To Keep Love Blurry

by Craig Morgan Teicher

  Where does being good meet being right?

  I won’t linger on my hardest feelings.

  Line them in silver, turn them downside up—

  so I can say I’m OK all the time. What does it

  feel like to linger on a feeling? Stand patiently

  in mud and suffer its stink and suck.

  Know thyself by thine unwashed smell, thine crust.

  I need to be good, that’s how my mother

  made me, but she’s dead and I’m grown

  and you can’t be a man and be good all the time.

  At work, someone would have come by to ask

  my help by now with a dumb, blessèd task.

  I’m looking at a reproduction

  of a painting by Dorothea Tanning

  of a lapdog, man-size, dancing

  with a corpselike naked woman. The dog turns

  his face toward the viewer, serious gaze,

  judging eyes, adorable jowls, paws.

  Something about this picture makes me think

  anything is possible, and reminds me

  most things aren’t. Those who can bear the grim

  facts of their lives, face them without recasting

  them in rosier terms, impress me. I talk

  a lot about my choices, facing my share

  of bad turns, but I ride on a gloss

  of sunshine. I love phrases like “all shall

  be well and all manner of thing shall be well,”

  as if the irony they clearly belie

  were a figment of a cynic’s inner grimace.

  For four years now I’ve been

  taking an antidepression, anti-

  anxiety drug, and I’ll never know

  to what extent my capacity to sometimes

  clean my mental slate, to move away

  from worries—that’s what it feels like now, I can

  move on, pass by, think about something

  else—I owe to the drug, and what’s due to

  therapy and trying hard at my life.

  I don’t want to be so mad at my wife.

  Listening to an online stream of an album

  by Richard Buckner, his plain, almost flat

  voice and lush arrangements. I like

  unmusical elements in music—

  with a voice like his, he shouldn’t sing,

  but he does and so aspires

  to, and attains, beauty and other

  wordless quirks, making it more

  than organized sound. I like the unpoetic stuff

  that crops up in poetry too: casual speech

  amidst sonorous language, ugly words,

  avoidance of the transcendent. The un-

  beautiful in both mediums points to

  the notion that art is at least fifty

  percent choice, that beauty is indeed

  in cahoots with its beholder and maker,

  just as the mirror can only reflect

  the one who chooses to stand before it.

  Most of this poem comes straight

  from my life, a record of events set

  in rhythmic words. But life’s unpoetic,

  and how will Brenda be hurt, and Cal,

  by being my excuse to dredge my brain?

  Did Lowell’s loved ones ever get over

  For Lizzie and Harriet? Plath’s son

  just killed himself. As I check my

  Twitter feed for mentions of an article

  I wrote that came out today,

  my son gets speech and feeding therapy

  while Brenda watches and I sit in my

  home office living my online life. Real life,

  not Auden’s stale suffering and “its

  human position,” is a bunch of things

  that don’t add up to much, happening

  at the same time, a series of tries.

  “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” but isn’t life

  as it is beautiful and full of lies,

  and life as written true and made to revise?

  Brenda brought home a coatrack from Ikea.

  Of course, it comes in a flat brown box

  full of rods and hooks and screws, assembly

  required, and, of course, I dropped the small

  middle rod into the bottom one—got it stuck—

  while we were giggling and putting it

  together, and an explosion followed.

  I have so little patience for her

  temper, how it beckons mine from

  nearby where it waits to pounce.

  I shouldn’t blame her, though. There’s not nearly

  enough—of what? some basic energy?—

  to go around, to share, to sustain us two

  and Cal and a house and the work we do.

  I’m afraid of what will happen when

  too much of this anger starts to accrue.

  But aren’t anger and resentment two of

  the things a marriage is meant to contain,

  that couples take to graves, that bloom after rain?

  For a living I still write about books, and

  recently, I profiled the author of a novel

  called You or Someone Like You—it comes out

  next month—in which the heroine, named Anne

  Rosenbaum, can only communicate

  with her husband, a Hollywood exec

  named Harold, who is pulling away,

  through these book clubs she runs for film bigwigs

  who gossip her pronouncements on love

  and literature back to Harold, who

  finally comes around. I will show this

  poem to Brenda before anyone else,

  and I can’t help but think I want her

  to take its implicit apologies

  seriously, store them, a first-aid kit

  against all that makes our love delicate.

  Everything now depends on progression,

  or, as the truth may be, pretends to it.

