Traveling Sprinkler

But then say the traveling sprinkler seems to be tightly connected in your mind, perhaps by a long, pale green hose, to another idea that interests you, which is Debussy’s piano prelude “The Sunken Cathedral.” You think you’re still all right, because one is a real object and the other is a piece of classical music that contains a metaphor of submergence. But then you remember that some yellowjackets have made their nest in the hollow plastic handle of the hose reel. This happens to me every summer. I know that if Nan says that I can set up the sprinkler’s hose route around her tomatoes, I’m going to need my hose as well as her hose, and I know that as soon as I start wheeling the hose reel around and pulling the hose off it the yellowjackets are going to fly out and dart at me angrily and sting me as I run away. I don’t want to be stung, so I’ll debate whether I should boil up a pasta pot of water and pour it on the hose-reel handle, destroying the yellowjacket nest. My friend Tim told me about this technique, and I did it two summers ago before my sister and her family came for lunch at the picnic table, and it definitely worked, but I felt horrible afterward. What right did I have to destroy a whole happy nest of insects, regardless of how annoying they are when they crawl around on the potato chips?

  Now your poem is in trouble. You’ve got wasps in the hose reel, you’ve got the sprinkler twirling at the end of the hose, and you’ve got Debussy’s cathedral sunk under the waves. You’ve got fish, you’ve got tomatoes. You’re starting to get strange purple interference patterns, fringe moiré patterns, at the edges of each metaphor, where it overlaps its neighbor. Photographers call this “purple fringing,” and it’s a flaw. This is the moment when your creative writing teacher may say: “You’ve got an awful lot going on here, Paul. Maybe you need to pare this poem down and pick a controlling image.”

  And you acknowledge that he has a point—too many colors make the rinse water muddy. We know that. On the other hand, the world is full of metaphors that are happily coexisting in our brains and we don’t go crazy. You have them all swarming and nesting and reeled up in there, but they don’t trouble one another. One moment you entertain one metaphor, and the next moment the next, no harm done. And this time you think, I don’t want to worry so much about this rhetorical non-problem. I want to pour them all in and let them go wild together. Let all the metaphors fuck each other like desperate spouse-swappers, I don’t care. I summarily reject this notion of metaphorical interference for the time being and I’m putting it aside and I’m going to think over the things that call forth thought, and if they get in one another’s way from time to time that’s just what happens. It’s my poem. I don’t care what Peter Davison might think. He’s gone now and God rest him.

  • • •

  I WANT TO REALLY BE with a woman. By that I mean I want to be able to stay up late with her talking about everything. I want to show her all the things that I’ve found out, which aren’t very interesting maybe, but they’re what I have. And I want her to show me all the things that she’s found out.

  I’d rather not spend two hours a day reading political blogs, or flipping through People magazine at the supermarket checkout, or watching old episodes of The Office. What good does it do me to read Glenn Greenwald’s excellent blog? He’s right about everything and I’m glad he’s doing it, but it doesn’t seem to have any effect.

  I want to confide—that’s what I want to do. What confiding is is that you have a woman you like a great deal and you tell her things that you didn’t even know were secrets. You look at her and you feel a nervous warmth because she’s the only person who will understand. She’s just said something so direct and so interesting—something you never heard before—and suddenly all of the distractions of people’s opinions swirling around you stop. You hear just this one woman next to you saying this one opinion that’s coming out of her mouth, and you think, I could listen to her say things forever.

  Roz and I are—I don’t want to say we’re finished, because we’re really not. We’re still good friends and we talk on the phone and I sometimes send her postcards when I’m lonely in hotel rooms. I still hold out hope. She’s promised to make me an egg salad sandwich on my birthday, after all. But it doesn’t look good. She’s very busy with her radio show. She produces a medical radio show called Medicine Ball in the expensive new NPR building in Concord, where everything is carpeted and hushed and all the microphones are state-of-the-art, even if monophonic. It’s a successful show, it’s syndicated, it’s good. Every week they discuss the side effects and potential harmful outcomes of at least one pill or medical procedure. They did an extremely good show on Lipitor. Who knew that Lipitor could be so interesting? A totally useless drug, it seems. You take it for years and it makes you dizzy and forgetful and you fall down and break your hip.

