Rebecca Beck

Homage to Stanley Kunitz, U.S. Poet Laureate, 1974 & 2000. All lines of poetry are quoted from his work.

Jonas knows the book is somewhere among the long-neglected stack in the corner. He’d caught a glimpse of it among papers and pamphlets a few days ago as he sat at his desk for the first time in weeks. He’d lowered his weight onto his chair as the air in its cushions sighed, and he’d sighed over its familiar comfort. That’s when his eyes rested on the book’s crimped corner. That woman . . . books were her diamonds.

He’d awoke that morning with the words desire, desire, desire flooding his brain, and recalled the crowded poetry reading thirty years ago. He can still hear the poet’s open r-sounds that transformed those three words into rolling waves. At first, Jonas had thought, Give me a break. But he’d been in his mid-forties when desire didn’t need to be conjured—it offered itself in the turn of Amelia’s hips as she worked in her studio, in a strand of her hair trailing across his cheek in the middle of one of his wakeful nights.

Stanley Kunitz, the Cape Cod gardener-poet Amelia adored. He recalls how she’d mine favorite lines and call them out to him. “Jonas, here’s one I think you should tape to your mirror: Here, everything waits to be renewed.” The line had unsettled him, especially since it made him wonder whether she was attempting a joke, insult, or hope. He’d grunted in reply and now feels remorse at not having appreciated her passion for Kunitz’s fluid use of syllables and images to elicit heartbreak.

Trying to recover the poem, Amelia’s favorite, he gingerly pushes through a tower of her books, careful not to incite an insurrection of stray papers resting among them. The stack starts to topple, but his right hand shoots up just in time. He pulls the book away. He’s glad no one’s there to notice his smug look over what would be such a minor feat for most people, yet no longer for him.

He turns to the Table of Contents for the title, “Desire.” It’s not there. He gnaws at his upper lip. She’d wanted him to get that one down. Maybe that wasn’t the right title. Hell . . . should have been. He looks down the list again, distracted by those he’d like to read. “The Quarrel” . . . won’t tell him something he doesn’t already know. He reads down to “An Old Cracked Tune.” The sands whispered, Be separate, and the stones told me, Be hard. He chuckles. Was Kunitz talking about him?

Frustration over not finding it couples with biting doses of loneliness. “Amelia, do you remember ‘Old Cracked Tune’? . . . Honey? Did you think it was written for me?”

She’s not here. Hasn’t been for a year. He hears the refrigerator’s dim hum, the thud of a neighbor slamming a trash can lid. He waits. He remembers. His jaw trembles. To distract himself, he turns his attention back to the book, where his eyes rest on “Touch Me.” He turns to page 158. The first line, Summer is late, my heart, yanks his own drumming, arrhythmic chamber. His head clears as he reads, Words plucked out of the air some forty years ago when I was wild with love and torn almost in two.

They’d been in the kitchen when she read the poem to him. He gulps back the knot in his throat and tries to focus but his ribs constrict. For the first time in a long while, long neglected sobs erupt in great, welcoming waves. Words on the page sprawl out of his vision, but he manages to make out: What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire.

He cries long enough to feel wrung out, and when he opens his eyes, they chance upon a corner of fabric protruding from the couch cushion. He hadn’t noticed it before, but his view from the floor affords new vantage points. Wiping his face with his sleeve, he slowly rises. Crouching, he pulls at lipstick orange and magenta silk, surprised at how the narrow strip virtually floats as he frees it. He lets a section cascade to the floor until there’s a swirl of a Caribbean sunset at his feet. A scarf.

In the same way she painted, pinpointing a combination of colors that she called her palette’s “temporary standards,” she only wore the scarf with one standard jacket. The way its frail threads played against the jacket’s rough-and-tumble denim had seemed sexy to him. Now the image is its own tragedy, a retriggering of everything he did wrong—petty jealousy over a poet’s artistry, over the man himself, competing with his wife in childish ways that invited her barbed retorts. He seems to only remember the fights, and they don’t end. His memory is his ongoing battlefield.

He lifts the scarf to his face. Amelia’s scent floods him. And then Amelia herself. They were climbing a towering sand dune on a hot October day. They’d both panted their way toward the top, anticipating triumph when the vast great lake appeared before them. Jonas had willed his legs to pull him up the few remaining yards. He’d reached back for her hand, but she brushed past and hopped ahead with an elk’s grace. That scarf waved behind her in the breeze and for an instant, teased his face.

