All of Us: The Collected Poems

  These are the facts of that time, enough to have made realists out of us if we hadn’t been realists already. Nonetheless, much as Chekhov had kept reading the train schedules away from the town in which he would die, Ray kept working, planning, believing in the importance of the time he had left, and also believing that he might, through some loop in fate, even get out of this. An errand list I found in his shirt pocket later read “eggs, peanut butter, hot choc” and then, after a space, “Australia? Antarctica??” The insistent nature of Ray’s belief in his own capacity to recover from reversals during the course of his illness gave us both strength. In his journal he wrote: “When hope is gone, the ultimate sanity is to grasp at straws.” In this way he lived hope as a function of gesture, a reaching for or toward, while the object of promise stayed rightly illusory. The alternative was acceptance of death, which at age fifty was impossible for him. Another journal entry revealed his anguish as the pace of the disease quickened: “I wish I had a while. Not five years—or even three years—I couldn’t ask for that long, but if I had even a year. If I knew I had a year.”

  In January 1988 Ray began keeping a journal under the inspiration of Stephen Spender’s Journals: 1939—1983, but with the discovery of his brain tumor it broke off suddenly in March, though he would start again in another notebook later. Our attentions were turned instead to the task of drafting a short essay to appear in the commencement booklet for the University of Hartford, where Ray was to accept a Doctorate of Letters in May.

  During much of this time I had been clinging to the stories of Chekhov, reading one after the other of the Ecco Press volumes, and now I offered two passages to Ray from Ward No. 6 to illustrate the epigraph from Saint Teresa (“Words lead to deeds … they prepare the soul, make it ready, and move it to tenderness”), which he’d used from my book of poems to begin his essay. Ray incorporated the passages from Chekhov into his piece, and this was the beginning of an important spiritual accompaniment which began to run through our days, and which eventually would play an important part in the writing of this book.

  The fervor with which we both seized on these particular moments in Ward No. 6 came, I think, directly out of the ordeal we were undergoing with Ray’s health, and this was particularly true of the second passage in which two characters, a disaffected doctor and an imperious postmaster, his elder, suddenly find themselves discussing the human soul:

  “And you do not believe in the immortality of the soul?”

  “No, honored Mihail Averyanitch; I do not believe it, and have no grounds for believing it.”

  “I must own I doubt it too,” Mihail Averyanitch admits. “And yet I have a feeling as though I should never die myself: ‘Old fogey, it’s time you were dead!’ but there is a little voice in my soul that says: ‘Don’t believe it; you won’t die.’ ”

  In his framing of the passage Ray underscored the power of “words which linger as deeds” and out of which “a little voice in the soul” is born. He seemed almost grateful to observe how in the Chekhov story “the way we have dismissed certain concepts about life, about death, suddenly gives over unexpectedly to belief of an admittedly fragile but insistent nature”.

  I continued to bring Chekhov into our days by reading a story first thing in the morning and then telling it to Ray when I came down for breakfast. I would give the story in as true a fashion as I could, and Ray would inevitably become engaged by it and have to read it for himself that afternoon. By evening we could discuss it.

  Another of Ray’s influences came from one of the books he’d been reading early in the year, Czeslaw Milosz’s Unattainable Earth, and it began to affect his idea of the form and latitude his own book might discover. In the interests of what he called “a more spacious form”, Milosz had incorporated prose quotes from Casanova’s Memoirs, snippets from Baudelaire, from his uncle Oscar Milosz, Pascal, Goethe and other thinkers and writers who’d affected him as he was writing his poems. He also includes his own musings, which take the form of confessions, questionings and insights. Ray was very much attracted to the inclusiveness of Milosz’s approach. His own reading at the time included García Lorca, Jaroslav Seifert, Tomas Tranströmer, Lowell, The Selected Poems of Milosz and a rereading of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych. From these he selected whole poems, which we later used as section heads for the book.