  Being laid off thwarts or spurs progress, but

  Cal must learn new ways to compensate for

  what his injury took, and we,

  Brenda and I, must talk more and listen

  better. All of it gets measured

  on a continuum plotted between

  imaginary points placed at the worst

  we were, or imagine we were, and now

  —the worst and best we are—and as good

  as we’ll get before time’s up, our losses cut

  and our gains written down in The Big Book

  no one gets to read. Do people progress?

  Can I change? If so, how would I know? I guess

  happiness is the benchmark, the vague way

  it has of being remembered, as if

  the past was always better or worse

  than now, rather than the same. It makes me ache

  for my favorite line by Frost, from “Directive”:

  “Drink and be whole again beyond confusion,”

  he says, the happiest of fantasies,

  as if we were whole once, or aren’t now

  but could be again, no longer confused—

  can anyone reach that far point before being dead,

  relax, stretch out, hum, read, just bask,

  and not regret what was and wasn’t said?

  What I liked best about work was structure,

  a place to go where I knew I should be,

  the sense that my time had already been bought,

  that to use it for myself broke a rule—

  I like rules, was raised by them, doing a dance

  with my mother whose steps involved committing

  minor sins she didn’t like, bowing with guilt,

  apologizing till I wore her down,

  then doing it all again and again.

  It’s cheap, I know, to blame her, but fair.

  She died, as my poems say, just before

  I could grow up and out of chi
ldhood,

  and so I never really do. I’ve looked

  for her everywhere since and found her most

  when I could recreate our sad ballet:

  easy enough occasions to find: marriage, job,

  anywhere anyone, especially

  a woman, expects anything of me.

  The world is overripe with surrogate moms,

  it turns out, and I’m a willing son. It’s

  pathetic. I’m a child wrapped in the life

  of a man. Of course, who isn’t?

  Understanding has just so much to give.

  Psychology can take us only so far.

  To go the rest of the way we have to—what?

  Wait? hope? forget? forgive? talk? just live?

  It’s a funny word, layoff, what I wish

  everyone, everything would do more of:

  lay off me, give me a break, let me be:

  less pressure, fewer appointments, less need,

  not so much to worry about, no more

  doctor’s visits and therapy sessions

  for Cal, no more books for me to read,

  no arguments to have, no dishes to do, no more

  blame to assign, no more Even

  Stevens, and no more syllabi to write,

  no more student poems to comment on,

  no more diapers to change, no more sleep lost,

  no more hours passed, no more compromises,

  no more messages to check, no more e-mails

  to which to reply, no more self-states

  to navigate and synthesize, no more

  about myself I didn’t know till now,

  no more coatracks to assemble, no more

  hopes I should have already outgrown,

  no more incomplete mourning to trick me

  into feeling like someone’s not dead,

  no more anxiety attacks or fear of

  fear itself, no more Paxils chopped in two,

  no more endless nights or sleep without rest,

  no more dreams about building towers

  of colored blocks on islands that float away

  too soon, no more dead dogs to mourn,

  no more fathers blamed, no more mothers lost,

  no more in-laws, mine or yours, no more step-

  sisters or brothers whose Evites need answers,

  no more lost ways or ways nearly found,

  no more mp3s to crave, no more wavy

  red lines hashed by spellcheck, no more friends’

  manuscripts to exchange, no more blog posts,

  no more teaching opportunities, no more

  nights facing your back or you facing mine,

  no more free time, no more busy days,

  no more beers or bottles of wine, no more

  30 Rock on Thursday nights, just some space

  and time that no one needs, some extra air,

  new names, a face no one could recognize,

  a small world, a view exactly the size of my eyes.

  How can I propose to write a poem

  about being laid off during the Great Recession

  and avoid money, which, if it doesn’t

  make the world go round, can surely stop it

  from chilling out, which, after all, may

  well be the real reason man was put on earth.

  Give me an eternity of ease,

  he seems to say, and I’ll suffer whatever

  you throw my way in the lifetime before

  forever starts, though don’t expect me

  not to complain. I’m speaking in generalities

  rather than talk about money and Brenda

  and me. For a couple of years now,

  she’s made much more than I have, teaching

  and working from home and taking care of Cal.

  I was out of the house most of the time

  at my nine-to-fiver, not making much

  more than I spent, often less, but bringing

  steady checks and health insurance.

  No end of argument ensued about who

  provided what, on whose shoulders burdens

  belonged. Neither of us knows what counts

  for more once it’s thrown into the family cup.

  How like a company is a family?

  Is money its reason and its root,

  what brings it together, breaks it apart?

