Our Souls at Night

21

I wanted to be a poet. I don’t think anyone but Diane ever knew that. I was studying literature in college and getting a teaching certificate at the same time. But I was crazy about poetry. All the standard poets that we read then. T. S. Eliot. Dylan Thomas. e.e. cummings. Robert Frost. Walt Whitman. Eem; margin-top: 3em; margin-bottom: 2em; text-align: 3art doesn’t mattermily Dickinson. Individual poems by Housman and Matthew Arnold and John Donne. Shakespeare’s sonnets. Browning. Tennyson. I memorized some of them.

Can you still recall them?

He said the opening lines of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” A few lines of “Fern Hill” and some of the lines of “And Death Shall Have No Dominion.”

What happened?

You mean why didn’t I pursue it?

You still seem interested.

I am. But not like I was. I started teaching and Holly came along and I got busy. I went to work in the summers painting houses. We needed the money. Or at least I thought we did.

I remember you painting houses. With a couple of other teachers.

Diane didn’t want to work and I agreed it was important for Holly to have someone at home with her. So I wrote a little in the evening and a little maybe on the weekends. I got a couple of poems accepted by journals and quarterlies, but most of what I sent out got rejected, got returned without a note. If I ever got anything from an editor, some word or phrase, I took that as encouragement and practically lived on it for months. It’s not surprising looking back on it. They were awful little things. Imitative. Unnecessarily complicated. I remember one poem had a line in it using the phrase iris blue, which is all right, but I divided the word up into the i of ris blue.

What does it mean?

Who knows. Or cares. I showed that particular poem, one of the early ones, to one of my professors at college and he looked at it and looked at me for a while and said, Well, that’s interesting. Keep working. Oh, it was pitiful stuff really.

But you might have gotten better if you’d kept at it.

Maybe. But it didn’t work out. I just didn’t have it in me. And Diane didn’t like it.

Why not?

I don’t know. Maybe it was a threat to her of some kind. I think she was jealous of my feeling about it and about the time it took me away to myself, being isolated and private.

She didn’t support your wanting to do this.

She didn’t have anything she wanted to do herself. Except take care of Holly. And later she was confirmed in her feelings and thoughts by the group of women she met with, like I told you.

Well, I wish you’d take it up again.

I think it’s past my time for that. I’ve got you now. I feel pretty passionate about us, you know. But what about you? You’ve never said what you wanted to do.

I wanted to be a teacher. I started a course in college in Lincoln but I got pregnant with Connie and quit school. Later on I took a short course in bookkeeping so I could help Carl, and as I said I became his part-time receptionist and did the books. When Gene started school I took a clerk’s job in the Holt town offices, as you know, and stayed there a long time. Too long.

Why didn’t you ever go back to teaching?

I think I was never really deeply involved or committed to em; margin-top: 3em; margin-bottom: 2em; text-align: 6inidbythat. It was just what women did. Teaching or nursing. Not everybody finds out what they really want, like you did.

But I didn’t do it either. I only played at it.

But you liked teaching literature in the high school.

I liked it all right. But it wasn’t the same. I was only teaching poetry a few weeks a year and not writing it. The kids didn’t really give a damn about it. A few of them did. But not most of them. They probably look back on those years and hours as old man Waters going off again. Talking shit about some guy a hundred years ago who wrote some lines about a dead young athlete being carried through town on a chair, which they couldn’t relate to, or imagine such a thing being done to themselves. I made them memorize a poem. The boys chose the shortest poem possible. When they got up to recite they were petrified, just nervous as hell. I almost felt sorry for them.

Here’s a kid that’s spent his first fifteen years learning how to drive a tractor and drill wheat and grease a combine and now somebody arbitrarily makes him say a poem out loud in front of other boys and girls who’ve been raising wheat and driving tractors and feeding hogs and now to pass and get out of English class he’s got to recite “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now” and actually say the word loveliest out loud.

She laughed. But that was good for them.

I thought so. I doubt they thought it was. I doubt they even do now, looking back on it, except to have a kind of communal pride in having taken old man Waters’s course and gotten through it, thinking it was a kind of rite of passage.

You’re too hard on yourself.

I did have one very bright country girl who memorized the Prufrock poem word perfectly. She didn’t have to do that. It was on her own, her own volition and decision. I only asked them to memorize something short. I actually got tears in my eyes when she said all those lines so well. She seemed to have a pretty good idea what the poem meant too.

Outside the dark bedroom suddenly the wind came up and blew hard in the open window whipping the curtains back and forth. Then it started to rain.

I better close the window.

Not completely. Doesn’t it smell lovely. The loveliest now.