  But in early June, when the devastating news of tumors in the lungs again was given to us, it was to Chekhov we instinctively turned to restore our steadfastness. One night I looked at certain passages I had bracketed in the stories and realized that they seemed to be speaking toward poems of Ray’s which I’d been helping him revise and typing into the computer. On impulse I went to the typewriter and shaped some of these excerpts into lines and gave them titles. When I showed the results to Ray, it was as if we’d discovered another Chekhov inside Chekhov. But because I’d been looking at the passages with Ray’s poems in mind, there was the sense that Chekhov had stepped toward us, and that while he remained in his own time, he seemed also to have become our contemporary. The world of headlong carriage races through snowstorms and of herring-head soup, of a dish made of bulls’ eyes, of cooks picking sorrel for vegetable soup, of peasant children raised not to flinch at the crude language of their drunken parents—this world was at home with the world of Raymond Carver, in which a man puts his head on the executioner’s block while touring a castle only to have the hand of his companion come down on his neck like an axe, a world in which a drunken father is caught in the kitchen by his son with a strange woman in a heavily sexual context, and in which we watch as a drowned child is carried above the trees in the tongs of a helicopter.

  Once we’d discovered the poet in Chekhov, Ray began to mark passages he wanted to include and to type them up himself. The results were something between poems and prose, and this pleased us because some of Ray’s new poems blurred the boundaries between poem and story, just as his stories had often taken strength from dramatic and poetic strategies. Ray had so collapsed the distance between his language and thought that the resulting transparency of method allowed distinctions between genres to dissolve without violence or a feeling of trespass. The story given as poem could unwind without having to pretend to intensities of phrasing or language that might have impeded the force of the story itself, yet the story could pull at the attention of the reader in another way for having been conceived as poetry.

  In order to work at all on the book during what was a bewildering time for us, we made the decision not to tell anyone about the cancer’s recurrence in the lungs. Instead of giving over to visitors and a parade of sorrowful goodbyes we could keep our attention on the things we wanted to do. And one of the things we decided to do was to celebrate our eleven years together by getting married in Reno, Nevada, on June 17. The wedding was what Ray called a “high tacky affair” and it took place across from the courthouse in the Heart of Reno Chapel, which had a huge heart in the window spiked with small golden light bulbs and a sign that read SE HABLA ESPANOL. Afterwards we went gambling in the casinos and I headed into a phenomenal three-day winning streak at roulette.

  When we returned home Ray wrote “Proposal”, which carries the urgency of that time, the raw sense of life lived without guile, or that cushion of hope we count on to extend life past the provisional. Our having married anchored us in a new way and it seemed we had knowingly saved this occasion to give ourselves solace, and perhaps also to allow us to toss back our heads once more in a rippling cosmic laugh as from that “gay and empty journey” Kafka writes of.

  This was also the time during which Ray wrote “Gravy”. The idea for the poem had come from a conversation we’d had while sitting on the deck facing the Strait of Juan de Fuca, taking stock. “You remember telling me how you almost died before you met me?” I asked him. “It could’ve ended back then and we’d never even have met. None of this would have happened.” We sat there quietly, just marveling at what we’d been allowed. “It’s all been gravy,” R
ay said. “Pure gravy.”

  Many of the poems Ray had accumulated toward the book had been drafted during July and late August the summer before. Nearly a year later, in early July, enough finished poems had accumulated that we decided I should begin to arrange them into sections and to shape the book. I had done this with each of Ray’s collections of poetry and also with most of his fiction. My perhaps primitive way of ordering a manuscript was to scatter the pages out on the living-room floor and crawl on my hands and knees among them, reading and sensing what should come next, moving by intuition and story and emotion.

  We had decided to try to include the Chekhov passages. The stories had been so integral to our spiritual survival that, as with Milosz’s inclusion of Whitman in his book, Chekhov seemed a companion soul, as if Ray had somehow won permission through a lifetime of admiration to take up his work with the audacity of love.