  Roz has taken up with this very articulate doctor from Dartmouth who has strong contrary opinions about the medical establishment. He’s a doctor who reads—not just research papers on Lipitor, but books. He fancies himself a sort of Oliver Sacks, I think. Last time I talked to her she said they were reading Tony Hoagland’s poetry together. What a horrible thing to imagine. I like Tony Hoagland’s poetry. I want to be reading it with her. The doctor has a low, growly radio voice. Apparently he “makes her laugh.” I know that kind of laughter. Sexual laughter.

  • • •

  MY BASSOON WAS a Heckel bassoon, made of maplewood, stained very dark, almost black, with a nickel-plated ring on top. I loved it because it looked like a strange undersea plant, something that would live in the darkness of the Marianas Trench, near a toxic fumarole. My wonderful grandparents bought it for me, and I performed Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade on it, and Ravel’s Bolero, and Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, and Vivaldi’s A minor bassoon concerto. I put in thousands of hours of practice, shredding my lips, permanently pushing my two front teeth apart. And then I decided I wasn’t going to be a musician, because I wasn’t that good, and my jaw was hurting badly and I had headaches from too much blowing. I was going to be a poet instead. I sold my beloved Heckel to Bill, my bassoon teacher, for ten thousand dollars. Suddenly I felt free and very rich. I quit music school and flew to Berkeley, California, and took a poetry class with Robert Hass, who was a good teacher.

  In Berkeley I heard Robert Hass read his somewhat famous and presumably autobiographical poem about an almost affair he’d had with an Asian woman who’d had a double mastectomy. She leaves a bowl of dead bees outside his door. It’s quite a poem when read aloud.

  • • •

  BACK LAST FALL, when I wasn’t writing much of anything—not because I was “blocked,” but because what I wrote wasn’t any good—I signed up for Match.com and I answered the questionnaire and I went out on a date. It didn’t feel like a date, exactly, because a date is such a fifties notion, but it was a date. In other words, I was out wearing a corduroy jacket one evening, sitting in a restaurant with a folksinger named Polly. Paul and Polly.

  That’s all I’ll tell you about it. I was sitting at the same table with Polly, near the fireplace, over which hung an enormous blue-green fish. That’s all you need to know. She was my “date.” You don’t need to know anything more about her. We were not in any sense together, nothing like that—that beautiful word, “together.” We were talking about Marvin Gaye’s tragic death and cider doughnuts and how amazing it is that we can both speak English. We were describing all the things we had to know in order to speak this crazy messed-up language.

  There was a little round moderno light above our table, sending down rays of electric energy onto our salads, and I could see the lightbulb reflected in Polly’s lipstick, and suddenly I told her that I was so happy to be sitting at the table with her that I wanted to get up and embrace the light and say thank you for lighting up our dinner. Because we are enjoying ourselves, and we’re covering a lot of ground, and we’re ranging wide over the field of human aspirations, and this is what we’ve got right now, is this single date in a restaurant.

&n
bsp; I wanted to say more to Polly because I knew it was going well, even though she didn’t like me as much as I liked her, and I knew that was because she was smarter and more sensible and mainly prettier than I was smart or sensible or good-looking. I said, “Polly, let me ask you this. Do you think all of our selves are pointed at this moment right here in this restaurant?” I tapped the bread in the breadbasket. It was a basket of bread, tucked in with a white cloth like a newborn child. I said, “Do you think that the bread in this breadbasket is the only thing in life right now?”

  She said, “In a way I do. But in a way I think of the whole city stretched out, and of other cities, and of distances between cities, and of long train rides or plane rides to get from one city to another, so I try to keep mindful of the fact that my moment isn’t the entire moment, but it’s difficult especially when I’m having fun and when I’m talking to a nice man in a restaurant.”