  Harder to say with families who’s in charge,

  but to keep love going the cost is large.

  Keats calls for Negative Capability:

  “when a man is capable of being

  in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without

  any irritable reaching after fact

  and reason.” If only he meant

  being capable while being negative,

  a useful quality, too, I suppose. He means,

  of course, imagining against the backdrop

  of reality and all the ways it opposes

  our little dreams, this business

  of truth and beauty being the same.

  But could a man who died childless

  at twenty-six have known much about how ugly

  truth can be, how far toward good

  lies can carry us? Very far, I’ve learned,

  though a time for reckoning always comes,

  many times for many lies, and, I think,

  we go on that way, leaping from hope

  to hope across the ample evidence

  that what we hope can’t come to pass.

  Life is off the page, and bearing

  down, being here, means being in one

  place right now, much harder, it seems,

  than being in two—our bed, my thoughts.

  The days are so far from ideal, but

  the ideal is merely a thought away

  from anywhere, anywhen. How to pick

  now, this, us, as it is, when there’s

  so much else right here in my head?

  I’m not very brave. I would be much

  braver could I wake and not need to say

  —I don’t think I can—it will be OK.

  I’ve got too much thought and nowhere

  to think it. I need to stop, to move on,

  to choose, to act, to lay off myself and you.

  If poetry and thinking both do nothing

  then the longer I write the less I choose

  to do. Is that what I want, who I hope

  to be, someone who sits before a scrawling page,

  a ream, if you will, as thick as the sky

  is deep, with room enough for all the words

  but for none of what they signify?

  I said what matters is who I address

  and how and why, not what is said,

  but, really, if I’m to make anything

  of this column I’ve spun like a droning

  A/C, which cools the room while it’s on

  then invites the sweat back in, what matters

  is that I address—and not in poetry,

  which maybe lasts forever, but, as Auden said,

  only “survives in the valley of its making,”

  a place, I fear, with a peerless, immortal view,

  but merely a mirage in our actual lives—

  what matters, all that matters, is that I say

  something, anything, aloud to Brenda.

  We fight not to say what we can’t or won’t,

  to say anything but what we know we need

  to hear. I’m sorry, Brenda, I haven’t been

  listening—I’ve hardly been awake, avidly

  drilling down toward an imaginary center.

  How selfish to go on like this for pages

  without even a pause for a word, an inkling

  from you. Tell me, what are you thinking?

  Lines in the Rain

  You, dear Brenda, are at home

  with our son, whose remarkable

  days have him laughing

  like any kid he isn�
�t. When

  we made him out of the wish

  to make him, we knew nothing

  except our own parents couldn’t be

  close or far enough.

  Our son can’t run, which may

  be our fault, we’ll never know,

  like sitting on separate daggers.

  Love is the need to escape

  the beloved, isn’t it? So you can

  pretend you can’t cause any pain?

  It’s a mutation of guilt, isn’t it?

  I hide beneath sheets, close

  to your belly, and apologize

  —to you, to my mother, to our son,

  to motherhood and fatherhood,

  to all those now fleeing

  what they love. It’s grotesque,

  but I will cough something up,

  a bloody string of self, to tie

  you to me, me to him, him to you,

  then we can all go our ways,

  separate or not, or nowhere, and pluck

  that string, feel each other

  tensing, teasing the other end.

  You may not understand—I don’t

  either—but someday we might:

  Someday shines on families like light.

  II

  The Meantime

  It’s easy to overjoy a window with brilliant flowers

  but what if long-longed-for time suddenly bubbled

  over the lip of the clock, as if each day doubled

  due to a lost job or loved one slaughtered, leaving hours

  to fill—how would you do it? Could you whittle

  the Founding Fathers faces out of wood, or fold little

  origami models of the same famous building?

  With time, couldn’t you master the craft of anything?

  Maybe write precious verse or, worse, illuminate

  the best of Aesop in needlepoint—someone ought to,

  or maybe someone really oughtn’t, so why, or why not you?

  If time’s a parking spot, life’s what you do while you wait

  for Mr. Whoever to get back in the car—a good hobby

  to make this minute count like a droplet in the sea.

  The Darkness Echoing

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  Blames his father. Lost his job. Can’t escape

  this sentence. Has and has not become

  what he most despised. Never saw or sees

  shapes in clouds. Has grown accustomed

  to autocorrect. Wants to be interesting,

  mostly to himself. Types this on his iPad.

  Wonders if that counts as aphorism and