  One night I remember watching with Ray a composer being interviewed on television, and the composer was exclaiming that Tchaikovsky had lifted whole passages from Beethoven and offered them as his own. When someone had challenged him about this he had said simply, “I have a right. I love him.” Ray had jotted down this exchange, and I think this right-of-love figured heavily into his decision to bring Chekhov so boldly into conjunction with his own work. The Chekhov passages also bound Ray’s poetry to his fiction, his last collection having ended with the tribute of “Errand”. The Chekhov selections seemed to fall very naturally into place in the manuscript, keying and amplifying in a tonal and emotional way the poems Ray had been writing. At times, through Chekhov, Ray was able to give himself and others instructions for the difficult task of continuing under the certainty of loss (“Downstream”), or he could admit fears he might have stifled in order to keep the upper hand in his waiting game with cancer (“Foreboding” and “Sparrow Nights”).

  The book, as we finalized my arrangement, fell into six sections. It began with poems retrieved from earlier publications, poems which, for one reason and another, had not been joined with more recent work. So just as Ray was bringing the time of Chekhov to bear on his work, he was carrying forward poems from his earlier life, and perhaps affecting both lives in their imaginative composition. I think in this regard that a passage he had marked in Milosz’s Unattainable Earth may illuminate Ray’s inner objectives:

  Jeanne, a disciple of Karl Jaspers, taught me the philosophy of freedom, which consists in being aware that a choice made now, today, projects itself backwards and changes our past actions.

  There was an urge in Ray’s writing, in both the poems and stories, to revisit certain evocative scenes and characters in his life, to wrest from them if not release, then at least a telling anatomy of the occasion. In this book the early love poems hint at a dark element which is realized more fully in recent poems such as “Miracle”, “The Offending Eel” and “Wake Up”. The son as an oppressive figure in former poems and in the stories “Elephant” and “The Compartment” reappears in “On an Old Photograph of My Son”, and although the pain is freshly present, there is the redeeming knowledge at the end of the poem that “we all do better in the future”. The theme of the dead child, which was explored so poignantly in his story “A Small, Good Thing”, is revived in the poem “Lemonade”, in which a child, sent by the father for a thermos of lemonade, drowns in the river.

  The second section introduced a series of poems whose territory was suggested by Tomas Tranströmer’s poem, “The Name”, about a loss of identity. Perhaps the best way to characterize these poems is by their dis-ease, the way in which a wildness, a strangeness, can erupt and carry us into realms of unreason with no way to turn back. Here the verbally abusive woman of his story “Intimacy” is joined by the physically abusive woman of “Miracle”. Drinking continued to motivate the rituals of disintegration in the poems about his first marriage, and he inventoried the havoc it had caused as if it had occurred only yesterday.

  Childhood innocence is abruptly sundered in the third section with “The Kitchen”, which recalls the story “Nobody Said Anything”. There are poems in which the unknown is left fully intact, as in “The Sturgeon” and “Another Mystery”. The violence of working-class family life in “Suspenders” plays off a section from Chekhov about peasant life and the brutalizing of the sensibilities of children.

  The hard question Milosz asks in “Return to Kraków in 1880” at the front of the fourth section—“To win? To lose? / What for, if the world will forget us anyway?”—challenges the poet’s sense of memory as an entrustment. And for Ray, of course, in facing his death the idea of whether one’s memory would persist importantly in the survival of one’s writing was also present. His poems suggest that an artist’s obsessions and signs, fragmentary and intermittent as they may be, exist in a world of necessity that transcends anyone else’s need of them. At the same time, poems like “One More” and “His Bathrobe Pockets Stuffed with Notes” reveal humorously the haphazard nature of creation itself, and indeed the amazement that anything worthwhile should accumulate from such a scattershot process. There is also a prose record in this section of Ray’s first intimations of the literary life when he’s handed a copy of Poetry by an elderly man whose home he enters as a delivery boy. Here, as in “Errand”, it is the ordinary moment which illuminates the most extraordinary things. A magazine passes from one hand to another and the young would-be writer discovers, to his surprise, a world in which writing and reading poems is believed to be a creditable endeavor.