  Wow, I felt a glow when she said that. Then a little later she said how much she liked Philip Glass’s movie soundtracks. Well, all right, I thought, with some effort I can learn to like Philip Glass’s soundtracks. They’re insanely repetitive, but I can come around. Then I made a dumb move. We were on the topic of Mark Rothko, and for some inexplicable reason I was moved to say critical things not only about Mark Rothko but also about Pablo Picasso. Why, why, why? I said Picasso would be all but forgotten in a hundred years, that he was a coattail-rider and a self-trumpeter, and that his kitschy blue guitars made me want to scream with boredom and rage at the moneyed injustice of the international museum establishment. And that those awful demoiselles from Avignon were nothing but a hideous cruel joke. And that he consistently ripped off Matisse. And not only that, but his daughter’s jewelry designs for Tiffany’s were just god-awful. There were, I said, innumerable Sunday painters who could paint better than shirtless old Pablo—and at some point we’d have to face that stark, appalling fact. I could see Polly flinch. I quickly apologized for being stupidly opinionated and said that I didn’t know anything about art and that actually I liked Picasso’s flashlight painting and his steer’s head made of bicycle parts, although Duchamp, et cetera, and we got back on track. Later she said, “I’m having fun.” But I knew she was just being nice because the wine was red and she was so very pretty and such a kindly person and she didn’t want me to know that she was never going to go out with me again because I’m a rogue mastodon who dismisses Picasso with an annoying wave of his trunk. She wanted me to think that the world is a place in which somebody like me could go out with somebody like her. She wanted me to think that she was a person who didn’t become infatuated with bad standoffish married men who dressed in leather car coats. But it turned out she was.

  • • •

  I COULD SEE the dismissal in the corners of Polly’s eyes. I could see that she was interested in talking to me, interested in knowing an anthologist of minor notoriety, and maybe in being my friend, all that junk—but that she probably wasn’t going to be my girlfriend. And that’s the thing I wanted. I wanted that little jingly bell in front of the word “friend”: girlfriend. I’m a boy—a boy in his mid-fifties—and here is my friend, who is a girl. I wanted to have her next to me when we were walking and to be able to put my arm around her shoulder and draw her to me so that she stumbled a bit, happily, smiling at her stumbling. This was not in the cards.

  No book review section can help you with this. No movie, no blog, no self-help book. Nothing helps, because it’s all new. It’s something two people make up as they go along. I called her up again and told her there was an Indian place I knew where they made memorable fried eggplant balls. Then she laid the truth on me. She told me that she had something going with a somewhat famous literary man, a married man who lived in New York, and it was turning into a terrible ordeal because he probably wasn’t ever going to leave his marriage, but there it was and she couldn’t escape her feelings, she had to live through them. She even told me who the man was. I looked up some pictures of him. I won’t tell you his name. But there he was in a photograph with his secretive successful smile, wearing a leather car coat. And that was that.

  Boy, she was pretty, though. I waggled my Shropshire lad that night.

  Six

  I’M SITTING in a very small park in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I live. There are two branches that face each other across a square of mulch and a weeping fruit tree in the middle. I have a corncob pipe between my middle molars. It has a yellow plastic stem and it was made in Missouri. The tobacco came from Turkey—it was a special kind of tobacco, said the tobacconist at Federal Cigar, who was apportioning it into plastic bags with zip tops. The reason it’s so special is that it was dried over a smoky fire. In other words, it’s smoked tobacco that you smoke. One bag cost eight dollars, and the corncob pipe cost five dollars. The only thing I don’t like about the pipe is that I can taste the yellow plastic of the stem, which has a flavor of Bic pens, and if I’m going to be chewing on something I’d rather be chewing on wood. The smoke itself seems to be turning my tongue into a pink tranche of smoked salmon.

  There’s a protest outside the North Church today—high school kids with a big sign that says “Occupy,” and what they’re protesting is global warming. What a hopeless cause. The earth has been warming and cooling for a billion years and they want it to stop. Why not protest actions that we can easily end, like the intentional killing of people with missiles in foreign countries? Start small.

  One thing that interests me is how long it takes to smoke a pipe. I’m stoned out of my brain stem right now, and there still seems to be a lot of smoked turkey left in the cob. Fortunately there’s a strong sideways wind.