They’d nearly tumbled down the dune’s other side. The sand, light as water, splashed around their feet, filling their shoes. Amelia began to run down the impossible slope. He tried to warn her about the mathematics of depth, angle, and speed, but before he could, she ended up rolling head over heels like he’d done as a kid. She kicked off her shoes ten yards from the water and kept running, fully clothed, straight into the glacial waves. He ditched his shoes and trousers before diving in, then quickly emerged with yelps and whoops to stave off the numbing cold. He caught her smiling at him through the veil of her wind-whipped hair—a mischievous smile that invited him to flick water at her. Instead, he pulled himself onto the beach, where he turned a full circle, taking in the firmament of white-caps, the dunes’ tree-lined ridge, the distant pasta bowl of a sandy blowout, then back to the big, raging lake—Mishigami.

Now, he wonders why he’d turned away from her that day, why he hadn’t splashed her like teenagers do, then bundled her into the cocoon of his sopping shirt.

Words flutter in the breeze of his memory as if Amelia has resent them. After one of their quarrels, she’d left one of Kunitz’s poems in bright red ink on their dull green refrigerator. He’d been irked by it, tired of the way she used the poet’s lines to wax sentimental, to admonish, to scorn. But the poet had been right: Lovers relentlessly contend to be superior in their identity. Now he regrets how often he’d retreated to the nacre that had become his heart and left Amelia to heal from their battles on her own.

#

He hadn’t thought he’d need the trail map that day they hiked the dunes. He understood the succession of dune grass to shrubs to cottonwoods, and finally, the climax of mature beech and maples signaling the hike was all downhill from there. He’d thought those layers would guide them to their car. But erosion by water and wind and new roads had changed things.

They headed up what he thought was the right trail. Their dripping clothes left Pollock droplets in the sand. “Look there,” she joked. “Finally, one of his works that we can afford.” He hadn’t chuckled and now wonders why.

When they stumbled upon the surprise of an established colony of prickly pear, his face had brightened. “Honey, here’s something,” he said, eager to share his knowledge of his childhood playground. He pointed with his foot. “These fuckers pricked my toes too many times when I was a kid running barefoot through here.”

She’d raised her left eyebrow. “Here?” she said with a hint of a scoff.

“Yes, damn it. Here. It grows year-round.”

“But this isn’t the desert.”

“It’s a micro-climate, my dear.” The compass of the ego is designed . . . To circumscribe intact a lesser mind. His smile had been smug. He too, could mine Kunitz’s lines.

As they climbed higher, he’d scrutinized the undergrowth. Indian puzzle weed . . . there it was . . . nestled among the clumps of dune grass. He didn’t remember so much of it thriving there. When she came alongside him, he said, “I used to love coming upon these, especially in the late afternoon when the light stippled them with reflected water. Seemed like they were encased in glass. I’d sit awhile sketching them, then mercilessly pull their segments apart before trying to put them back together.” By her expression, he knew he’d said the wrong thing, but hell, he’d been eleven years-old, taking on an irresistible challenge.

“I’m not surprised you did that,” she said.

To lighten the mood, he’d wrapped his arms around her from behind so they could both look over the now distant water. “You know me well, baby. I was a budding reprobate.”

The afternoon had turned sticky. “Goddamn . . . you’d think they’d have made the sign larger. A person could walk in circles for miles, get dehydrated. What if a snake bit one of us?”

“Well, it won’t,” she’d said, swiping her scarf around her neck, its orange and magenta ablaze in the heat. “Are you going to find something else to gripe about?” She jutted her chin at him, giving him a moment to look for the lake’s reflection in her eyes. “If so, just get it over with now so I can enjoy the sights.”

They eventually made their way to the road. The cool of the asphalt in the oak’s shade had soothed his outlook. He cracked a joke. Amelia laughed, more in relief that his foul mood had passed than at the gist of his humor. When they found their car, he unlocked her door first. Once inside, he turned to see her gazing at him. There was light in her face—western receding light that cut it in two. Without taking her eyes from his, she’d placed her hand on his thigh. He reached across the seat and kissed her longer than he had in a while. He’d grasped her upper arm, felt the rise and turn of muscle coursing beneath her skin, marveled at the litheness of her flesh, didn’t dream it would ever fail her.

They’d taken that hike a mere two months before she wore the scarf to the clinic. One end danced on the curve of her upturned left breast, as if defiant of their appointment’s outcome. As they walked down the hallway, her shoes drummed a death knell, causing him to wish the slate beneath their feet was something softer—maybe pine—to offer comfort in their fraught march to the oncologist’s office. They passed six identical doors and he was back in one of his nightmares, helpless to choose the one that would avert their hellish plight.

