Craig Morgan Teicher

How tense it makes me, reading poetry, knowing how much I miss, misunderstand, how only some of the words resolve under my eyes into sentences while others slip by unnoticed, like a note inscribed on a greeting card by an aunt who never knew me well. What I mean is the job is never done, I’m never through. And I’m not made for tasks that linger; some of me is always considering all the money I owe to banks and credit card companies and the kid who kindly bought me most of my high school lunches because my dad forgot to send me to school with a couple of bucks. Which is of course to say reading poetry is a metaphor. Nothing ever finishes. ~ So why did I choose poetry? Maybe because it acknowledges right away what scares me most, how the line breaks before the thought is done, how the line, a partial thing, is the measure, and it’s never enough. My college love never did come running back after I sent her that photocopied pamphlet of heartbroke verses, and my lamentation did not un-injure my son or get me back my job. ~ I woke up panting and confused from the same nightmare over and over through childhood—I can’t remember when it stopped: my task was to build with colored blocks atop a floating green island a kind of little city; this was urgent—there would be no forgiveness if it was not complete. The dream ended with me standing before this hovering shard of land as it hovered away, my job still undone, and I was dropped back into my bed to beg my mother for something she could understand but not give. It’s hard now not to see it as a premonition, maybe a preparation for her dying only a few years later, her life, my life like all lives, unfinished. ~ And so I came to poetry.

It’s about to rain, suddenly and without mercy. The rain will be brief, I can tell. but I will be driven inside within earshot of those anxious sounds bent on occluding my mind like a pile of unpaid bills —perhaps I will even see the pile of bills. The rain will be brief, but no matter—I won’t get back outside tonight. ~ So, I have maybe ten minutes for this to get said before all is wet and after the fact ~ because I have only a succession of chances, most missed. ~ Cal is finally fast asleep; the machine that makes the mist that keeps his trach moist rattles like an idling truck. Simone is plotting something, standing and yelling in her crib, jumping now, her sleep a bad joke. Ten years since last I was alone. My mind is not my own. ~ Reading the new poems tonight of my old teacher —she was never taken with me, not particularly—I admire her lifelong pursuit of childhood through art. She has pursued art as though it is as serious as childhood, which we all pursue to the end. ~ And yet, if her poems—ornate as stained glass leaning against a wall in the glass shop, windows looking in on almost nothing—say anything, it is,I am alone; beauty is everything except company, so beauty is nothing, almost. ~ Does she want what I have? Do I? My poems lie. The rain is coming. A few drops more and I’ll lose these letters. Simone still won’t sleep.

Spoiler alert: in this all-but-forgotten masterwork, Jean Stafford—who was once widely regarded as the leading novelist of her generation, and who wrote this perverse, short, lyrical novel, her second, during the flailing failings of her marriage to my hero Robert Lowell—kills Molly, her child-alter ego, a girl too unloved and unloving to survive puberty, too pure and awful—like Stafford, who died pickled and childish three decades later after winning the Pulitzer with her devastating, hurtfully compassionate Collected Stories—for this or any other world, especially the necessarily allegorical one of fiction. I am broken now, hopeless; hope is proved by this book to be a contrivance. I have just read the last pages in which Molly’s brother, Ralph—who, to live, cannot love either, has no spare love—shoots her, aiming for the wild mountain lion whose stuffed corpse was to be the triumph of his new manhood. I don’t hate Ralph—how can I, a boy, mistaken, like me? And can I hate Molly, who so needed Ralph and everyone, still young enough to savor the bittersweet of her anger? What about Stafford, who hurt herself, all our selves, with this ending, her classic tragedy, writing, decades later,Poor old Molly! I loved her dearly and I hope she rests in peace. Fuck insight and analysis: my heart is shot. Why did she have to die? Why does anyone? Why do you, do I? Because of what Ralph was feeling just before he accidentally slaughtered the future? This book must have ravaged the already sleepless poet Gregory Orr, who shot his brother, too, and suffers that endless error in poetry and prose. And because Molly refused everything, she stood between Ralph and tomorrow. But he grew, he changed. Confused? Read the book. In novels people die because of what they feel. In life, people die when their bodies conk out, exhausted machines that living expends. And what happens when people feel their feelings in life? Nothing? Anything? Brenda, dear Brenda, my love, nothing happens, I’m afraid. I’m sorry. And afraid. A small breeze born in the heart gently bends a blade of grass and no one hears a word. No one reads Stafford anymore—I asked on Facebook. Stafford died, her legacy gently dispatched into the low air. O, life is terrible, literature ridiculous. Stafford’s prose, teeming and rich as loam, could take Famous Franzen’s for a walk, feed it biscuits. But who cares? Who remembers? O, to have been Jean Stafford, in the past I idealize, when the world was less self-conscious, less precise. I could be dead already, warmish beneath a blanket of dust. Joyful are the faded, the once-greats whose afterlives slipped out a hole in posterity's pocket: they are loved poignantly by a needy few. O, to be kept cozy in the bosoms of those desperate and proud, forgotten for all the good I do. Love is sunlight streaming unevenly through the canopy of leaves overhead. We can only grow in the brighter patches below, fading where light is thin. Molly, we are with you, nowhere and gone. Mostly we are forgotten, too.