  • • •

  THIS MORNING I read some articles on how to get better posture. The best advice I found was to imagine your nipples and then imagine your way four inches down on your rib cage below them and then imagine that two large steel hooks had hooked under two ribs and were pulling you diagonally up toward the sky. When you do this you immediately sit with better posture. And you really have to imagine your own nipples only once, thank God.

  I want to improve myself in a dozen ways. But my fingers are trembling because of the pipe tobacco and I feel a little queasy.

  I should be standing outside one of President Obama’s campaign offices with a sign that says “Our President Is Killing People.” The next day my sign would be: “Abolish the CIA.” And the next day the sign would be: “Drones Are Bad News for Civilization.” My friend Tim goes to marches and carries signs, and he says it feels good. He got arrested once.

  A bird has dropped a half-eaten berry on my keyboard. It landed on the tilde key. Maybe it was not half eaten but fully shat. I put my corncob pipe down and blew on the dark fragment of berry and it hopped away onto the mulch next to the metal bench. I imagined the two hooks winching me up, lifting my slouching corpse skyward.

  A man walked past, smoking a cigarette, wearing a black stoner T-shirt. “How are you doing?” I said, waving my new pipe at him. “Not bad, and you?” He walked away across the parking lot.

  • • •

  TODAY IS A CLOUDY DAY. I woke up and I was amazed by how completely roasted and smoked my tongue felt. It’s been many hours since I smoked a pipe, and my tongue is still recovering. It was a piece of meat in my mouth that didn’t want to be steak or corned beef, it wanted still to be my own tongue. My very own talker, my slipper and slapper of mysteries.

  I could be on the elliptical trainer at Planet Fitness listening to pumping music right now. The slogan of Planet Fitness is that it’s the “Judgment Free Zone.” You can be fat or thin, old or young, and they want you there exercising. I try to go every other, every third, day.

  The problem with the corncob pipe, aside from the fact that it bothers my jaw and roasts my tongue, is that I feel as if I’m impersonating Vannevar Bush. Bush was a famous war scientist who helped create the atomic bomb, and he also was a great pipe s
moker and a great carver of pipes. He made presents of his handmade pipes to his cold-warrior friends. He gave a pipe to James Conant, the head of Harvard University and purger of Communists, and he gave a pipe to Allen Dulles, head of the CIA. “I trust,” Bush wrote to Dulles, “that the pressure of the administration will not be so intense that you cannot find the time occasionally to put your feet on the desk, smoke the old pipe, and puzzle out the course of affairs in the queer world we live in.”

  Dulles replied on CIA letterhead—an eagle poised on a shield bearing a strange crystal star. “As I write these lines I am smoking with contentment, and no little pride, the pipe which bears your initials and which I know is your own handiwork,” he said.

  Perhaps Allen Dulles smoked Vannevar Bush’s pipe as he mulled over the CIA’s coup in Iran and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo.

  Seven

  I ALMOST SKIPPED QUAKER MEETING because I hadn’t had a shower and it’s hard to sit silently for an hour if you’re not clean, but then I went anyway. As I drove I listened to Beth Orton sing a song that goes: “I don’t want to know about evil, only want to know about love.” I think that’s very true. Sometimes you don’t want to know about evil, you just want to know about love. You want to take off the misery hat and think only about the good things.

  When I got inside, the clock was ticking and I was two minutes late and discombobulated, and it took me a while to settle down. I held my car keys. I always hold my keys during meeting. I clutch them at first and later my grip relaxes and I feel the smooth mountain range with my thumb.

  Excuse me now while I throat-clear. Harrooom! God, that’s nasty. As soon as I start talking into this thing—this little Olympus recorder—my vocal cords become coated with a resistant substance that has to be ground away by an enormous throat process. And then it’s as if I’m a kid who’s fallen on his bicycle and skinned his knee: there’s this damaged, wrecked, injured vocal cord, with half of its phlegm scraped away and half still there. It’s just really revolting. I’m sorry about it. It’s a product of my own nervousness. I have to overcome some powerful desire to be entirely private by talking to myself in this almost public way. Whisper-talking. Breaking the silence.