man of words, am I not? Not always, as it turns out. Not always, as I’m showing. It is not words that enables a human being to hold all these apparent disparates in mind at the same time. What is it, then? Some sort of miraculous force, which I say with no braggadocio: I have nothing to do with the exertion of such force; I do not own it; I am owned by it. And yet it permits me to own all manner of things I never owned before. I have left my family indoors, but I know they figure into whatever this odd reverie is. Indeed, they’ve done so as long as there has been a family. Just after the oldest son was born, I remember walking out under late December’s round moon, day-bright on the snow, and climbing through two meadows to a stone fence just at the edge of a fat stand of white pine. I sat on that fence and thought things, everyone asleep in the small yellow house downhill, as important as any I’ve ever thought. I had back then what I still must have: the woods-rambler’s yen to be alone when he’s considering ultimates, be they sad or joyous. Things are a lot less than joyous just across the road on the city-managed green space, though rough laughter does now and then ring from it. But the laughter seems somehow assaultive and resigned at once. Some of the winos and addicts --most of them, sadly, native people, farther from their spiritual homes than I from my literal --lie comatose on the new-mown grass, whose bracing odor seems out of sorts with all I’m feeling and all I see of humanity there; other vagrants pass their Sneaky Pete and weed from bench to bench. The breeze being right, I can smell the marijuana’s sweet reek too, more fitting --and for me, more portentous, though my drug of choice used mostly to take liquid forms. I am also living another sort miracle just now, and one miracle a day ought to do me, even if, perversely, I can sometimes forget that. I’m no public nuisance here myself, nor even, likely, much of a distraction to passersby. I’m not noisily choking on my multifarious emotionality. No wailing, not so much as a mild sniffle. Instead my tears quietly seep, turning my T-shirt into a chill apron as the same breeze washes me. I squint into the sun, which will be here more or less all day and night. What time, in fact, is it now? Noon, though it could be 10:30 --a.m. or p.m. But even if I make no spectacle, I can’t somehow stop, can’t seem to “get ahold of myself,” as my late mother would have said. This was a mother who actually boasted about not weeping at either her husband’s funeral or her second-born son’s. No doubt that poor brother, dead of aneurysm at 37, and even that mother, with whom my relations were more painful and vexed, figure into this groundswell of melancholy. And so, perhaps above all, does that husband, my dear father, who dropped dead of his own coronary before any of his ten grandchildren saw a single day. And somewhere in the mix, no doubt either, is my brother-in-law, a cop, a guy I love like actual kin, who struggled valiantly through the nastiness of surgery and chemo and radiology five years back, and whose colorectal cancer has at this late hour migrated to both of his lungs. He starts another ordeal --injections, pills and knife --about the same time as we get back to Vermont. Shortly after, his wife, whose breast cancer was diagnosed that half-decade back at the same time as the brother-in-law’s tumor, will undergo tests for what look like uterine polyps. They’re both in their forties, for the love of God! I weep as well for their three children, any and all of whom I’d gladly have raised myself. He’s the sick man I referred to, who subtly reminded me that I must celebrate the flow of the ordinary, a lesson too easy to forget when the going is easy, routine. I once had a different routine. There’s a bar near The Title Wave, far too busy for the time of day. Its clients stumble in and out. One of them, a young man but hard-worn, reels toward me with his spiel all set, I’d venture. When he sees that I’m crying, though, he just mutters God bless you, a remark that, however automatically offered, makes me feel stupefyingly grateful. I watch the fellow make his way along 4th, taking up most of the sidewalk as he goes. Decent-honest-citizens retreat into store entryways. Not that I blame them. The man got close enough to me that I could smell the bar --that mix of smoke and urine and liquor and sweat and despair --on his smeared blue workshirt. That drunk wasn’t going to ask me why I was so sad, but if he had, I’d have said A friend has died. That would scarcely have been an accurate account, and to say so is no insult to John Engels’s importance. Indeed, I’d have insulted John’s memory, insulted all I valued in our friendship, if I’d been thus reductive. John would not have approved, for he was nothing if not complexity’s familiar. The bar, I muse, sits on the next rung up from the verdant Hell across the street, where tramps and lost souls loiter. It would be easy enough for me to turn my present emotions into the purely maudlin, or else to quash them altogether. I could just wander into that bar myself. It’s been some years, praise be, since I’ve considered such a move. There aren’t any bars near where I live, to be sure, and one doesn’t want to be known as the fellow who buys twenty or thirty beers a day in the local general store. Or at least I never did. So what one can do is to drive a few miles south to the hideous, huge new chain-store pharmacy and buy a liter bottle of Listerine, which has more alcohol in it than the equivalent amount of beer anyhow. One can deceive himself that the smell of mouthwash, as opposed to more conventional hooch, will fool everyone. Not least, it will dupe the cops, who --talk about miracles --have never figured into my life. Except the cop with the cancer. Sometimes I think I need to pray all day long, and whenever I wake up at night. Jacked up on antiseptic, I drove the dirt roads of north Vermont for hours, or crossed the sublime Connecticut River, oblivious, into New Hampshire, where I found the same sort of road, listening to corny country music, whose singers all lamented the sizes of their livers and the loss of their hopes. I could make myself feel bluesy, moved. The encroachment of “trophy” houses on the hillsides I used to hunt, the salt-created blister rust on the low leaves of