My Last Innocent Year(19)

This first collection was quiet, poems about nature mostly, sunsets, seashells, the play of light on a blade of grass. When I told Jason once that I didn’t understand poetry, he said, “That’s because you’re searching for meaning. You have to let the work happen to you. Forget whether you understand it or not—how does it make you feel?” As I read Connelly’s work, I could feel myself grasping for meaning, looking for a narrative strand that would help me understand the work and, by extension, him. I read all the poems through once, then took a deep breath and read them again—and again—until I felt myself letting go. I let his language wash over me and, after a while, felt it wriggle inside, burrowing in like earthworms.

Connelly’s second book, I’m Sorry I Can’t Stay Long, was shorter than the first, not much thicker than a pamphlet. It seemed funny to me that such a big man would write such slim books. Connelly’s relationship with his father had been fraught. He was an angry man, an alcoholic, competitive with his only son in all the worst ways, and yet Connelly wrote about him lovingly. In one poem, he described his father standing on a patch of grass outside his house, beer in hand, watching planes take off. It reminded me of a poem from his first book about a man watching a flock of geese cross the sky overhead. There was something sad about both images, two men yearning for a freedom beyond their reach, and I wondered if Connelly meant for the two poems to mirror each other. I made a mental note to ask him one day. There were more poems about his father, only the one about his mother, a few that hinted at his own complicated relationship with alcohol and the many ways he’d turned his anger at his father back onto himself, summed up by the phrase “blood, booze and women.”

The poems in this collection were short and terse except for the last one, about his father’s death, which spanned nearly seven pages. I read it quickly, my eyes tripping over the page, gulping it down so fast it stuck in my throat. When I finished, I read it again, slowly, trying to see how he had done it, captured something so ineffable, that moment when you pass from one state to another. But also how he had managed to describe the terror and ugliness of death so beautifully. It seemed impossible and yet he had done it. His words brought me back to my mother’s last moments, the hospital room, the incessant beeping of machines, the smells appalling and vile. My mother terrified and desperate and out of her mind with pain. “This isn’t supposed to happen,” Abe kept saying as though he had a say in things, as though the world made sense.

Toward the end of the poem, Connelly wondered if his father would have wanted his son to witness his body making its final, horrifying turn against itself and if it would be wrong to leave. He wrote about wanting so desperately for it all to be over and then, when it was, his shame at having wished it. It was exactly how I had felt when my mother died, but I’d never told anyone because it felt wrong. How could you not want to spend every last second you could with someone you loved? But here Connelly was, not just talking about it but writing it. It was true what he told us in class: you could write anything, say anything. There were no rules. This poem was proof. I’d once read that writing is a conversation you have with an invisible reader and that is exactly how it felt to read his poem. It was as if he had written it so I might read it one day, sitting on the floor of a library in New Hampshire, as if he had moved across time and space and spoken directly to me.

I closed the book and studied the author photo. Connelly looked straight at the camera, as if daring it to take his picture. His hair was darker, his face fuller, but otherwise he looked the same. He may even have been more handsome now. Below the photo in tiny letters was the name of the photographer: Roxanne Stevenson. I looked around before peeling back the plastic cover and tearing the photo from the dust jacket. I placed it deep in the pocket of my coat and headed downstairs.

Roxanne Stevenson was a Wilder alum, a member of the first class to graduate women. She had written seven books, all published by academic presses, at a healthy clip of one every two years. Her area of expertise was the Tudor court; she was best known for a feminist reimagining of Anne Boleyn, portraying her not as a crafty temptress but as a victim of Henry and his court, which systematically dismantled her reputation. On the acknowledgments page of her most recent book, she thanked R. H. Connelly for “his necessary and unstinting support.”

I gathered all of Roxanne’s books together and studied the author photo on each one, charting her transformation from fresh-faced young academic to middle-aged woman. In early photos, she had a chin-length bob that traced the line of her jaw; in the latest one, she’d cut her hair short. Her eyes were the same, steady and focused, a little too small for her face, her dark eyebrows cutting across her forehead like a slash of permanent marker. She wore sensible monochromatic clothing, blazers, turtleneck sweaters, a white button-down shirt with the collar popped.

“Look at her,” I remembered my mother saying one night as we watched the small television at the foot of her bed. I was eleven, maybe twelve years old. “She’s going to be on television for God’s sake. You’d think someone would tell her to put on a little lipstick. And that blazer,” she said, pointing at the television with her cigarette. “Some cheap polyester blend. You see that, right?” I nodded as my mother brought the cigarette to her lips and took a long, slow puff.

I walked closer to the television and watched Roxanne as she flickered across the screen, no longer listening to what she was saying but studying the slope of her nose and the way it turned down at the end, the dark skin under her eyes, the open pores on her cheeks. I could feel my mother watching me. She was training me to search for beauty, and while I’d never be an expert like she was, even then I could see that Roxanne wasn’t beautiful. I curled up next to my mother, studied her long neck, deep-set eyes, and delicate bone structure while she stroked my cheek, checking for beauty, as if it might be something subterranean, buried beneath the surface like a winter bulb.