I
In a garden at evening a man
walks slowly among the shadowy flowers,
feeling that familiar melancholy
as it surrounds him, still, full of promise.
Far off a woman might be singing.
Where had he heard that song before?
Someone in a story, following the pathways
of such a garden, might also
stop to listen, and perhaps
instead of sorrow he could feel
a sudden, incomprehensible
happiness, as though the whole world
were watching him, keeping quiet, and waiting
for him to understand it ….
The sky is clear, lit up with stars,
and now the air seems cold enough
to imagine frost by morning, to imagine
how the flowers might be damaged.
II
When he knew the cancer had returned
he wanted things to be quiet.
He sat on his porch, looked out at his garden,
and finished his work. This is what
the newspaper tells us: Raymond Carver,
Writer and Poet of the Working Poor, Dies at so.
At dinner, six or seven years ago,
I remember how he turned the wine glass over,
turned it over before the waitress
could ask if he wanted anything to drink.
It was such a definite gesture.
It said: That’s not in my life anymore.
Then he ordered a large Coke, lit another cigarette,
and we went on talking. Hours before
he died, the obituary reports, he spoke to his wife
about how much he admired the stories of Chekhov,
whose death he had described with such care
in the last story in his last book of stories.
Olga went back to Chekhov’s bedside.
She sat on a footstool, holding his hand,
from time to time stroking his face.
“There were no human voices, no everyday sounds,”
she wrote. “There was only beauty, peace,
and the grandeur of death.”
III
“What would you like for your birthday?”
I asked my father, making the drinks before dinner.
It was a question he always answered
with a shrug-another shirt
would be fine, another pair of socks.
“What I want you can’t give me,”
he replied, and paused.
“To be ten years younger.”
In a few weeks he’d be seventy-four.
Why ten? I wondered. Why not fifteen,
or forty? I couldn’t imagine
that ten years ago my father would have claimed
he was happy, if happiness
was what he had in mind. Was he looking
back to some moment in his life
I knew nothing about? He’d never tell me,
even if I asked. I gave him the drink.
“But nobody can do anything about that,” he said,
as if, already, he’d said too much.
IV
In Chekhov’s “The Black Monk” the young student,
Kovrin, knows what he sees is an illusion-
that legendary monk who sweeps across the world
every thousand years, who chooses him
to counsel and support. Yet what a pleasure
to talk all night of beauty, and the idea
of genius, and the object of eternal life!
Then one morning his wife awakens, terrified
to find her husband laughing
and gesturing passionately into the air.
Yes, he admits. It appears I must be mad.
Don’t be afraid, she cries. All this will pass ….
But Kovrin turns against her
after he is cured. He becomes reasonable,
sad, and mediocre. Years later,
in a small hotel by the sea,
where the air is warm and tranquil,
Kovrin steps out onto the balcony
and hears a woman singing
something familiar—a melancholy ballad
about a young girl listening in a garden at night
to sounds so beautiful and strange
she knows they must form
a sacred harmony, not to be understood by others.
Suddenly Kovrin feels that joy he thought
he’d lost forever, and at this moment
the monk returns. There was no reason,
he says, for you to stop believing in me.
But Kovrin cannot answer, his mouth
has filled with blood, and his hands flutter
helplessly before him, as the black monk whispers
that he has always been a genius,
and that he is dying only because his body
can no longer contain that genius.
“I think,” Chekhov wrote to his friend
Suvorin, “that it is not for writers
to solve such questions
as the existence of God, pessimism, etc.
The writer’s function is only to describe
by whom, how, and under what circumstances
the questions of God and pessimism were discussed.”
I don’t think my father was remembering
a secret life. I think ten years ago
must have looked like a time
when he wasn’t afraid of dying,
when he hadn’t started to worry,
each day, about how painful it might be.
Although I’m sure of this,
I don’t want to believe it.
But could I ask him to imagine anything less real
than pain? And what would that be?
Beauty? Peace? Any kind of grandeur?
When all he wanted
was not to feel what he was feeling.
VI
At times I imagine a voice,
not yet any person’s voice.
What can it describe? A clear sky
full of stars. Or sunlight
on the frost in a garden. And the sound
of water or of trees in the wind which make
a sound like water. Then the light
finds a room where two people
are talking. It enters as if it were
another person who had arrived
unexpectedly. What were they saying?-
these two who are quiet now, watching
the light, which has made their silence
singular, like nostalgia
or regret. One I recognize
as myself, while the other,
who is not yet my father,
leans forward, trying hard
to listen, or about to speak.
VII
In the woods darkness arranges itself
into shapes. I walk outside, and the cut grass
makes a wide avenue among the pines,
which, in a dream, or a story,
might lead somewhere.
Someone could stand here for a long time,
letting the stillness of the evening
include him, feeling that affection
we feel for the world
when it lies at peace around us. .
And when he understands he must be waiting
for something to happen
that cannot happen, he turns
and sees the lights of his own house
not far away, the familiar pattern
of the windows, which he will look up into
as he walks back, thinking
he could still be anyone
out there with the darkness around him,
until he reaches the door, until he walks inside.
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