Mark Halliday

In the huddle you said “Go long—get open” and at the snap I took off along the right sideline and then cut across left in a long arc and I’m sure I was open at several points— glancing back I saw you pump-fake more than once but you must not have been satisfied with what you saw downfield and then I got bumped off course and my hands touched the turf but I regained my balance and dashed back to the right I think or maybe first left and then right and I definitely got open but the throw never came— maybe you thought I couldn’t hang on to a ball flung so far or maybe you actually can’t throw so far but in any case I feel quite open now, the defenders don’t seem too interested in me I sense only open air all around me though the air is getting darker and it would appear by now we’re well into the fourth quarter and I strongly doubt we can afford to settle for dinky little first downs if the score is what I think it is so come on, star boy, fling a Hail Mary with a dream-coached combination of muscle and faith and I will gauge the arc and I will not be stupidly frantic and I will time my jump and—I’m just going to say in the cool gloaming of this weirdly long game it is not impossible that I will make the catch.

The Holy Ghost was browsing in his or her library one day in the future, unaccountably bored, oddly querulous, vaguely wanting something that would be quietly unfamiliar. "It doesn't have to be great," said the Holy Ghost with the faintest note of exasperation in his or her voice, "just so long as it has its own special character." Gliding along the billion shelves, incredibly graceful despite his or her mood. Then the deft and lovely hand of the Holy Ghost lit on a slim volume of poetry— it was your book. It was your book. The first poem caused the Holy Ghost to frown; ah, but not with disdain, rather with curiosity! The second poem brought a brightening of divine eyes. And the page was turned as if by a pensive breeze. Maybe it happened after your death, but so what? It happened. "I'm taking this back to my perfect desk," said the HG. "This is really something."

Sam paused on the stairs. He had forgotten a thing. In Leland’s room a copy of Thomas Merton lay on the floor. The air was full of gnats of possibility. What was the story? Sam looked at the clock twice. The day was dropping softly away while Sam’s sneakers made the wood stairs creak. The wood was sure it was wood. Alice got home from the store. The bags had to be unloaded as the day went and went. Then the sundown kitchen grew quiet. Sam crossed his legs one way, then the other way. He had chosen purple corduroys. They were pants of the day; one possibility. On the tilted table sat the damaged typewriter. What about Thomas Merton? Did he know the central story? Someone was quietly reading by the fireplace but not Sam. Next day there was badminton with the troubled carpenter and the story of an awful egg salad, causing laughter; but Sam had forgotten some thing. Then Alice brought in the brownies and minor pleasure colored the house and there went the evening. J.J. came downstairs all gleamy from her bath. She had three reasons to get downtown fast. Sam picked up a novel by Sukenick. The clue must be nearby. Between Sam and the page swarmed the gnats of possibility. Leland stowed his bicycle in the basement and came upstairs with a point about capitalism. Look at the time said someone. Where was J.J. now? Where was the story? Under the red chair lay the newspaper whose relevance was all mystery or not mystery enough. Then Alice went out to see a movie. Some man meets some woman with big eyes on a jet and changes his whole life for her, disastrously but thrillingly. Alice told about it briefly, and went to make tea. Sam paused on the hard wooden stairs. J.J. was gone. She was gone. Leland was eating yogurt at midnight. The whole brown house was floating, gliding very smoothly for some reason with Sam not clear whether the gliding was a story and if so was it central and was it his?

The students eat something and then watch the news, a little, then go to sleep. When morning breaks in they find they have not forgotten all: they recall the speckle of words on certain pages of the chapter assigned, a phrase of strange weight from a chapter that was not assigned, and something said almost flippantly by a classmate on the Green which put much of the 18th century into perspective. Noticing themselves at the sink they are aware the hands they wash are the "same" hands as in high school—though the face is different. Arriving in the breakfast hall having hardly felt the transit, they set down their trays on one table; presently, glance at another corner of the space: that was where we mostly sat two years ago, that was where Gerry said what he said about circles, the concept of, and Leonardo da Vinci.

