And then horses and riders passed behind some trees and were gone.
I raked shit.
In the evening I went to Mr. Penfield’s rooms and we listened to the scraps of dance music carried from the main house on the wind.
“I suppose I’ll be out of here tomorrow,” I said.
“What?” He had been staring into his wineglass.
“When it comes to his attention.”
“You can’t be sure, Joe of Paterson. I have made a great study of the very rich. The one way they are accessible is through their whim.” He swallowed some wine. “Yes. I have not told you this, but six or seven years ago when I came up here at night along the track, as you did, I knew where I was going. I had traced Frank Bennett to Loon Lake and I intended to kill him.”
“I have the idea myself,” I said. He didn’t seem to hear me.
“Mr. Bennett was amused. I was invited to remain on the grounds and write my poetry. Yes. And now you see me.”
“I do,” I said. “I see you.”
“I know what you think. You think living this way year after year and not going anywhere, not doing anything, I have lost my perspective. It’s true! It’s true. So that everything that happens, every, oh God”—his eyes go heavenward, he swallows some wine—“small thing, is monumentally significant. I know! I lie in wait like a bullfrog lying in wait for whatever comes along for his tongue to stick to. Yes. That’s the only part of me that moves, my tongue.”
He dropped his chin on his chest and stared at me with his bleary red eyes. “You want to hear me croak?”
“What?”
He emitted the sound of a bullfrog, never had I heard such a blat of self-disgust I didn’t want to. It was not one night like this but several I remember, sitting in his living room over the stables, piles of books on the floor, a desk covered with papers, composition notebooks the kind I used in school, clumps of dust on the floors, ashtrays filled to overflowing, ashes on the carpet, on the window seat, he drifts back and forth back and forth between the wine bottles and the window, and all the while Miss Clara Lukaćs dances rides swims dines in the provinces of Loon Lake, mysteriously advanced now to the rank of its mistress.
“I don’t think it’s a small thing,” I said. “I think it is monumentally significant.”
“Yes,” he says, and he pulls his chair closer to mine, “this is not the first acquaintance. And it has nothing to do with who I am or the way I look, it’s always the same — the immediate recognition I have for her when she appears, and the ease with which she comes to me whatever circumstances I’m in, whatever I’ve become. Because I have no particular appeal to women and I never have, except to this woman, and so the recognition must be mutual and it pushes us toward each other even though we don’t talk the same language. And so, you see, now again, even though I’m indisputably fatter and more ridiculous as a figure of love than I ever was. And even though” his eyes brimmed—“she is faithful to nothing but her own life.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about.
He struggled out of his chair and ran to his bookshelves, and not finding what he wanted, he disappeared into a closet from which came the sounds of crashing and falling things.
He stumbled out with a book in his hand. He blew the dust off. “I want you to have this,” he said, “my first published work, my first thin volume of verse”—he smiled unsmiled—“The Flowers of the Sangre de Cristo.” He did not hand me the book but examined it closely. “I printed it on a hand press and bound it myself in Nutley. It was my project for recovery, you see. The signatures in this one are out of order. But no matter, no matter.”
He pressed the volume on me now and looked in my eyes as if hoping to see the wisdom that would flow into them from the book.
“Just a minute,” he said. He ran back into the closet there was a terrible crash I jumped up but he came out coughing in a cloud of chalky dust waving his second published work. “This one too,” he said, slamming the closet door. He swallowed a great draught of wine and slumped back in his chair wheezing from the exertion.
I held the two slim volumes, the second included a Japanese woodprint as frontispiece. “Don’t read them now, don’t ask me to watch you as you read them,” he said.
I held the books, I could not help granting him the authority he craved as profound commentator on his own life — he was an author! Never mind that he published his books himself, I was impressed, nobody I ever knew had written a book. I held them in my hand.
Apart from everything else and despite the shadows of the wishes in my mind the vaguest shadows of the implementation of the wishes, I am moved to be so set up in the world with such a distinguished friend. I know he is a posturing drunk, how could I not recognize the type, but he has made me his friend, this poet, and I have a presence in the world.
He tells me his one remaining belief.
“Who are you to doubt it,” he says angrily, “a follower of trains in the night!”
I don’t doubt it I don’t. I have listened to his life, heard it accounted indulged improved incanted and I believe it all. It is a life that goes past grief and sorrow into a realm, like the life of a famous gangster or an explorer, where sudden death is the ordinary condition. And somehow I’m invited to engage my instinct not to share his suffering but to marvel at it, a life farcically set in the path of historical and natural disaster it comes to me as entertainment—
The war before the war before the war
Before the rise of the Meiji emperor
Before the black ships—
his great accomplishment was his own private being the grandness and the depth of his failed affections each of his representations of himself at the critical moments of his past contributed to the finished man before me
Child Bride in a Zen Garden by Warren Penfield
In a poem of plum blossoms and boats poled down a river
Behind a garden wall the sun lighting its pediment of red tile
A fourteen-year-old girl aches for her husband.
One bird whistles in the foliage of a tree that stands on crutches.
Small things are cherished, a comb a hand mirror a golden carp
in a pool no more than eight inches deep. Curved wooden foot
bridges of great age connect the banks of ponds. But everywhere
we know on the map are mountains with vertical faces
and thunderous waterfalls, escutcheons of burning houses
and suicidal armies, history clattering in contradistinction to
the sunlight melting itself in the bamboo grove.
Oh the fifty-three stations of the Tokaido. On the embankment
above the rice paddy travelers crouch under slants of rain.
Messengers run with their breechcloths flapping. Merchants
beat their donkeys. Boats with squared sails make
directly for shore. Paper lanterns slide down the waves.
Rain like the hammers of sculptors works the curved slopes
of water. When the sky clears at sunset fifty-three prefecture
officials arrive in the stations of the Tokaido. Fifty-three
women are prepared for them. Sunlit legends will be made tonight.
Beans are picked from the gardens, plump fowl slaughtered, and