“Okay. Name the date, I’ll be there.”
We laughed.
“You gotta get going, Ms. Kuo?”
I checked the time.
“Yeah.”
I was thinking of the Merwin poem, and how he knew it by heart, and how he had written to his daughter, I know it by heart and I would love for you to know it, too.
Thinking to buy time, I said, “Let’s recite it again.”
The words came to us easily; they were a formality, a rite.
Let me imagine that we will come again
when we want to and it will be spring
we will be no older than we ever were
the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud
through which morning slowly comes to itself
and the ancient defenses against the dead
will be done with and left to the dead at last
the light will be as it is now in the garden
that we have made here these years together
of our long evenings and astonishment.
We made it to the end without a hitch. “It’s a bit like singing to yourself, isn’t it?” I said. The words made sounds and the sounds kept thought away. After a while you stopped wondering what it all meant, because it’s become a part of you.
But even as I said this I could remember the first time we’d read it together, and I tried to make sense of it. It was back in March, five or so months into my time in Helena, and I’d asked him for his favorite line. Answering this question had just started to become important to him.
“We will be no older than we ever were,” he had said finally.
I asked why.
“Because whenever you go to this one place, it’s like—it’s like this place that last forever. It’s like this be a place where”—Patrick made a small sound in his throat—“where time don’t matter no more. Where time be just stopping.”
This place that last forever.
Where time be just stopping.
A place where time don’t matter no more.
I thought about all the time he felt he’d lost—no, not lost, wasted—by being in jail, and how this feeling had made him think, in turn, of all the time he felt he’d wasted during his life. For his vocabulary sentence he’d used the word oblivion to write: My teenage years were an oblivion.
“Do you have a place like that?” I now asked. “Where time lasts forever?”
Without hesitating, he said, “My mama.”
I blinked. I felt I was on the threshold of some kind of understanding.
No trick, no magic, no God could reverse the past, undo what happened: un-kill a man, bring life back, or give Patrick the chance to live his teenage years again. But poetry, or this poem, had brought him closer to a feeling, to a presence, to an immensity that could swallow death and do away with time. As supernatural as it all felt, it was just the memory of love: his mother waiting for him to come home.
There were moments when I was reading with Patrick that he appeared to me anew, as a person I was just beginning to know. In these brief moments, there seemed to exist between us a mystical and radical and improbable equality. This was what reading could do: It could make you, however fleetingly, unpredictable. You were not someone about whom another can say, You are this kind of person, but rather a person for whom nothing is predetermined. I had given him the books, I had taught him the mechanics, and still the words had moved us separately, as if we had heard the same bird singing and the song entered each of us, changed.
It was time to go. “I need you to do one last thing,” I said.
He picked up his pen.
I told him to put it down.
“You won’t have to write about this. You just need to relax.”
I told him to close his eyes, and he squeezed them shut. I told him to imagine a place he wanted to go. What did he see? He saw water, he said, and then, sand.
“Any sign of life?” I asked.
“A crab, all by itself.”
“Any human beings?” His eyelashes flickered, his mouth twitched.
“Cherish,” he said. I waited. “She’s squatting,” he continued. “Looking at the crab. She’s saying that it has little legs.” But, he said, his mouth in a faint smile, “her legs be little, too.”
11
* * *
Easter Morning
It is to his grave I most
frequently return and return
to ask what is wrong, what was
wrong, to see it all by
the light of a different necessity
but the grave will not heal
and the child,
stirring, must share my grave
with me, an old man…
—A. R. AMMONS, “Easter Morning”
I LIVE IN OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, AND work at a nonprofit organization in the district of Fruitvale. One morning a pigeon flies into an open window at work and shits everywhere. This becomes a badge of honor I share with my fellow lawyers. On Thursday evenings we hold “clinics” for clients, mostly undocumented Mexican immigrants: day laborers, gardeners, dishwashers, construction workers, nannies, all either stiffed out of wages or facing eviction.
At the end of the day, we lock up the office and get drinks—a lot of drinks. They christen me with Spanish names: Michelada, Michelina. I am happier than I can remember. Fondo fondo fondo. Bottoms up. I am learning Spanish. Within a month, I meet someone at a bar, also a “public interest lawyer,” as we’re called. I can hardly believe I am already dating someone.
—
THEN I GET a letter from Patrick.
Not just one, but several at once.
He was transferred from the county jail to prison after prison, until he ended up at Calico Rock in northern Arkansas. He tells me that he got my letters and fills me in on his days.
But I have trouble focusing on what he writes, because I’m distracted by the “how.” Words are misspelled, apostrophes forgotten. His letters are larger, rounder. Where is the writing from just three months before, tiny and nearly calligraphic, which could pass as a kind of artisanal typeface? That handwriting was proof to me that I had not imagined his progress.
Be realistic, be generous, I exhort myself. Education isn’t like business or accounting—present loss of skill doesn’t diminish the value of the hours put in. Besides, Patrick reports good news: He’s taking advantage of programs at the state prison. He has the best scores in his GED classes. In October, he sends me a copy of his high school diploma in the mail.
In a letter he asks, Do you have a couple dollars to spare? He had to borrow money for a stamp.
I begin to worry. Not about Patrick, but about me. I begin to think that those seven months didn’t really happen, that I had imagined the mystical silences we shared while Patrick wrote. I must have dreamed the poems we memorized, because I cannot remember the lines anymore. On the way to work, holding the metal bar of a subway, I wonder what it was all for and consider the idea that once you stop thinking about something, it disappears.
—
STILL, I SEND Patrick postcards. One is a picture of sequoia trees—I’d gone to a park in California with friends. How are you? I ask. Look at these trees! They are the biggest and oldest in the world.