IT SEEMED IMPOSSIBLE that a book he had given away many years ago and several miles from here should now lay in his hands at this rummage sale. His first thought on seeing it was, The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. How I wore my copy out. Then, turning a few pages and catching glimpses of the hand-written notes between lines and in margins, Wait, this is my copy. His name and old phone number written on the inside cover confirmed it. Astonished and then amused, he stood in the community center’s dust motes and Saturday afternoon light flipping pages and wondering whether to buy it. Buy it again. He certainly wanted to read many of the poems again, perhaps revisit some of the poets that had previously intrigued him but resisted his deciphering. Maybe this time, with so much more experience in life and in reading, he would crack them. More than that, he was drawn to the notes in his handwriting; as much or more so than the poets, he was interested in getting reacquainted with his old self of 20-plus years ago. The book was $1.50. A dollar fifty! He bought it, took it home, set it on the coffee table in the living room.
His wife asked, “Isn’t that the book of poems we all had to have in college?”
“Not just that!” he exclaimed. “Look! It’s my exact same copy. How it got from Ypsilanti to Livonia I’ll never know but here it is. Look: Dennis Hand, 434-3284. That’s me. Twenty, twenty-one years old.”
Dennis’ wife Wendy made a face, if not of disapproval, at least of suspicion. Dennis recognized it as one moment in a frequent sequence of events that originated with Wen being harassed by some other episode in her busy life as a white-collar working woman and mother to two pre-teens, and transferring her annoyance to an unrelated behavior of his. He wanted to call this out but preferred peace at this particular time. He was eager to enjoy his “new” book.
As the cold wet weeks of spring yielded to the first warm days of reluctant summer, Dennis encountered the book frequently where he’d left it on the coffee table, or on the kitchen counter where he dumped his car keys and the mail, or by his favorite place on the couch, or, sadly but honestly, in the basket of magazines near the toilet. He spent a lot of his quiet moments, when they came, thumbing through the anthology to poets or poems he remembered or that provoked his curiosity, sometimes reading a specific poem first, sometimes another that distracted him, sometimes the introductory text by the anthologists. He remembered how much one of his professors enjoyed “Wicker Basket” by Robert Creeley and re-read it, and, yes, experienced that same bouncy joy, then the intro text where he wondered, Who were the Black Mountain poets and what were they after? He checked out Sylvia Plath again. Something about her and her ach-daddy-du had put him off as a student, but Plath was important to a lot of people, especially women, especially a certain type of thoughtful, serious woman, so he read her anew and this time appreciated the strength of her words and the powerful movement of her arrangements. The editors put Plath into further context for him with biographical details and he developed new sympathy for her, and wondered how she would have lived or her work been received if she’d been writing in the present day.
He read and liked some of the other women poets in the anthology he had liked before, Adrienne Rich and Diane Wakoski. He’d never read Levertov, and made a point to, thumbing down the corner of the page where her section began, then plunged into more familiar waters, those Gary Snyder poems he had loved. “Axe Handles!” How much more poignant now that he was a father. Donald Justice – he’d forgotten how powerful and accessible were poems like “Tourist from Syracuse,” and he re-read “Men at Forty” which, as a man in his 40s, staggered him. Back to Levertov. He liked these poems, was interested in what the editors had to say about her religion, made a mental note to do more reading on the topic. Back to the men. He didn’t mind admitting to himself that he preferred men poets, that they had something more to say to him as a fellow man, perhaps in a tone he recognized. And wow, who is this weirdo, Charles Simic? And who was Robert Pinsky? This “Figured Wheel,” this “nothing-transfiguring wheel,” what was that? A spiritual vision of destructive force that mirrors the God creator force? The natural consequence of humanity’s ambition to simply live? The unraveling of time? Here was Philip Levine, another son of Michigan, and while Dennis didn’t recognize the Detroit of “What Work Is” necessarily, he felt kinship with its echoes.
As well as the ideas in the poems he was drawn to, the atmospheres they created, Dennis was moved as he had perhaps not been 20 years ago by the power of the lines; he had more appreciation for the language now. Sipping coffee and enjoying some solitude in the mornings before work, in this strange new era of work that took him sometimes to the office and sometimes to his laptop at the dining room table, he was happily stunned by Philip Larkin’s description of
The sun-comprehending glass
And beyond it, the deep blue air that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless
How can that be! When he re-read Justice proclaim that “something is filling” men at forty
…something
That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.
he had to put his sandwich down. He wished he had been somewhere other than the toilet when Kingsley Amis observed
Sex stops when you pull up your pants,
Love never lets you go.