  The juxtaposition of contemporary time with the era of knights and chivalry in “The Offending Eel” is one we’ve seen before in the story “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love”, and also in the more recent “Blackbird Pie”. Such counterpointing seems to allow the contemporary material a fresh barbarism. In light of the Lowell quote that begins the fifth section—“Yet why not say what happened?”—we look with fluorescent starkness into the unrelenting, obsessive magnetism of “the real”, its traps and violences.

  The poem “Summer Fog” in the same section was made all the more extraordinary for me because of something Ray said when he first gave me the poem to read. He told me he was sorry he wouldn’t be there to do the things for me that I was doing for him. “I’ve tried something here,” he said. “I don’t know if it works.” What he had tried was to leap ahead into the time of my death, and to imagine his grief as a gift to me against my own approaching solitude. It seems all the more moving that this was done at a time when his own death was, in the words of the poem, the “stupendous grief” we were feeling together.

  The last section of the book deals with the stages of his awareness as his health worsened and he moved toward death. In “Gravy”, as I’ve mentioned, he displaces the devastating significance of death in the present by inserting the memory of a prior death narrowly avoided, when in 1976—7 he had nearly died of alcoholism. So in effect he uses his coming death as proof of a former escape; and death, he realized, once displaced by such an excess of living during the ten productive years he’d been allowed, could never be quite the same. Nevertheless, the introductory passages from Chekhov (“Foreboding” and “Sparrow Nights”) acknowledge an inner panic. Along with the matter-of-factness of “What the Doctor Said” and the “practicing” for death in “Wake Up”, there is the defiance of “Proposal”, and the two poems which rehearse the final goodbye—“No Need” and “Through the Boughs”. I hadn’t realized until three weeks after Ray’s death, as I went over the manuscript to enter corrections Ray had made before we’d taken the final trip to Alaska, that I had perfectly, though unwittingly, enacted the instructions of “No Need” the night before his death. The three kisses which had been meant as “Good night” had, at the time, carried the possibility that Ray would not wake again. “Don’t be afraid,” I’d said. “Just go into your sleep now” and, finally, “I love you”—to which he had answered, “I love you too. You get some sleep now.” He never opened his eyes again, and at 6:20 the next morning
he stopped breathing.

  The “jaunty” slant of the cigarette in the self-portrait “Afterglow” belies the consequences which have made this a last glance. Maybe it’s as close as Ray would let himself come to irony at a time when a lesser writer might have carved out a sad, edgy little empire with it. In the final poem, “Late Fragment”, the voice has earned a more elevated coda. There is the sense that central to the effort of the life, of the writing, has been the need to be beloved and that one’s own willingness to award that to the self—to “call myself beloved” and, beyond that, to “feel myself beloved on the earth”—has somehow been achieved. For a recovering alcoholic, this self-recognition and the more generalized feeling of love he was allowing himself was no small accomplishment. Ray knew he had been graced and blessed and that his writing had enabled him to reach far beyond the often mean circumstances from which he and those he wrote about had come, and also that through his writing those working-class lives had become a part of literature. On a piece of scrap paper near his typewriter he had written: “Forgive me if I’m thrilled with the idea, but just now I thought that every poem I write ought to be called ‘Happiness’.” And he was, in spite of not agreeing to such an early death, in the keeping of a grateful equanimity when we talked during those long summer evenings of what our life together as writers, lovers and helpmates had been.

  By mid-July his last book was finished and I had found its title, taken from an early poem called “Looking for Work”. We didn’t discuss the title; we just knew it was right. We had been given a rather incredible gift shortly after our wedding and this, I think, influenced us in our choice. Our painter friend, Alfredo Arreguin, had been working on a large painting about which mysterious, tantalizing hints had been leaked at intervals to us by his wife, Susan Lytle, also a painter. The day before our wedding reception, Alfredo and Susan arrived with the painting strapped to the top of their car. The painting, once hung in our living room, proved to be of several salmon leaping midair toward a vigorous, stylized waterfall. In the sky, what Ray would call “the ghost fish” were patterned into clouds heading in the opposite direction. The rocks in the background were inhabited as well, studded with prehistoric eyes.