by Keith Waldrop

 
 

I write so slowly that sometimes the world turns clean around between sentences or before I can decide between terms.

Coming and going, which seem so symmetrical, have nothing in common. A line of trees offering shade on my left, I give up a shorter route and step into the smaller street. It is like a tunnel home. Speckles of sun on the sidewalk enhance my sense of escape.

It does not follow that this should be read in spurts or in an attempt to restore layers of effort and hesitation. Writing, reading, though they share a text, have no other relation--as being born does not tell how to die.

Sun speckles the table, persistent.

My second left lower bicuspid has never been particularly useful to me. It sprouts from its gum, diagonal, projecting inward, and grinds nothing. For decades, my tongue has worried the crown.

Now it hurts and my dentist tells me the fang is rotten.

It has done me little good, this second left lower bicuspid, and is bound now to cause me a share of pain. And yet I'm sure I will regret it, as I regret whatever is lost while passing even briefly through my life, let alone a part so intimate, thrusting itself daily into my consciousness, my irritation.

If I could express all such irritations, those rough or tender spots on the otherwise unfelt surface of my time on earth, it would come to a list of the things I cannot, as they say, take with me. And since once left, in their totality, untaken, they include the very faculty of regret, I must mourn now or never my whole passing world.

And I do in fact, in advance, regret it--the encompassing, the encroaching, the impenetrable, the hard, heavy, incomprehensible given. Of Christian virtues, I claim only one: I love my Enemy.

There are things I seem able to do only in sleep--important things, perhaps.

If only I could remember them.

Sometimes, as I wake, the last dreamt image remains, tenuous, fading already as I try to hold it in the speckle of sun that cuts through the blind.

Even from my waking hours I do not, of course, remember everything. Least of all those things for which I must turn back, look behind me.

(Some souvenirs I carry in my hand, like weapons.)

But dreams: they are so often lost even while coming into being.

I am called upon--in dreams--to perform. Without lines, before no house. Playing for a packed void, con- strained to play.

I sleep badly.

The great violin-makers--Guarnerius, Stradivarius--were perfectly aware that wood must vibrate, that the instrument must be played, for a long time before it comes into its own, reaches the quality that it is, finally, capable of.

At the end of their lives, they were carving the backs thicker, the ribs stronger, making possible a louder tone, more brilliant technique--delaying the peak of performance for eighty or a hundred years. They never heard their violins as they could, and do, sound.

=

I could hope--since one can hope for something, even while realizing its unlikelihood--that, at the prospect of being erased, my life will fast forward, appearing (while disappearing) in a swift trail before my mind's eye.

Not that I hanker to see anything over, still less (even if it were imaginable) to propose a replay.

But it adds some interest now to suppose that in that extreme moment a pattern might emerge--even if only the kind of pattern one wrests from a crumbling wall or from clouds blustered across blank air.

Isolated, the most casual scene becomes formal. Glimpsed in psyche or cheval glass, random details proportion themselves, heighten into tone. Any picture is another world, and suggests a whole world.
 

My dentist scratches at my second left lower bicuspid and shakes his head in a sorrow I suspect is genuine. He does not want to upset me. He does not want to complicate his schedule.

Nothing, as a rule, holds him long from one or the other of his specialties: glider flying, deep sea diving.

"Poetry," he once murmured, his hand in my mouth, "can you live off of poetry? I mean, now," he goes on, since I can't answer, "everybody has teeth."

And tells me my tooth must out and his wife works an appointment for me into a crowded hour on one of his working days.

In dreams, I lie down in a garden, in a forest, on the shore, in the back yard, in a faint, unnatural in the dreamlight of a dreamt sun, cool, hoping to dream real accomplishments.

=

  Over the years, I have allowed unstated--even unconscious--judgments to determine, for instance, what I will read or not read. Without condemning so-and-so's work, I cease to look for new instalments. Not throwing aside such-and-such a book, I simply do not pick it up, but look at another. One cannot give everything, or even very many things, full attention.

Now I have come to a point where all my judgments seem questionable, those I've wrapped in a phrase and can hand on, but also those which carry me, as if by instinct, past a shelf of volumes I only half notice to this one suddenly under my hand. They could all be wrong, these judgments, bad habits of exclusion and easy reference.

Habits can have wrong results even if, in some sense, they are good habits.

Books I read long ago (I stay with my example of books, but it is not merely--or even mainly--a literary matter) I have an urge to re-read, to see if they are as good as I once thought, or as bad, or if they are simply what they once seemed to me. That my latest impression must be, soon, as unsubstantial as the earlier doesn't bother me.

All that bothers me now is the increasing hurry of the passage.
 

I have been told, over and over, that one does not, properly speaking, "waste" time, that when it seems to me I'm doing nothing, new forms are preparing--"gestation," one calls it, and another talks of "incubation." I wish I could believe them.

I have often the feeling that time, with me, does little but waste, though no example can be given--any account suggesting survival.
 

Sleep surrounds me and, as I fall into it, rises on all sides. It is as though waking were a deep shaft down into sleep, where gravity is different--I sink, I hover sometimes around chance level.

And I do not sleep well, not tossing in torment, not anxiety-ridden, simply awake, or partly awake, off and on, uncertain, through the sleeping hours.

The air is viscous, an air resembling a liquid, heavier, harder and harder to breathe, until it seems alive, breathing, and I become its breath.

Messages, relayed, become progressively more blurred. Subject matter filters out and abstract qualities begin to predominate--as happens in memories. The light increases, to a point of irreality. The grossest delusions, it seems, the lies most exasperating, the foulest, come as illuminations.
 

Some went into the desert--the hermits of the Thebaid, for example--desperate to escape the complications of an unanointed world, its vague riddles, its uncertainties like shifting sand.

But some went farther afield, beyond where Anthony fought temptation, steeling himself against the images his appetite called into being.

And before scattering into, as it were, this desert beyond the desert--the vast, uncultivated, inner waste--they vowed that God being their only hope, they would henceforward accept aid from no hand but His, nothing from humankind, neither food nor shelter. They were His. He would provide.

Then, one by one, they went out, compelled by an urge whose nature they failed to discern.

And of course they perished, one by one, each alone in his wilderness. They were destroyed by hunger, by thirst, by the implacable sun. Starving, they were attacked by wild beasts. Starved, they fed the carrion birds.

And one of them, parched and crazed by the noon glare, stumbled into the midst of a nomadic tribe notoriously bloodthirsty and inhospitable to the point of legend.

And the hard hearts of those barbarians were so struck by the condition of the hermit that for once they were moved to compassion and offered him bread, tea--amenities of the austere encampment.

But he was beyond insight and, not considering that all things come from God, refused the bread, the drink, and died.
 

Considered sub specie aeternitatis, the Odyssey, the waters over Atlantis, my rotten tooth--are of equal duration, poised on a moment's edge.

I turn left, as I must, at a sign which announces THE DEAD IN CHRIST SHALL RISE and park where it says VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED. We are merely waves. We know nothing of the water.

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