roadside trees, the twang of steel guitar and the hiccupppy vocals: I could turn this farrago into a bleak eloquence. Of something. The whole mood was nothing but a sort of narco-trip of course, and it didn’t even belong to me. It was owned rather by what possessed me, something tellingly called spirits. I want ownership now, I realize. I want here chiefly to own my pain over John Engels’s passing, and over the other sadnesses that course through my brain on this Alaskan block, bar and bookstore and tickytack souvenir shops at my back, permanent sun in the sky, evidences of human ruin going in and out of doors around me or sitting on iron or sprawling like piled cabbages on that sward, cross-lots. I’m not the only one who could ever feel these sadnesses. I know that. Whatever other cockamamie convictions I’ve held, I’ve never believed poets any more “sensitive” than the next man or woman. And yet I’m the only one who has access to my versions of grief, and that suddenly strikes me as beyond merely important, even seems a sort of consolation. I could easily believe that I’ll fall stone-dead myself if I give up the metaphorical deeds to such property. Why do I feel such an urgent possessiveness? It has to do with the miracle I mentioned a few minutes ago. That I don’t want to turn those deeds over as quickly as I’m able; that I don’t want to go buy beer or whiskey or some mind-bending mouthwash (staying away from any kind that’s blue, that variety resulting in cramps and worse); that I want to possess rather than to be possessed: that all this has daily been true for quite a time now... that is the miracle I spoke of. By rights I should be lying on that lawn over there or its equivalent elsewhere, and only a Ph.D. education (and attendant rhetorical talents) have kept me from such a posture. An advanced degree, and the grace of a countervailing spirit, one I comprehend as God, having no better word to substitute. It has taken a shock of unhappiness to remind me that I am blessed, that there is something, that there are indeed many things, in the world I know besides unhappiness. And although no, I don’t stop the weeping, laughter suddenly oozes through it. I remember a moment in Dewey Hall at the University of Vermont. Our mutual poet- friend David Huddle has invited to campus the director of an MFA program in which John --then with most of his own five kids in college --aspired to teach part-time. He needed the money, but he was also a man who simply loved to teach. The invitee is to read her poems, and John to express admiration, nay adoration of the work. He is, in a word, to win the visitor over. The fix is on. David hosted a barbecue prior to the reading, and it may be that John overate there and even had one more beer than he should have. Hot weather makes the air stuffy in the hall. The poems from the lectern are --dreadful. Intended to be racy, they’re a lot closer to vulgar, and they’re ultimately boring enough that John nods off beside me. Except to jostle him now and again when I hear a snore a-borning, I leave him to his catnap, because, his eyes lightly shut and his brow furled, his state looks close enough to rapt concentration that I suspect no one else will see the difference. Enter the famous junebug. The insect has made its way through one of the high windows in the rotunda, and, in the manner of its species, is bumbling clumsily about, batting at the stuccoed ceiling, rattling off the chandeliers, providing a welcome diversion for the sweaty audience. At the very moment of its appearance, I somehow know that it will mean trouble, and specifically trouble for John. Sure enough, the taxing recitations proceed, everyone else seeming to have forgotten the junebug’s intrusion. The junebug, however, has reached a point plumb overhead. Over John’s head, I mean. It drops straight, making a loud thwack on collision with the dozing man’s bald spot. John lurches upright, spilling his cup of water, making other loud rattles of his own, bellowing something like HOO-ah! He is not offered the contract. The incident still makes me laugh out loud right here on 4th Avenue, as it has so often in John’s and David’s company. My mind is going wherever it wants, the world so funny and tragic, so rich and varied. I think for no reason of the thousand cliff swallow holes in the banks of the Connecticut, from which I flush the thousand birds as I pass in my canoe. How does each remember which hole is her own? As the poet (Frost again) once wondered: Can design govern in things so small? Next, or simultaneously, I think of my children and wife inside. I think of the two older ones, who have not come on this trip. The firstborn crafts custom electric guitars back in Burlington, John’s home city. The instruments are works of art, and I’m as proud of them as their maker must be, though I’m even prouder of his character, all modesty and decency. I think of that granddaughter developing in his good wife’s womb. I think of his immediately younger sister, doing God’s work in Brooklyn with immigrant and ghetto kids, not with us just now because she is placing fourteen hundred of those kids in summer job apprenticeships. Yes, I am a blessed man. Too bad that it has taken me all these six decades and more to understand what unconditional love is, but I’ll own that too, with all my heart, even if I can’t find proper words for it. Lines from John Engels’s late poem “Angina” occur to me as I make once more for the door of The Title Wave; I’ll look them up when I’m home to make sure I have them right:
Rest peacefully, John. None could say it better, certainly not I. I disagree with one thing, though: just here, just now, the light of endless sun in Alaska does seem, and precisely, the light of glory. The world before me is pocked with sorry souls and blighted aims, but it isn’t merely cold after all. It has allowed me, or something has allowed me, to come back to it in one piece. That’s something like what John must have meant by comfort; it’s what I must mean by glory, however parochially or self-servingly I construe the term. I’ll take that glory back inside the store; I’ll take it home with me too. .. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- .. .... | Home | The Books | Sampler | Awards | Work In Progress | Contact | ... ... ... | |
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