Wallace Stevens, I remember Bernard telling me on another occasion, had heavily influenced two poets Bernard particularly loved: Ashbery, whom everyone rightly celebrated, and Bronk, who was largely unknown. Ashbery wrote in color, Bernard said, whereas Bronk wrote in black and white; Ashbery embraced Stevens’s lushness, whereas Bronk stripped it down, as if Stevens were being translated into a limited vocabulary. As a result, Bronk’s poetry was suspended between philosophical heft and an almost autistic linguistic simplicity, a combination that, I must say, had never really worked for me: I’d read all his books out of a sense of duty, but I was usually bored or unconvinced by the affect of profundity. But now, when I found Bronk’s selected poems on one of the shelves and opened the book at random, the power of it was all finally there, finally real for me:
MIDSUMMER
A green world, a scene of green deep
with light blues, the greens made deep
by those blues. One thinks how
in certain pictures, envied landscapes are seen
(through a window, maybe) far behind the serene
sitter’s face, the serene pose, as though
in some impossible mirror, face to back,
human serenity gazed at a green world
which gazed at this face.
And see now,
here is that place, those greens
are here, deep with those blues. The air
we breathe is freshly sweet, and warm, as though
with berries. We are here. We are here.
Set this down too, as much
as if an atrocity had happened and been seen.
The earth is beautiful beyond all change.
This was what I brought to the hospital the next morning, along with some quinoa salad and dried mangoes for Natali. I just caught the elevator as the doors closed, and hit the button for the seventh floor, but the number didn’t light up. Still, the elevator started to ascend, stopping on every floor. I was the only one in the elevator and its erratic behavior was making me nervous, so I got out on the fourth floor and walked. Later I would learn that this was a Sabbath elevator — an elevator that operates automatically in order to circumvent the Jewish law requiring observers to abstain from operating electric switches on Shabbat.
Bernard looked tiny in the hospital bed, his neck in a brace, but he also seemed like himself; the first thing he said to me, his voice raspy because of damage to his larynx, was that he was sorry he hadn’t had a chance to read my novel, but he’d been detained. It smelled like a hospital room smells, like sanitizer and urine, but it was otherwise okay. A paper curtain offered privacy to or from the other patient in the room, who must have been asleep.
I entertained Natali and Bernard, trying to ignore the beeping of the machines to which he was attached, by recounting in comical terms my anxiety about what to bring, how I knew this had all been arranged as a secret test for me. When I presented them with the Bronk, I believed that Natali was touched, that it was exactly the right book, that it proved I had been listening with care all these years, but I might have imagined that response. Bernard started to retell the story about the graduate student, but it required too much effort, and he let it go. I changed the topic to their “daughter”—only now did I really feel the kinship between the stories — but Bernard didn’t seem to remember what I was talking about, even though we’d laughed about it together many times before.
Despite the bright hospital lighting, emerging onto the street felt like crossing from night into day, or from a darkened theater, a matinee, into sunlight, or, I imagined, like surfacing in a submarine — the threshold between the hospital and its outside was like a threshold between worlds, between media. Have you seen people pause in revolving doors like divers decompressing, transitioning slowly so as to prevent nitrogen bubbles from forming in the blood, or noticed the puzzled look that many people wear — I found a bench across Fifth Avenue and sat and watched — when they step onto the sidewalk, as if they’ve suddenly forgotten something important, but aren’t sure what: their keys, their phone, the particulars of their loss? Terrible to see them recall it a second later; as I observed the hospital from a safe distance, I thought back to the weeks I’d spent sleeping on the futon at Alex’s after an SUV struck a friend of hers in Chelsea, how some mornings Alex, who tended to get out of bed before she was fully awake, would be halfway to the kitchen to put on the water for her tea before she remembered that Candice was dead. (I don’t know how I knew she briefly didn’t know, or how I could tell when the fact returned to her consciousness.) If you want to pick out the devastated or soon-to-be-devastated from the stream of people leaving Mount Sinai, I decided, don’t look for frank expressions of sorrow or concern, look for people whose faces resemble those of passengers deplaning after a long flight — a blank expression as the body begins adjusting to a new time zone and ground speed.
“Ground speed”—I sat, my back to the park, waiting for the city to reabsorb me, holding my breath until the exhaust from a passing bus dissipated. The beeping of a reversing FedEx truck became Bernard’s heart monitor. I began to say the words aloud, joining the thousands of people in the city talking to themselves at that moment, repeating the phrase until ground began to sound like the past participle of grind—as if velocity could be powdered, pulverized. It made me think of instant coffee.
* * *
There were still piles of books on my apartment floor when the protester arrived the following week to use my shower. He was a few years younger than I and taller, so much taller — easily six-foot-three — that he made the building feel smaller; he had to duck so as not to hit his head on the landing as he followed me up the stairs to my third-floor apartment. Was he Marfanoid? He set his oversized climbing backpack beside the door and sat on the top stair to take his shoes off before entering although I told him it wasn’t necessary, and while he did so I could smell a variety of odors: sweat, tobacco, dog, the must of his socks. I asked him how long he had been sleeping in the park and he said a week, but that he’d been at one encampment or another across the country for more than six weeks. He’d been picked up at his door in Akron — he had been living in his parents’ basement — by a caravan of protesters he’d made contact with on craigslist, just as craigslist was being used to connect protesters with people in the city who would let them use their bathrooms. He smiled his disarming smile without interruption. Did I go to Zuccotti a lot? he asked me.