#

It still catches him off guard—the fact that she could climb one hundred eighty-five feet up a near-vertical dune, all the while her feet sinking into shifting sand, only to end up weeks later, collapsed in bed. More profound than the change in her body was the devastation of her voice. Once buoyed by a gusty set of lungs, her speech was always powerful in the absence of force. But as she struggled to hold onto life, her words became phantoms competing with the rest of her body for precious oxygen. In a rising wind . . . the manic dust of my friends . . . those who fell along the way . . . bitterly stings my face.

He becomes aware of the neglected, stony room suffocating him with a widower’s laments. His hard-heartedness. His cynicism over what she had loved—Kunitz’s poems, Pollock’s art—childish jealousies. He’d let too many nothings drive him further away. Hungry, still in his slippers, he rises from the couch and without grabbing a jacket or his wallet, walks out the front door. For the first time in weeks, he blinks into light he’s long neglected to notice. From his front porch, he takes in the houses across the street and sights his neighbor’s new raspberry red door with laser blue trim.

Across the street, a yappy white puppy sets him on edge. He enjoys the irritation, on some level knowing it signals a new kind of angst that’s independent of his gnawing sadness. Without thinking, he heads down the sidewalk, toward the park, to the sounds of children’s shouts and laughter.

He finds the bench he and Amelia often chose and makes room for himself next to a waif of a woman with a head of Raggedy Ann-red hair. She’s wearing baggy linen trousers cinched with a studded belt. He notices her purple high tops and seems to remember Amelia having an identical pair.

He turns to her. “How do.”

“Back at ya.”

“Was it this crowded when you got here?”

“Yeah, the kids come and go, but a new crop always shows up.”

His voice rises with a happy memory. Pointing to her high tops, he says, “I think my wife once had a pair of shoes like that.” He points to the basketball court. “We used to shoot baskets over there. Can’t tell you how many games of Horse she won wearing those.” He waits for her to turn to him, but she doesn’t answer. “Do yours bring you that kind of luck?”

The woman’s eyes remain on her phone. Just like Amelia . . . this one makes you break your teeth on peanut brittle just to get to her sweetness.

He hears what he thinks is the same yappy puppy that barked as he’d left the house. Its bobbed tail wags in a circular motion and he thinks of the propeller fighter he flew in the war. Head down, it approaches him.

He reaches down to pat it. “Hey mister. Where’d you come from?” He wants it to answer him. Needs what he can’t seem to latch onto—an exchange between beings that affirms he’s still alive. He studies the creature’s matted fur. Sores circumscribe its left foreleg. The thing won’t take its eyes off him. Maybe it wants entry into his old, mummified heart.

After their walk home from the park, he and Amelia would sit over coffee in their dull green kitchen with its collage of the poet’s lines transcribed in her bright red-ink. They’re still there, on the refrigerator. He can only glance at them.

She took her coffee thick as nails and bottomless black. At these times, she often waxed poetic over photos of Kunitz’s gardens. In one, his bent frame carried buckets of compost down a stone path. “Like a poem, he was plotting where he’d begin a new flower bed,” she’d said. She turned over another photo. “I just found this one. See his wrinkled hand? At first, I thought he held a lobster, but on closer examination I realized it was a red-handled pair of clippers.” She paused. “Wonder how many of his poems he composed while digging in dirt. Once, he single-handedly planted an entire forest. That must have resulted in a far-reaching poem.” Her expression turned sober. “When his marriage failed, he destroyed it.” She reached for the bookmarked poem and in her clear voice, read, That year of the cloud, when my marriage failed, I paced up and down the bottom fields, tamping the mud-puddled nurslings in with a sharp blow of the heel timed to the chop-chop of the hoe.

Now he wonders, had she read those words to warn him?

Sitting on a bench with a dog at his feet and an insular woman beside him on a spring afternoon. It wasn’t enough. He craved the poet’s lyrical veils of meaning like he craved his kalua and coffee. Craved how Amelia mined Kunitz’s clean-cut lines when they both needed their music, their balm, their caution. And damn it, their marriage hadn’t failed. It had come close several times, but there’d been no need for the finale of trampling tender saplings.

He stands and so does the dog. Its happy prance makes him think of the old poet’s words: Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road precious to me. The lines, like the dog’s wagging, lighten his steps. If he can exult in a gardener-poet’s lines and celebrate the woman with an ear for their good song, then maybe he’ll find a way to live in the layers, not on the litter . . . as Kunitz once advised.

*All lines of poetry are quoted from Stanley Kunitz’s work: Passing Through, The Later Poems New and Selected, W.W. Norton and Company, 1995, and The Wild Braid, W.W. Norton and Company, 2005.