Today Will Be Different(5)

Which is how you join the gang of nitwits who describe everything as amazing.

Well, it rattled the hell out of me. I had a memoir to write. Yes, much of my memoir was going to be illustrations. No problem there. The words were the rub. With a book, I couldn’t just blather on in my accustomed way. Economy was everything. And economy wasn’t happening due to the abovementioned bad brain.

I got the big idea to sharpen my instrument by memorizing poems. My mother was an actress; she used to recite Shakespeare soliloquies before bed. It was amazing. (There! Amazing! If my brain weren’t so bad I might have said, It was proof she was disciplined and properly educated and may have had an inkling of her terrible fate.) So I did what anyone would do: I picked up the phone, called the University of Washington, and asked for their finest poetry teacher.

For the past year I’ve been meeting Alonzo Wrenn every Thursday morning at Lola for private lessons. He assigns me a poem. I recite it from memory, and the conversation gallops where it may. I pay him fifty bucks plus breakfast. Alonzo would buy me breakfast, so great is his love of poetry, but my will is stronger, so he accepts it and the crisp bill with a poet’s grace.


“What did you think?” Alonzo asked.

He was a big guy, younger than me, with a mop of mouse-colored hair atop his exceedingly kind face. He always wore a suit, linen in the summer, wool in the winter. Today’s was chocolate with a sheen; it must have been vintage, and under it a shirt the color of parchment. His tie was moiré, his pocket square starched white. (Joe’s mother made him wear a suit and tie to the dentist to show “respect for the profession.” Little Joe wearing a tie in the dentist’s chair = falling in love all over.)

“Can we start with what’s concretely happening in the poem?” I asked Alonzo. “What’s the term for that? The discrete incident?”

“The discriminated occasion.”

“The Discriminated Occasion!” I said. “You’d better make that the title of your autobiography.”

“I might prefer Discrete Incident.”

I unfolded my marked-up poem and launched in. “It starts with the hermit heiress who lives year-round on the summer island. I’m picturing Maine.”

Alonzo nodded, ceding it as a possibility.

“‘Her farmer,’” I said. “Is that her husband?”

“More like someone in her employ who farms her land.”

“Like you’re my poet,” I said.

“Like I’m your poet.”

“There’s lots of oranges,” I said. “But red too. Blue Hill is turning fox red. The red comes back later with the blood cells and the skunks’ eyes. God, doesn’t your heart break for the fairy decorator? Don’t you just want to go buy something in his shop? Don’t you want to just fix him up with the hermit heiress?”

“Now that you mention it,” Alonzo said with a laugh.

“Then the poet steps out of the shadows. He’s been saying ‘our’ up until now, but then it turns to ‘I.’ Is he called the poet or the narrator?”

“The narrator,” Alonzo said.

“The narrator appears. It’s a real shock when the poem alligator-tails around and says, ‘My mind’s not right.’”

“What do you know about Robert Lowell?” Alonzo asked.

“Only what you’re about to tell me.”

Our food arrived. Alonzo always ordered Tom’s Big Breakfast. It comes with octopus and bacon. I always ordered the daily egg-white scramble with fruit. God, I depressed myself.

“Can I have your bacon?” I said.

“Robert Lowell was born to Boston Brahmins,” Alonzo said, placing the thick strips on a saucer. “He battled mental illness his whole life and was in and out of institutions.”

“Oh!” I suddenly had an idea. I waved over the waitress. “You know how you sell cookies and mints and that garlic spread? Can you make me a gift basket?”

For Sydney Madsen. Another bugbear was the way she always arrived with little presents for me. Today being different, I would bring her one too.

Alonzo continued. “The poet John Berryman suggests that ‘Skunk Hour’ depicts the moment when the ‘I’ of the poem—”

“The ‘I’ of the poem?” I had to laugh. “You’re among friends. Just say it: Robert Lowell.”

“When Robert Lowell recognizes a depression is coming on that will leave him hospitalized. ‘A catatonic vision of frozen terror,’ Berryman called this poem.”

“‘I myself am hell; nobody’s here. Only skunks,’” I said. Something occurred to me. “Only. Another one of our poems hinged on the word only.”

Alonzo frowned.

“‘Dover Beach’!” I practically shouted because how on earth did I remember that when I can’t remember what year it is? “‘Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Only, from the long line of spray’… That’s when that poem turns on its axis too.”

Alonzo pointed to my printout. “May I?”

“Go ahead.”

He tore off a corner and wrote only.

“Look at me, making the page!” I said. “Will you use that in one of your poems?”

Alonzo cocked an eyebrow mysteriously and pulled out his wallet, bursting with similar scraps. Among the stacked credit cards, a blue stripe with white block letters—