A humble place to witness a powerful idea.
What a time to fall in love with poetry again, these lengthening days. He chased his son Gary around. “Here, I’ve got a sticky note on this poem, ‘Axe Handles.’ You have to read it and tell me what you think.” In church, he opened one of the Bibles in the pew and turned anew to the Psalms, which he had previously regarded as obligatory music whose tune he did not know. He asked Wendy after dinner one evening, on the back patio overlooking their grass which flowed into the neighbors’ grass which flowed into a kind of village green between the similar, almost identical houses on their street, “Do you like Sylvia Plath?”
“Is that the one that put her head in the oven?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think so. I always thought she was more for black turtleneck type chicks.”
“Do you think Dottie’s ready for stuff like that?”
“She might be reading it already. I mean, maybe not Plath, but she’ll be in high school soon and I’m sure they’re preparing her for it.”
“I’ll have to ask her about it.” The kids were somewhere in the house. “You know, a funny thing about poetry. It’s easy to let it slip out of your life. I mean, except for the occasional poem in The New Yorker or something, when was the last time you read one that wasn’t assigned to you by some teacher? We read, but it’s, you know, thrillers and book club books and current affairs and things. Unless you make an effort to include poetry in what you read, you’ll forget about it.”
“True, I guess.”
He sensed she was losing interest or had never been interested in the first place. He wanted to go on, to tell her that poetry had the ability to make him feel elated the way a song did, or reflective the way a prayer could, an epitaph, or the sensations you feel when you look at a painting or photograph and you don’t want to look away, what do we call that, when you’re entranced by the colors, lines and textures, the light, even if it is a simple subject? Too, he wanted to tell her that he still didn’t understand every poem, that he couldn’t solve all their riddles of symbolism or meaning, but he understood more of them now than he did when he was young; it came easier to him or it was easier for him to conclude, “I don’t know what that means, but I like it.”
And something else. As fascinated as he was by this rediscovery, he was almost as fascinated by the person that had once been him surfacing in the penciled notes on the pages’ margins, the school boy hand that had written such things as “influence of painting on poetry,” “English public school homosexual practices” and “who or what is the Emperor of Ice Cream?” He supposed it could be a matter of mild curiosity to find a piece of your handwriting from another era, say a grocery list. “I must have wanted a bay leaf for something.” Or it could be startling, as in finding an old, dramatic diary entry. “Did I really think that? Why was I so upset?” Because these notes were fragments appended to works of art, and supplemented lecture notes in a long-lost notebook, they were even more cryptic, the garbled transmissions of a time traveler, messages from his former self to his current self. But whether these were mere facts recorded for posterity, secrets, prophecies, warnings, Dennis had yet to determine. He was, he supposed, like most men in that he did not despise his predecessor. Sure, he’d like to be able to go back and kick his own ass on some subjects, alter decisions or implement some different habits, but that improvising youngster, his “triumphs and disasters,” was responsible for who he was today, and he pretty much liked himself.
If he could have told this to Wendy, what he might have said was, It’s such a weird thing to meet 20- or 21-year-old Dennis Hand again, however darkly. I remember that guy, in those red checkered flannel shirts he favored, a fuller head of hair under that Carhartt hat, no beard yet. I remember vaguely him being serious about his studies, but these scratches are the proof. See, there, where he underlined a section and wrote, “this will be on the final.” He seems curious and engaged with his university world of experiences and ideas. He didn’t want to be a poet – he majored in political science – but he wanted to keep poetry and other arts near, he understood their importance to the individual and society. I can see him from here, across canyons of years. He used to go see indie bands and to art movies, look, there his is in a crowd of people at the Blind Pig waiting to hear a band trying to sound like Radiohead. Now he is a customer satisfaction manager for a logistics company living in a labyrinthine subdivision in Canton, Michigan, 30 miles from where he grew up. It’s not “wrong,” it’s just different; he pretty much followed the plan for his life. But if past Dennis did send messages through time to future Dennis, messages like “Why is April the cruelest month?” maybe it was to remind him that, then as now, these were things that made him feel alive.