They got old, they got old and died. But first— okay but first they composed plangent depictions of how much they lost and how much cared about losing. Meantime their hair got thin and more thin as their shoulders went slumpy. Okay but not before the photo albums got arranged by them, arranged with a niftiness, not just two or three but eighteen photo albums, yes eighteen eventually, eighteen albums proving the beauty of them (and not someone else), them and their relations and friends, incontrovertible playing croquet in that Bloomington yard, floating on those comic inflatables at Dow Lake, giggling at the Dairy Queen, waltzing at the wedding, building a Lego palace on the porch, holding the baby beside the rental truck, leaning on the Hemingway statue at Pamplona, discussing the eternity of art in that Sardinian restaurant. Yes! And so, quite frankly—at the end of the day— they got old and died okay sure but quite frankly how much does that matter in view of the eighteen photo albums, big ones thirteen inches by twelve inches each full of such undeniable beauty?

For example, I wrote my first poem in 1976 about being in the Vermont house after my mother’s death; she died the year before; she loved that house. My father said he kept having moments of thinking she must have just stepped outside for a minute to weed the garden or to walk just a little way along Prospect Street, for a few minutes only and now almost now she’d be coming back, we’d hear the screen door, Bev would be back and saying something casual about— about the cats, Daphne and Chloe, or about Mrs. Yamokofsky next door or about the pear tree, “or a colored stone she found.” That was the phrase that ended my poem in 1976: “or a colored stone she found.” The phrase rang slightly false but I wanted it—the “ound” and “one” sounds sounded profound and in 1976 “stone” was still a word guaranteed poetic. But did my mother ever pick up colorful stones? Wasn’t that more something I did fifteen years earlier? In the poem I was trying to turn my ironic mother into an ideal figure certified sweet like a child. But what could I make her say? Something very sly and wry? The poetry would be in her voice, the way of her voice being hers—voice of my mother—whether the words were about the cats or Mrs. Yamokofsky or potatoes to peel for mashing. Not your mother.My mother. Poetry of her saying in her Bev way “those potatoes” or “Mrs. Yamokovsky” or “Daphne’s gone down by the Black River but if we feed Chloe I’m sure she’ll be back.” And my father and Kimbo and me just going “Yeah” or “In a minute” because this was all just life.

Like nearly all women under sixty she would have deftly avoided meeting the eyes of an unknown man— but occasionally an exception happens by chance and her unconscious skill at avoidance gets instantly replaced by a human generosity which is either inherently feminine or gender-trained, as you please; she glanced at me exactly when I glanced at her in the store at the mall and so she gave me that momentary slight smile which implies Though many men are dangerous, and I do not intend to suggest the slightest likelihood that you and I will meet or talk, much less make love and much less together conceive a sweet helpless child, still our eyes have just met and in this there is an undeniable contact between your humanity and mine and you are probably coping with some difficulties of masculine humanity while I cope with those of feminine humanity; and so I wish you well.

