After, as I read his work, he massaged his hands as if they were sore.
I had been taken aback by Patrick’s interest in some of these poems. He loved Whitman. He loved lines about the delight in the carpenter nailing a plank and the mother singing to her child. He loved: STRANGER! If you, passing, meet me, and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you? Patrick didn’t deride any of it—he wanted to be a part of it. Whitman was fun and easy to imitate: exclamation points, bursts of feeling, clear line breaks. You, Patrick Browning! What widens within you? And: O take my hand Patrick Browning! As the world moves! So vivid and quaking! And another: I hear the amazing drippings of a waterfall from huge cliffs or mountains / I hear leaves shaking as the storm rattles the tree branches. When you wrote a line about waterfalls, cliffs, mountains, storms, leaves, you made that beauty a part of you. You built an inner world that moved and amazed you.
But perhaps of all the poems we studied, he knew W. S. Merwin’s “To Paula in Late Spring” the best.
Let me imagine that we will come again / when we want to and it will be spring, Merwin wrote to his wife.
Patrick wrote a version for his daughter. Let me imagine that I am there with you / when you need me even if a little late
Then he wrote one for his mother. Let me imagine that we are high in the mountains
We recited the Merwin at the beginning of each session; we knew it so well that it nearly bored us.
—
I HAD RETURNED to poetry out of desperation, after a series of failed lessons with prose. We would get halfway through a novel or play and we would quit: a Walter Dean Myers story (he said it reminded him too much of his life), a Shakespeare play (it was taking too long), the Book of Job (he said God must have had a reason to punish Job, and I couldn’t persuade him otherwise), The Things They Carried (he said it was too violent and that he didn’t like not knowing what was made up). So poetry arose from a process of elimination.
“I think you’ll like this poet.” It was George Herbert. “He was a pastor. And he writes in a simple, natural voice.”
The poem was an old favorite: “Love (III),” in which Love exhorts the speaker to eat at his table.
“What’s your favorite line?”
Patrick thought. “But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack,” he decided.
“Like me—maybe I got a little dust on me, maybe my ways be kinda crooked. But Love, because it eye be quick, it watch him fall away. People that don’t love you ain’t telling you that you falling away. But Love do. Love observe you, then Love tell you. What your favorite line, Ms. Kuo?”
I told him I liked the last two lines. “?‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’ / So I did sit and eat.”
He agreed they were good ones. “It’s God,” he said. “It’s God inviting you to dinner. It’s God saying, We straight.”
Then he asked, “Yesterday wasn’t Easter, was it, Ms. Kuo?”
“It was.”
“Only reason I knew ’cause yesterday morning time they had given us some eggs. They usually give us plain grits. Somebody was like, it’s the first Sunday of the month; it’s Easter.”
“Do you usually celebrate Easter?”
“My mama, she cook or whatever. But not really. What happen on Easter, anyway, Ms. Kuo?”
He leaned forward.
I began: “So you know how Jesus is killed the Friday before Easter?”
He blinked, suggesting he didn’t know. Kids were religious here, but their knowledge of Bible stories was selective.
“So on Sunday,” I continued, “Mary Magdalene goes with a friend to visit his tomb.”
At the sudden sound of his mother’s name, Patrick beamed.
“But on the way to the tomb, they keep worrying about it. Because it’s blocked by a big stone. They keep asking, Who’s going to roll the stone for us? How are we going to get in? But when they get to the tomb, the big stone isn’t there. And somebody says, The tomb is empty! Jesus isn’t there, because he’s been—”
“Raised,” Patrick concluded. “An Easter—that the day he be born again?”
“Yes, that’s right. Everybody is so excited but also terrified, because they can’t believe it.”
I had not grown up with much religion, but in college I had accompanied friends to services and found myself at a small prayer group for the first time. People prayed about all sorts of things, opening themselves up (it seemed to me) to the criticism that their innermost cares were trivial. What could I say? To be honest, I was doing pretty well. My turn came. “Help me, God,” I began, tentatively, awkwardly, wanting to laugh at myself, not believing I was speaking to anybody. “Help me, God…” And when I repeated that weird phrase, the repetition softened its strangeness, and I thought it was not such a bad thing to have the structure of address decided for me, so I could focus on content. And indeed the supplicatory posture released the worries I had been holding in: About a friend suffering from the first episode of major depression in her life, a new territory for us both. About a guest at the homeless shelter, his life’s belongings, including a picture of his grandchild, in a garbage bag. His two weeks were up, and he wanted to store his bag in our locker, but he worried that the staff would get rid of it, and I locked the bag away. “Help me, God, help me sit still with my friend. Help me, God, to concentrate on things that matter.”
I told Patrick all this. He was listening, concentrating. He wanted me to believe in God. And he was happy to hear me explain Easter. It meant something to him that I knew the story. And this in turn made the story mean something to me.
—
IT WAS ALMOST May, and in the mail I got keys to my place for the summer. It was an apartment in northern Oakland, where, my subletter promised, there was excellent Lebanese, Ethiopian, and Korean food all on one block. I was going to drive, and I decided on the route I’d take. A friend from law school would meet me in Albuquerque and help me drive from there to California. We would stop at the Grand Canyon, see cacti, take pictures. I toyed with the idea of staying longer in the Delta, but now I knew that it was time to leave.
—
“I’M WRITING THIS IN PART to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later,” Patrick read. He paused, curiosity seeping into his voice: Perhaps he was wondering about himself. “You have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle.”
Patrick paused at the word miracle, to think.