In the dissolving light in their yard, Dennis watched his wife check her phone for something and sensed he was on dangerous ground. He guessed that Wendy would not only find his examination annoying, but threatening. Any discussion of what their lives before their marriage were like would be interpreted as an indictment of their present circumstances. This was often, he observed once again, part of that pattern of misplacing the blame for her burdens on him; she’d certainly never admit that the children were driving her up a wall or that she wasn’t leaving work at work. Wendy used to find Dennis’ chronic daydreaming adorable, his personal projects something she admired about him. Now, he could imagine her saying, “So, what, you wish you were still that guy? No responsibilities except going to class and chasing hipster girls?” Another component of this was that if Dennis retaliated, or pointed out that Wendy was being mean, she’d at first quarrel with him but eventually admit she was being mean, and complete the chain with a period of intense self-criticism and depression. So these days, after 14 years of marriage, he mostly held his tongue and learned to avoid subjects that antagonized her. Here was the woman he’d followed on hikes in state parks and whose bouncing, rebellious curls he longed to touch, whom he’d promised to cherish in a channeled frenzy of physical and religious desire and solemnity. When had they become adversaries?
Wendy half-tossed her phone on the patio table. Probingly, Dennis asked, “What did you want to be when you were 20, Wen?”
She said, “Not answering emails at 8:00 at night.”
Dennis chuckled sincerely. She gave him a quick glance to determine he was laughing at her quip and not at her. “But seriously,” he said.
“When I was 20?” She lifted her eyebrows and gazed at a space above them. “I think I was realizing just how much work psychology was going to be, to become, you know, an actual psychologist, so I was thinking about switching my major.” She had, in fact, completed her degree in psychology and eventually gone into human resources. “I remember just wishing I knew what the available jobs were. Like it occurred to me our parents went to an office every day and did something for their salaries but I didn’t really know what it was. I remember just wishing I knew what those jobs were, and what I had to do in college to get one.”
“What 20-year-old knows what a human resources manager is?”
“Right. If only I could have warned her…”
“You know, I didn’t feel like a full adult until I was in my 30s. Maybe right up until we had Dottie. All through my 20s, I still felt like a kid. I bet college, that temporary world of college, had something to do with it.”
“Well, adolescence is lasting longer and longer with each generation. Instead of going off to your first job, like our grandparents did –”
“Or a war.”
“—right, or a war, people in our day prolonged adolescence through college, and who knows what it’ll be like for Dottie and Greg. There’s less pressure to start earning an income immediately and the levels of education for many fields are increasing.”
“Like, with grad school and internships and such.”
“Right.”
This was a soap box Dennis would have liked to have stepped onto, because he had a low opinion of people in his industry with advanced degrees, and of the American debt crisis, and some vague ideas about how continuing education or enrichment ought to be, informed by his recent reacquaintance with The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Instead, he checked the level of rosé in Wendy’s glass and suggested, “I think we’re gonna need some more wine. And maybe some vodka shots.”
“It’s Tuesday,” she protested.
“And? Where are the kids? Why did we have kids if not to fetch us box wine when we need it? Why, in my day…”
Dennis was glad to see Wendy smiling, though not laughing, glancing at her phone but not reaching for it, as he slid open the screen door on the patio and carried their glasses into the kitchen. He would love to get Wendy intoxicated and passionately naked in their bed, though she would complain about the way her body looked now and be crabby about the week night antics the next morning. And how would they elude the kids, who during summer vacation had no bed time and the roam of the house, and might sense what their parents were up to in their darkened room with the door locked? Geez, weren’t they the same two people who had made drunken, stealthy love in a threadbare tent between whispering sleeping bags just a few feet from other people in other tents? As he opened the refrigerator and poured cold box wine into their glasses, the lust rose in Dennis easily. But he remembered what Kingsley Amis had written and he himself noted with a penciled exclamation point about sex and love. Amis was, from what Dennis had read, probably the last person qualified to give anyone advice on marriage, but as Dennis carried the wine back to the sliding screen door, he tempered his longing with an injection of empathy. He’d try to find a way to let Wendy know he wanted her, let her know she was a wife desired by her husband, careful not to elicit a glare from her and feelings of guilt over them not having enough sex. But he’d settle for a good conversation, especially if he could make her feel heard. He set the wine glasses and himself down. Dogs and children were still at play in the summer night.
— CHARLIE KONDEK
Charlie Kondek is a marketing professional and short story writer from metro Detroit, where he still lives with his family. He works in the crime and literary genres, and his stories have appeared in Black Cat Weekly, Hoosier Noir, The Saturday Evening Post, BULL, and elsewhere. He can be found at CharlieKondekWrites.com.