I find I am descending in a propeller plane upon Pasco in the state of Washington. I accept this; I have reasons for participating in the experiential sequence that has brought me here. Down below the land is printed with huge circles, doubtless an irrigation system, doubtless it makes sense. There are people who understand it living with dignity in square houses and the result possibly is one billion radishes. Now some so-called time has passed. This nation is a huge nation in which the infinity of for example Washington State is just one segment of an even less thinkable hugeness and yet zim zim zim zim United Airlines has me here in my Eastern metropolis with its ten thousand makers of third-rate pizza uncannily far from the possible radishes of Washington State. The taxi driver experiments with narrow streets to shorten our detour caused by sports fans and he says the Eagles will out-tough the Steelers. I defer to his judgment, I am conserving my powers. After “a while” I have this unsettlingly smooth tuna salad with a pale pickle in a drugstore designed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, reading a few poems by David Rivard. I have thoughts. I have my Uncle Ralph’s jacket soft and droopy giving me a Sense of the Past. The rain out there on the roofs of retail outlets is saying No Guarantee and in a way I am nowhere, in another way maybe definitely not. In a wide wet parking lot I turn back toward the store to explain to the cashier that she charged me for six cans of seltzer when in fact I only had one from a six-pack but the idea of justice seems so fatiguing I would rather read a surprisingly serious detective novel so I vibrate with indecision in the parking lot till all the car windows rattle imperceptibly. Then an alleged interval ostensibly intervenes, at the mall a woman at a piano has played 1800 songs from memory according to the radio personality who stands with a mike explaining her bid for the Guinness Book of Records. I am walking away at an unplanned angle singing “Tiny Montgomery” which I bet she wouldn’t have been ready to play. I have this inner life, I think of my father lonely in Vermont, I think of myself lonely in Syracuse and my old poem about a detective who can’t solve his biggest case and as a result I have feelings—but my teacher said the future of American poetry can’t be merely the notation of sensibility. When he said that I felt a chilly fear at the edge of consc-consc-consc-consciousness like an ice cube in the corner of my stomach. That’s how I felt. So then, so then consequently I thought “I must gather up some serious ideas” but then Ashberry phoned and left a message after the beep. “Don’t be a sucker, ideas are where it isn’t.” This made my throat get sort of dry so I drank a Classic Coke and then another Classic Coke two hours later as time so-to-say passed. What was always there? Texture, that’s what, how it was/is, the how of how; when I pick up my color prints at the camera shop the disappointment I always feel is actually a blessing is it not? I can say “I’ll go along with this charade until I can think my way out” even though I’ll never think my way out. I’ve come this far; that day in 1971 I hitchhiked all the way to Montpelier didn’t I? And here I am. Suddenly I have a son who focuses with tremendous insistence upon dogs, balloons, air conditioners, hats, clocks, and noses. To him I convey that the world is okay: life is good: we accept it. Your dad is a little mixed up but your shoes got tied, right? As Barbara Cohen in high school said about politics it’s interesting, giving the word four earnest syllables, in-ter-est-ing.

It would have been dark but not lugubrious. It would have been fairly short but not slight. It would have contained a child saying something inadvertently funny that was not said by my daughter, something strangely like what your daughter or sister said once if you could remember. The child's voice flies across a small parking lot where, in one of the cars, a man and a woman sit listening to the silence between them. The child's voice probably hurts them momentarily with a sense of beauty apparently very possible yet somehow out of reach. In the missing poem this is implied, conveyed, transmitted without being flatly said. And it does a dissolve into the look of a soccer field after a game—the last three or four players walk slowly away, their shin-guards muddy, their cleats caked, one player dragging a net bag full of soccer balls— the players seem to have known what it was all for yet now they look somehow depleted and aimless there at the field's far end; and a block away on a wood-grainy porch the eyes of a thin woman sixty-three years old search the shadows in each passing car, as the poem recalls what she wants to recall. Hours later the field is dark and the hills are dark and later even Firehouse Pizza has closed. In the missing poem all this pools into a sense of how much we must cherish life; the world will not do it for us. This idea, though, in the missing poem is not smarmy. Remember when you got the news of the accident— or the illness—in the life of someone more laced into your life than you might have thought; the cool flash of what serious is. Well, the missing poem brings that. Meanwhile not seeming like an imitation of Mark Strand or Mark Doty or Mark Jarman! Yet not like just another Halliday thing either. Instead it would feel like a new dimension of the world, the real world we imagine. With lightness! With weight and lightness and, on the hypothetical radio, that certain song you almost forgot to love.

Though it’s all too clear how unimpressed you are by a cri de cœur and wafting away unhugged is from your perspective de rigueur of schemes to rendezvous with you I’m still a restless entrepreneur The thought of you converts my favorite main dishes into hors d’oeuvres My addiction to the tingling you induce is a fait accompli Each drifting day is another page in the secret book whose d é nouement never arrives, while your fleeting glances lock me into this unfinishable roman à clef The idea that any one remembered moment at a party or picnic was my sole forever lost chance to touch you must be a cul de sac When my projects for a prudent career try to stand up your voice remembered administers the coup de grâce and my mélange of bright ideas becomes a mere potpourri How I would love to believe this dance is a folie à deux The way you stride across Memorial Drive is a tour de force but glimpses across traffic make a paper-thin raison d’être Your recent exit is implicit in many a mise en scène It’s as if you heard me approaching for a tête à tête and you slipped into the elevator with your tall boots and sangfroid Always you get to reculer and I never seem to mieux sauter— Still I will keep an eye out for you on every rez-de-chaussée.