Today I began my term as Maine poet laureate by going for a sunrise walk on Mackworth Island with my dear Teresa. We didn't talk much about poems. Instead, we looked at fog. We spoke of birds. We admired our friends.
Yesterday's rehearsal was hard but good. Whatever it is we are making is beginning to cohere, to become itself.
Here's a very old poem, about a time that Baron Wormser came to my house in Harmony for dinner. . . .
Dinner with the Poet Laureate
Dawn Potter
Dissatisfied with the conversation, the four-year-old
keeps poking the tip of a peacock feather into the faces
of the guests; later, slowly eats the rest of the seeded
rolls brushed with egg and baked till golden earlier in the day
by the less good poet, who was nervous both before
and after the guests arrived, thinking of Tennyson’s
glossy laureate beard, nails sticking out of the sheetrock,
not enough chairs, and the probability that the four-year-old
would find something along the lines of a peacock feather
with which to terrorize the guests: as when he informed her in-laws,
over cocktails, that he planned to be gay when he grew up.
The painter and the photographer begin some chat about galleries
that the poet laureate and the less good poet listen in on,
the less good poet squirming in her chair, self-conscious
about her restlessness. In a Kate O’Brien novel, the mother
superior of an Irish girls’ school, well read in the poetry
of Henry Vaughan, subdues a sense of internal chaos by keeping
her hands quiet at all times. Is this an imposable task?
The physical self is so willful, shamelessly following its bad habits,
while the mind is like an anxious, second-guessing parent.
Because the poet laureate asserts that he doesn’t like the music
of Merle Haggard, the photographer has chosen Etta James,
who says she would rather be blind, boy, than see you
walk away from me, babe; sure true about more than one thing
the less good poet can think of: the whole reason the poet laureate
has wedged himself at her kitchen table (she hopes); though she worries
they have nothing to say to each other over the second kind of tomato
soup he’s had today, which the four-year-old is deliberately spooning
down the front of his pajamas. Nothing goes as planned;
think of a sonnet unleashing its skewed logic down the page,
careening around every turn. The Burden of the Mystery,
Keats called this beetle-browed unease she feels, wishing
for pleasure, for confidence in a situation that seems close to tears,
with Etta vanished, the painter trying to explain the odd path
her career has taken, the photographer a father wiping soup
off the four-year-old with a dishcloth.
The less good poet pours out the last of the Riesling.
All the ways the mind works, folding in on itself—
John Berryman with those poems about Chris, falling-down
drunk in her capri pants on a ratty hearthrug; and here,
four people eating dinner with a child whom the photographer calls
the Boy Tyrant when he’s lying in bed with the less good poet
smoking a bowl and rehashing the evening; and she reminds
him of the poem in which she imagines having thrown
the four-year-old off a bridge, an exhilarating aspect of the art,
like being possessed by a kind of honest evil spirit,
a sort of longing for the truth of the matter, something analagous
to what she feels now, propped up beside the photographer,
his face shadowed under the dim lamp, broad-boned and mercurial:
the desire that overtakes her for vision—
to be able to take in everything and align it in some stately
Spenserian array, heavy as alabaster and ivory, remote as heaven,
in a poem that uses the word crimson in a way that really works.
The problem with being a less good poet is the triviality that arises,
like fog spreading over a window. Just when she thinks she’s run up against
something really important, her thoughts stage-dive into the crowd.
What does a real poet imagine over the dish pan?
Did T. S. Eliot idly vacuum the same section of carpet twenty times,
let the rhythm of a line circle around him like a fish,
hum a tune in the key of the motor while Vivienne
broke things in the next room? The less good poet cannot
manage to put herself into anyone else’s shoes: the whole
world seems fixed on herself, the center of a tiny Aristotelean
universe plagued by the malignant orbit of the four-year-old,
paid employment, and laundry. Asleep, the photographer
emits a small snore, emblematic of the calm order of his own
more Galilean universe, where steady hard work produces
superior results and nothing keeps him awake, not even
a less good poet looking for love, whose mind is a castle
honeycombed with a thousand passageways—
climbing and twisting, falling into endless loops and permutations;
and there is no way out, no way at all. But she wants him
to know she’s here, as she wants to believe that the painter
has left this house in the country to sit in the dark passenger
seat of a reliable Subaru, mesmerized by the windshield wipers
sweeping back and forth in their dark mirror, a sweetness
like tires hissing down a wet street; that the poet laureate reads
Pope as woodchucks browse in his kale and cats do nothing
to stop them; that Snow White and Rose Red wander
through the forest hand in hand, but no beast dares touch
one hair of their heads—that there is a way to compose
these pieces into patterns of great beauty and precision,
as a clock ticks, as a falcon flies over a woodland edge,
crying its hunger in heroic couplets. The world conflates into Milton’s
royal image, but didn’t Keats wrestle with exactly this pain?
When the four-year-old wakes in the morning and puts on his cowboy mask
with a smile, the less good poet will dish out yogurt and orange juice,
while Shakespeare brews more coffee and the diminution of space
points their love as sharp as a needle, the image rocking her back
on her heels as if it were her own. At another dinner, the painter
and the poet laureate, even the buzzing four-year-old, might hear
those words ringing off the countertops, off the bones of her skull;
the photographer, on his way to hunt out that Merle Haggard tune
about Roman sandals, stopping to listen—every sound a chime,
a thought, a heartbeat; each phrase a life lived over and over.
